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This book is the first volume in the “unmourning” trilogy. Here, the text studies mourning and melancholia within and around psychoanalysis, analyzing the writings of such thinkers as Freud, Nietzsche, Lessing, Heinse, Artaud, Keller, Stifter, Kafka, and Kraus. The book maintains that we must shift the way we read literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis to go beyond traditional Oedipal structures. The book argues that the idea of the crypt has had a surprisingly potent influence on psychoanalysis, and it shows how society’s disturbed relationship with death and dying, our inability to let go of loved ones, has resulted in technology to form more and more crypts for the dead by preserving them—both physically and psychologically—in new ways.

Traditional narratives of the period leading up to the Civil War are invariably framed in geographical terms. The sectional descriptors of the North, South, and West, like the wartime categories of Union, Confederacy, and border states, mean little without reference to a map of the United States. This book contends that antislavery writers consistently refused those standard terms. Through the idiom this book names “abolitionist geography,” these writers instead expressed their dissenting views about the westward extension of slavery, the intensification of the internal slave trade, and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law by appealing to other anachronistic, partial, or entirely fictional north-south and east-west axes. Abolitionism’s West, for instance, rarely reached beyond the Mississippi River, but its East looked to Britain for ideological inspiration, its North habitually traversed the Canadian border, and its South often spanned the geopolitical divide between the United States and the British Caribbean. The book traces this geography of dissent through the work of Martin Delany, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others. This book explores new relationships between New England transcendentalism and the British West Indies; African-American cosmopolitanism, Britain, and Haiti; sentimental fiction, Ohio, and Liberia; John Brown’s Appalachia and circum-Caribbean marronage.

Academic Profiling focuses on the schooling experiences and relationships between the two fastest growing groups in the United States—Asian Americans and Latinas/os. At a time when politicians and pundits debate the sources of an achievement gap, Academic Profiling turns our attention to students, teachers, and parents to learn about the opportunity and social gaps within schools. In candid and at times heart-wrenching detail, students in a California public high school share stories of support and neglect on their paths to graduation. Separated by unequal middle schools and curriculum tracking, students are divided by race/ethnicity, class, and gender. While those in an International Baccalaureate Program boast about socratic classes and stress release-sessions, students outside of such programs bemoan unengaged teaching and inaccessible counselors. Labeled “the elite,” “regular,” “smart,” or “stupid,” students encounter differential policing and assumptions based on their abilities. These disparities are compounded by the growth in the private tutoring industry where wealthier families can afford to spend thousands of dollars to enhance their children’s opportunities, furthering an accumulation of privileges. However, in spite of the entrenchment of inequality in today’s schools, Academic Profiling uncovers multiple forms of resilience and the ways that students and teachers are affirming identities, creating alternative spaces, and fostering critical consciousness. As the story of this California high school unfolds, we also learn about the possibilities and limits of change when Gilda L. Ochoa shares the research findings with the high school.

The first in the four-part series, this book charts the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing as seen on the street and in museums, in films and literature, and in advertisements and magazines. The book features a close-up focus on accessories—the shoe, the hat, the necklace—intimately connected to the body. The chapters here offer new theoretical and historical takes on the role of clothing, dress, and accessories in the construction of the modern subject. The book offers array of ideas about the modern body and the ways in which we dress it. From perspectives on the “model body” to Sonia Delaunay’s designs, from Fascist-era Spanish women’s prescribed ways of dressing to Futurist vests, from Barbara Stanwyck’s anklet to Salvatore Ferragamo’s sandals, from a poet’s tiara to a worker’s cap, from the scarlet letter to the yellow star: this book imparts startling insights into how much the most modest accessory might reveal.

This book provides a philosophical and historical account of early photography in India that focuses on how aesthetic experiments in colonial photography changed the nature of perception. Considering photographs from the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 along with landscape, portraiture, and famine photography, this book explores larger issues of truth, memory, and embodiment. This book scrutinizes the colonial context to understand the production of sense itself, proposing a new theory of interpreting the historical difference of aesthetic forms. In rereading colonial photographic images, it shows how the histories of colonialism became aesthetically, mimetically, and perceptually generative. It suggests that photography arrived in India not only as a technology of the colonial state but also as an instrument that eventually extended and transformed sight for photographers and the body politic, both British and Indian.

This book presents a passionate defense of radical ecology that speaks directly to current debates concerning the nature, and dangers, of sovereign power. Engaging the work of Bataille, Arendt, Levinas, Nancy, and Agamben, among others, the book reconnects the political critique of sovereign power with ecological considerations, arguing that ethical and political responsibilities for the consequences of our actions do not end with those defined as human. The book turns Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty and biopolitics toward an investigation of ecological concerns. In doing so, it exposes limits to that thought, maintaining that the increasingly widespread biopolitical management of human populations has an unrecognized ecological analogue—reducing nature to a “resource” for human projects. The book contends that a radical ecological politics must resist both the depoliticizing exercise of sovereign power and the pervasive spread of biopolitics in order to reveal new possibilities for creating healthy human and nonhuman communities.

