DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

(P/B) THE EMPTY CRADLE OF DEMOCRACY
[...] "The Empty Cradle of Democracy" examines the complex relationship between nationalism and gender and re-theorizes late modernity and violence by exploring Greek representations of human agency, the fetus, national identity, eroticism, and the divine. Halkias's analysis combines telling fragments of contemporary Athenian culture, Greek history, media coverage of abortion and the declining birth rate, and fieldwork in Athens at an obstetrics / gynecology clinic and a family-planning center. [...] (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) PERSPECTIVES ON THE GLOBAL CRISIS
This special issue examines the global economic crisis in systemic terms that encompass economic, social, and cultural dimensions of contemporary life. The essays analyze not only the nature of the crisis but also the possibilities of transformative action. One contributor evaluates the historical structural causes of the contemporary crisis to propose future tactics for the Left in promoting egalitarian and locally autonomous and self-sufficient economic practices. Another explores crises in the global pharmaceutical industry, particularl...
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(P/B) MATERIALITY
Throughout history and across social and cultural contexts, most systems of belief - whether religious or secular - have ascribed wisdom to those who see reality as that which transcends the merely material. Yet, as the studies collected here show, the immaterial is not easily separated from the material. Humans are defined, to an extraordinary degree, by their expressions of immaterial ideals through material forms. The essays in Materiality explore varied manifestations of materiality from ancient times to the present. In assessing the f...
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(P/B) THE AESTHETICS OF SHADOW
In this revealing study, Daisuke Miyao explores "the aesthetics of shadow" in Japanese cinema in the first half of the twentieth century. This term, coined by the production designer Yoshino Nobutaka, refers to the perception that shadows add depth and mystery. Miyao analyzes how this notion became naturalized as the representation of beauty in Japanese films, situating Japanese cinema within transnational film history. He examines the significant roles lighting played in distinguishing the styles of Japanese film from American and Europea...
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(P/B) BENJAMIN NOW
The Arcades Project is the unfinished, final work of influential cultural theorist, critic, and historian Walter Benjamin. Until 1999, this huge, unruly manuscript, which provides a more complete picture of the diversity of Benjamin's work than formerly available, had not been fully translated into English. Benjamin Now is the first collection of essays in English to focus on The Arcades Project. While this essential text's title refers to its ostensible subject - the nineteenth-century shopping arcades of Paris - The Arcades Project is a ...
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(P/B) REPRODUCING JEWS
There are more fertility clinics per capita in Israel than in any other country in the world and Israel has the world's highest per capita rate of in-vitro fertilization procedures. Fertility treatments are fully subsidized by Israeli national health insurance and are available to all Israelis, regardless of religion or marital status. These phenomena are not the result of unusually high rates of infertility in Israel but reflect the centrality of reproduction in Judaism and Jewish culture. In this ethnographic study of the new reproductiv...
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(P/B) SHARDS OF LOVE
With the Spanish conquest of Islamic Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the year 1492 marks the exile from Europe of crucial strands of medieval culture. It also becomes a symbolic marker for the expulsion of a diversity in language and grammar that was disturbing to the Renaissance sensibility of purity and stability. In rewriting Columbus's narrative of his voyage of that year, Renaissance historians rewrote history, as was often their practice, to purge it of an offending vulgarity. The cultural fragments left behind foll...
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(P/B) WRITING IN DANTE'S CULT OF TRUTH
Using the works of Dante as its critical focus, Maria Rosa Menocal's original and imaginative study examines questions of truth, ideology, and reality in poetry as they occur in a series of texts and in the relationship between those texts across time. In each case, Menocal raises theoretical issues of critical importance to contemporary debates regarding the structure of literary relations. Beginning with a reading of La vita nuova and the Commedia, this literary history of poetic literary histories explores the Dantean poetic experience ...
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(P/B) WAKE THE TOWN AND TELL THE PEOPLE
Jamaican dancehall has long been one of the most vital and influential cultural and artistic forces within contemporary global music. Wake the Town and Tell the People presents, for the first time, a lively, nuanced, and comprehensive view of this musical and cultural phenomenon: its growth and historical role within Jamaican society, its economy of star making, its technology of production, its performative practices, and its capacity to channel political beliefs through popular culture in ways that are urgent, tangible, and lasting. Norm...
