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The Death-Bound-Subject:
Richard Wright's Archaeology of Death
by Abdul R. JanMohamed
Abdul R. JanMohamed is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
During the 1940s, in response to the charge that his writing was filled with violence, Richard Wright replied that the manner came from the matter, that the “relationship of the American Negro to the American scene [was] essentially violent,” and that he could deny neither the violence he had witnessed nor his own existence as a product of racial violence. Abdul R. JanMohamed provides extraordinary insight into Wright's position in this, the first study to explain the fundamental ideological and political functions of the threat of lynching in Wright's work and thought.
“Abdul JanMohammed reworks the concept of 'social death' to read Richard Wright in comprehensive and provocative ways. At the same time, he offers a new account of slavery, rewriting Hegel and psychoanalysis along the way, to rewrite 'lordship and bondage' as the 'death contract' and to discern the precise and various ways in which autonomy and freedom are asserted." Judith Butler, Maxine Elliott Professor at the University of California, Berkeley
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No Coward Soldiers:
Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America
by Waldo E. Martin, Jr.
Professor Waldo Martin teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
No Coward Soldiers brings a new perspective to the civil rights and black power eras, while illuminating the broader history of American and global freedom struggles. From the music of John Coltrane and James Brown to the visual art of Jacob Lawrence and Betye Saar to the dance movements of Alvin Ailey and Arthur Mitchell, Martin discusses how, why, and with what consequences culture became a critical battle site in the freedom struggle. And in a fascinating epilogue, he draws the thread of black cultural politics into today's hip-hop culture.
"Waldo Martin takes up the charge being led by a growing number of scholars who understand the symbiotic connections between the Civil Rights/Black Power movements and black expressive culture in a myriad of forms." —Deborah E. McDowell, University of Virginia, author of Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin.
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Politics of Piety:
The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
by Saba Mahmood
Author Saba Mahmood is Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley.
Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.
"This very timely book opens doors into spaces of Islamic piety that shatter the stereotypes which dominate thinking in the West. Mahmood carefully unpacks the distortions that common modes of liberalism and feminism impose on the Muslim world. She combines richness of description with theoretical sophistication to provide insight into the struggle of some Muslim women to live their faith, often in the face of not only Western liberal influences but also Arab nationalism and political Islamism. The reader is forced to face dilemmas that cannot be easily resolved. This is social science at its most illuminating." --Charles Taylor, Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy, Northwestern University, author of Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.
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America's Asia:
Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945
by Colleen Lye
 Author Colleen Lye is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley.
America's Asia explores a discursive tradition that affiliates the East with modern efficiency, in contrast to more familiar primitivist forms of Orientalism. Colleen Lye traces the American stereotype of Asians as a "model minority" or a "yellow peril"--two aspects of what she calls "Asiatic racial form"-- to emergent responses to globalization beginning in California in the late nineteenth century, when industrialization proceeded in tandem with the nation's neocolonial expansion beyond its continental frontier.
"A combination of literary criticism, history, race and ethnic studies; and political theory and history, America's Asia places meticulous analyses of a critically defined historical field within a theoretical framework that greatly extends the significance of this period and these issues to the question of American modernity."--David Palumbo-Liu, author of Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier
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Porn Studies
edited by Linda Wiliams
Author Linda Williams, PhD, is a University of Colorado, Professor in the Departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric, and the Director of the Film Studies Program, at the University of California, Berkeley.
Porn Studies resists the tendency to situate pornography as the outer limit of what can be studied and discussed. It moves beyond futile feminist debates and distinctions between a "good" erotica and a "bad" hard core. This volume acknowledges that with revenues totaling between ten and fourteen billion dollars annually--more than the combined revenues of professional football, basketball, and baseball--visual, hard-core pornography has emphatically arrived as a central feature of American popular culture. It is time, Williams contends, for scholars to recognize this and give pornography a serious and extended analysis. The essays in Porn Studies exemplify this effort.
"Thank God for Linda Williams! She is absolutely brilliant. I have learned an enormous amount from her over the years. She boldly goes where few academics dare. Porn Studies is a smart, much needed, fascinating book, which paves the way and sets the tone for future porn studies. This book boggles and blows my mind."--Annie Sprinkle
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Community-Driven Regulation
by Dara O'Rourke
Author Dara O'Rourke is Assistant Professor of Environmental and Labor Policy in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley.
In Community-Driven Regulation: Balancing Development and the Environment in Vietnam, Dara O'Rourke proposes a new policy model for pollution control, based on detailed case studies from rapidly industrializing Vietnam. He shows that environmental problems can be solved when affected community groups mobilize to pressure both state and industry and argues that this strategy, which he terms "community-driven regulation," used successfully in Vietnam, can achieve similar success in other countries.
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Insult and the Making of the Gay Self
by Didier Eribon and translated by Michael Lucey
Author Didier Eribon was in residence at the University of California for September and October 2004.
A bestseller in France following its publication in 1999, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an extraordinary set of reflections on “the gay question” by Didier Eribon, one of France's foremost public intellectuals. Known internationally as the author of a pathbreaking biography of Michel Foucault, Eribon is a leading voice in French gay studies.
“… A tour de force of cultural criticism, erudition, and social engagement, Eribon’s work demonstrates the intellectual breadth and radical potential of queer critique.”—George Chauncey, author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940
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Closely Watched Films:
An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique
by Marilyn Fabe
Author Marilyn Fabe is a Lecturer in the Film Studies Department at the University of California.
How do films work? How do they tell a story? How do they move us and make us think? Through detailed examinations of passages from classic films, Marilyn Fabe supplies the analytic tools and background in film history and theory to enable us to see more in every film we watch. Ranging from D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, and ending with an epilogue on digital media, Closely Watched Films focuses on exemplary works of fourteen film directors whose careers together span the history of the narrative film. Lively and down-to-earth, this concise introduction provides a broad, complete, and yet specific picture of visual narrative techniques that will increase readers' excitement about and knowledge of the possibilities of the film medium.
"Writing in a clear prose that is nevertheless based on a complex awareness of film history, criticism, and technique, Fabe takes us through the diverse film strategies of exemplary classic directors who have significantly shaped the history of film and made it into a potent cultural force."--Claire Kahane, SUNY-Buffalo, author of Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850-1915
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Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism:
Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)
by Kevis Goodman
Author, Kevis Goodman, is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of California.
In Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism, Kevis Goodman traces connections between georgic verse and developments in other spheres from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. She expands the subject of the Georgic to broader areas of literary and cultural study--including the history of the feelings, print culture, and early scientific technology. Goodman maintains that the verse form presents ways of perceiving history in terms of sensation, an approach more usually associated with Romanticism.
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Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity
by Daniel Boyarin
Author Daniel Boyarin is the Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California. He is the author of Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism and A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity.
In Border Lines, Daniel Boyarin makes a striking case for a very different way of thinking about the historical development that is the partition of Judaeo-Christianity. There were no characteristics or features that could be described as uniquely Jewish or Christian in late antiquity, Boyarin argues. Rather, Jesus-following Jews and Jews who did not follow Jesus lived on a cultural map in which beliefs, such as that in a second divine being, and practices, such as keeping kosher or maintaining the Sabbath, were widely and variably distributed. The ultimate distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were imposed from above by "border-makers," heresiologists anxious to construct a discrete identity for Christianity.
"Boyarin's book challenges the ordinary usage of the terms 'Judaism' and 'Christianity' and juxtaposes the formation of orthodoxy as it is formulated within rabbinic tradition and among Christians of the patristic period. His bold thesis will no doubt prove controversial and important." -- Elaine Pagels, author of Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas.
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