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Faculty Publications

Sample listing of current faculty book publications

Please see faculty directory pages for full lists of publications.

	Banu Bargu, Editor - Turkey's Necropolitical Laboratory Democracy, Violence and Resistance - Oxford University Press, 2018 This book makes a strong case that Turkey’s regime and its vicissitudes are dependent on a necropolitical undercurrent. Building on the insights of critical and contemporary theory, the essays address the multiple ways in which lives are brought into the fold of power. Once there, they are subjected to mechanisms of death and destruction, and to modalities of infrastructural violence, strategic neglect and exposure. This produces new forms of impoverishment, inequality and disposability.
	Massimiliano Tomba - Insurgent Universality An Alternative Legacy of Modernity - Oxford University Press, 2019 This book advocates for a tradition of political universality as an alternative to the juridical universalism of the Declaration. Insurgent universality isn't based on the idea that we all share some common humanity but, rather, on the democratic excess by which people disrupt and reject an existing political and economic order. Going beyond the constitutional armor of the representative state, it brings into play a plurality of powers to which citizens have access, not through the funnel of national citizenship but in daily political practice.
	D.S. Marriott - Duppies - Commune Editions, 2019 In Duppies, D.S. Marriott writes a poetry of grime, the London street music, one that is “late shift, zero hour.” Mixing lyric tonality with grime’s aggression, grit, and speed, this is a coruscating study of the racial politics of austerity. And it is an erudite lyric, one attentive to the continuing legacies of slavery, how this history shapes and defines everything from the law to the understanding of who or what is human.
	D.S. Marriott - Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being. Stanford University Press, June 2018. Investigating and foregrounding the clinical system that Fanon devised in an attempt to intervene against negrophobia and anti-blackness, this book rereads his clinical and political work together, arguing that the two are mutually imbricated. For the first time, Fanon's therapeutic innovations are considered along with his more overtly political and cultural writings to ask how the crises of war affected his practice, informed his politics, and shaped his subsequent ideas.
	Edited by Banu Bargu and Chiara Bottici - Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique: Essays in Honor of Nancy Fraser. Palgrave Macmillan, July 2017. This edited collection examines the relationship between three central terms—capitalism, feminism, and critique—while critically celebrating the work and life of a thinker who has done the most to address this nexus: Nancy Fraser. In honor of her seventieth birthday, and in the spirit of her work in the tradition of critical theory, this collection brings together scholars from different disciplines and theoretical approaches to address this conjunction and evaluate Fraser’s lifelong contributions to theorizing it.
	Banu Bargu - Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons. Columbia University Press, September 2016. Starve and Immolate tells the story of leftist political prisoners in Turkey who waged a deadly struggle against the introduction of high security prisons by forging their lives into weapons. Weaving together contemporary and critical political theory with political ethnography, Banu Bargu analyzes the death fast struggle as an exemplary though not exceptional instance of self-destructive practices that are a consequence of, retort to, and refusal of the increasingly biopolitical forms of sovereign power deployed around the globe.
	Massimiliano Tomba - Marx’s Temporalities. Haymarket, December 2013. Rethinking the central categories of Marx's work, this study provides a critical analysis of his political and theoretical development. By integrating the paradigm of the spatialisation of time with that of the temporalisation of space, Tomba shows that an adequate historiographical paradigm for capitalism must consider the plurality of temporal layers that come into conflict in modernity.
	Eric Porter and Lewis Watts - New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition. University of California Press, February 2013. With New Orleans Suite, Eric Porter and Lewis Watts join the post-Katrina conversation about New Orleans and its changing cultural scene. Using both visual evidence and the written word, Watts and Porter pay homage to the city, its region, and its residents, by mapping recent and often contradictory social and cultural transformations, and seeking to counter inadequate and often pejorative accounts of the people and place that give New Orleans its soul.
	Robert Meister - After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. Columbia University Press, November 2012. Merging examples from literature and history, Robert Meister confronts the problem of closure and the resolution of historical injustice. He boldly challenges the empty moral logic of "never again" or the theoretical reduction of evil to a cycle of violence and counterviolence, broken only once evil is remembered for what it was.
	D.S. Marriott - The Bloods. Shearsman, 2011. In The Bloods, his third poetry collection, D.S. Marriott's recurrent theme is that of memory and absence — ‘bound to what is remembered/ what is absent'. In poems that both embody and inhabit this double obligation, memory and absence prove to be equally central to the mysteries of ordinary language, the politics and philosophy of enslavement, as well as markers — typographic, archival, ethical — respecting the borders of what cannot, finally, be known.
	Eric Porter - The Problem of the Future World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury. Duke University Press, November 2010. The Problem of the Future World is a compelling reassessment of the later writings of the iconic African American activist and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois. As Eric Porter points out, despite the outpouring of scholarship devoted to Du Bois, the broad range of writing he produced during the 1940s and early 1950s has not been thoroughly examined in its historical context, nor has sufficient attention been paid to the theoretical interventions he made during those years.

	D.S. Marriott - Hoodoo Voodoo, Shearsman Books, 2008 Poetry. Afro-Caribbean Studies. "D.S. Marriott 'dares to dream' in this book...by refolding beautiful romantic lines...into new relation with the real that haunts him, which he attends through mourning and recasts in an art full of loss.
	D.S. Marriott - Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity. Rutgers University Press, March 2007. In Haunted Life, David Marriott examines the complex interplay between racial fears and anxieties and the political-visual cultures of suspicion and state terror. He compels readers to consider how media technologies are "haunted" by the phantom of racial slavery.
	Carla Freccero - Queer⁄Early⁄Modern. Duke University Press, January 2006. In Queer/Early/Modern, Carla Freccero, a leading scholar of early modern European studies, argues for a reading practice that accounts for the queerness of temporality, for the way past, present, and future time appear out of sequence and in dialogue in our thinking about history and texts.
	Eric Porter - What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists. University of California Press, January 2002. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? challenges interpretive orthodoxies by showing how much black jazz musicians have struggled against both the racism of the dominant culture and the prescriptive definitions of racial authenticity propagated by the music's supporters, both white and black.

	D.S. Marriott - On Black Men. Columbia University Press, September 2000. Mutilated, dying, or dead, black men play a role in the psychic life of culture. From national dreams to media fantasies, there is a persistent imagining of what black men must be. This book explores the legacy of that role, particularly its violent effect on how black men have learned to see themselves and one another.
	Carla Freccero - Popular Culture: An Introduction. New York University Press, August 1999. From Madonna and drag queens to cyberpunk and webzines, popular culture constitutes a common and thereby critical part of our lives. Yet the study of popular culture has been condemned and praised, debated and ridiculed. In Popular Culture: An Introduction, Carla Freccero reveals why we study popular culture and how it is taught in the classroom.
	Carla Freccero and Louise Fradenburg - Premodern Sexualities. Routledge, September 1996. Premodern Sexualities offers rigorous new approaches to current problems in the historiography of sexuality. From queer readings of early modern medical texts to transcribing and interrogating premodern documents of sexual transgression, the contributors bring together current theoretical discourses on sexuality while emphasizing problems in the historicist interpretation of early textualizations of sexuality. Premodern Sexualities clarifies the contributions literary studies can make--through its emphasis on reading strategies--to the historiography of sexuality.