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(P/B) INTIMATE OUTSIDERS
Until now, the notion of a cross-cultural dialogue has not figured in the analysis of harem paintings, largely because the Western fantasy of the harem has been seen as the archetype for Western appropriation of the Orient. In Intimate Outsiders, the art historian Mary Roberts brings to light a body of harem imagery that was created through a dynamic process of cultural exchange. Roberts focuses on images produced by nineteenth-century European artists and writers who were granted access to harems in the urban centers of Istanbul and Cairo...
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(P/B) NOSTALGIA FOR THE MODERN
As the twentieth century drew to a close, the unity and authority of the secularist Turkish state were challenged by the rise of political Islam and Kurdish separatism on the one hand and by the increasing demands of the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank on the other. While the Turkish government had long limited Islam - the religion of the overwhelming majority of its citizens - to the private sphere, it burst into the public arena in the late 1990s, becoming part of party politics. As religion became pol...
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(P/B) FLEXIBLE CITIZENSHIP
Few recent phenomena have proved as emblematic of our era, and as little understood, as globalisation. Are nation-states being transformed by globalisation into a single globalised economy? Do global cultural forces herald a postnational millennium? Tying ethnography to structural analysis, "Flexible Citizenship" explores such questions with a focus on the links between the cultural logics of human action and on economic and political processes within the Asia-Pacific, including the impact of these forces on women and family life.Explainin...
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(P/B) ZAPOTEC WOMEN
In this extensively revised and updated second edition of her classic ethnography, Lynn Stephen explores the intersection of gender, class, and indigenous ethnicity in southern Mexico. She provides a detailed study of how the lives of women weavers and merchants in the Zapotec-speaking town of Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, have changed in response to the international demand for Oaxacan textiles. Based on Stephen's research in Teotitlan during the mid-1980s, in 1990, and between 2001 and 2004, this volume provides a unique view of a Zapotec...
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(P/B) FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL
With the NASDAQ having lost 70 percent of its value, the giddy, optimistic belief in perpetual growth that accompanied the economic boom of the 1990s had fizzled by 2002. Yet the advances in information and communication technology, management and production techniques, and global integration that spurred the "New Economy" of the 1990s had triggered profound and lasting changes. Frontiers of Capital brings together ethnographies exploring how cultural practices and social relations have been altered by the radical economic and technologica...
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(P/B) HIGH TECH AND HIGH HEELS IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy is an ethnography of globalization positioned at the intersection between political economy and cultural studies. Carla Freeman's fieldwork in Barbados grounds the processes of transnational capitalism-production, consumption, and the crafting of modern identities-in the lives of Afro-Caribbean women working in a new high-tech industry called "informatics." It places gender at the center of transnational analysis, and local Caribbean culture and history at the center of global studies. Freeman...
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(P/B) WAVES OF DECOLONIZATION
In Waves of Decolonization, David Luis-Brown reveals how between the 1880s and the 1930s, writer-activists in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States developed narratives and theories of decolonization, of full freedom and equality in the shadow of empire. They did so decades before the decolonization of Africa and Asia in the mid-twentieth century. Analyzing the work of nationalist leaders, novelists, and social scientists, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Jose Marti, Claude McKay, Luis-Brown brings together an array of thinkers who linked local s...
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(P/B) BLACKS AND BLACKNESS IN CENTRAL AMERICA
Many of the earliest Africans to arrive in the Americas came to Central America with Spanish colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and people of African descent constituted the majority of nonindigenous populations in the region long thereafter. Yet in the development of national identities and historical consciousness, Central American nations have often countenanced widespread practices of social, political, and regional exclusion of blacks. The postcolonial development of mestizo or mixed-race ideologies of national iden...
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(P/B) NANOVISION
The dawning era of nanotechnology promises to transform life as we know it. Visionary scientists are engineering materials and devices at the molecular scale that will forever alter the way we think about our technologies, our societies, our bodies, and even reality itself. Colin Milburn argues that the rise of nanotechnology involves a way of seeing that he calls "nanovision." Trekking across the technoscapes and the dreamscapes of nanotechnology, he elaborates a theory of nanovision, demonstrating that nanotechnology has depended through...
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(H/B) HAREM HISTORIES
Harem Histories is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the harem as it was imagined, represented, and experienced in Middle Eastern and North African societies, and by visitors to those societies. One theme that threads through the collection is the intimate interrelatedness of West and East evident in encounters within and around the harem, whether in the elite socializing of precolonial Tunis or the popular historical novels published in Istanbul and Cairo from the late nineteenth century onward. Several of the contributo...
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(P/B) THE RED RIVIERA - GENDER TOURISM & POSTSOCIALISM ON THE