Agitating Images explores the early history of Communist organization among small dispersed groups of indigenous Evenki peoples of Central Siberia. It draws this history into an examination of the destabilizing role of photographs in the production of history. While documenting the development of Soviet Nationalities policy in context of people who were considered to be socially and technologically ‘backwards,’ the project is resolutely committed to the demonstration of what I call photographic agitation. It performs this agitation all the while presenting a ‘nervous’ history of the momentous encounter between Soviet socialism and indigenous peoples in the Siberian North. This book will have broad appeal. Not only is it the first book to present a comprehensive treatment of the remote soviet outpost called the Culture Base but it adds to a lively historical and ethnological discourse on the colonial experience of the indigenous minorities of the Siberian North. Scholars working on histories of soviet socialism will be interested in this book for its counter-narrative of socialist modernity. For scholars interested in photography’s colonial histories, Agitating Images demonstrates the muddy role of photography in producing coherent scopic regimes.

Airport Urbanism studies the exponential leap of global air traffic since the 1980s and its implications for the planning and designing of five East and Southeast Asian cities. Focusing on the low-cost, informal, and “transborder” transportation networks used by newer members of the flying public, the book uncovers the architecture of an emerging global mobility that has been inconspicuously inserted into buildings and places that are not typically associated with the infrastructure of international air travel. The primary focus is in Asia, with research conducted in five different locations: China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Unique security clearance has allowed for access to the restricted zones of airports, unpublished maps, and photographs. In all, the book combines research tools from the humanities and design professions in order to advance an innovative approach to the study of rapidly developing Asian cities in relation to the increase of air travel.

Humanity has sat at the center of philosophical thinking for too long. The recent advent of environmental philosophy and posthuman studies has widened our scope of inquiry to include ecosystems, animals, and artificial intelligence. Yet the vast majority of the stuff in our universe, and even in our lives, remains beyond serious philosophical concern. This book develops an object-oriented ontology that puts things at the center of being—a philosophy in which nothing exists any more or less than anything else, in which humans are elements but not the sole or even primary elements of philosophical interest. And unlike experimental phenomenology or the philosophy of technology, this book’s alien phenomenology takes for granted that all beings interact with and perceive one another. This experience, however, withdraws from human comprehension and becomes accessible only through a speculative philosophy based on metaphor.

All Thoughts Are Equal is an introduction to the work of French philosopher François Laruelle and an experiment in nonhuman thinking. For Laruelle, standard forms of philosophy continue to dominate our models of what counts as exemplary thought and knowledge. By contrast, what Laruelle calls his “non-standard” approach attempts to bring democracy into thought, because all forms of thinking are equal in value. Philosophy–the discipline that posits itself as the power to think at the highest level–does not have a monopoly on reason. Such democracy clearly has relevance for the nonhuman, too. If non-philosophy hopes to extend what we mean by thinking beyond the boundaries set by classical approaches, then such a project has important implications as regards the existence and value of nonhuman forms of thought. This study strives to see how philosophy might appear when we look at it with non-philosophical and nonhuman eyes. And it does so by refusing to explain Laruelle through orthodox philosophy, opting instead to follow the structure of a film, Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions, to introduce the non-standard method. Von Trier’s documentary is a meditation on the creative constraints set by film, both technologically and aesthetically, and how they can push our experience of film, and of ourselves, beyond what is normally deemed “the perfect human.” All Thoughts Are Equal adopts those constraints in its own experiment by showing how Laruelle’s radically new style of philosophy is best introduced using our most nonhuman form of thought, that found in cinema itself.

Tracing the history of efforts in the United States to limit the sexual freedoms of such persons, using methods such as forced sterilization, invasive birth control, and gender-segregated living arrangements, Michael Gill demonstrates that these widespread practices stemmed from dominant views of disabled sexuality, not least the notion that intellectually disabled women are excessively sexual and fertile while their male counterparts are sexually predatory. Analyzing legal discourses, sex education materials, and news stories going back to the 1970s, Gill shows, for example, that the intense focus on “stranger danger” in sex education for intellectually disabled individuals disregards their ability to independently choose activities and sexual partners, including nonheterosexual ones, which are frequently treated with heightened suspicion. He also examines ethical issues surrounding masturbation training that aims to regulate individuals’ sexual lives, challenges the perception that those whose sexuality is controlled (or rejected) should not reproduce, and proposes recognition of the right to become parents for adults with intellectual disabilities. A powerfully argued call for sexual and reproductive justice for people with intellectual disabilities, Already Doing It urges a shift away from the compulsion to manage “deviance” (better known today as harm reduction) because the right to pleasure and intellectual disability are not mutually exclusive. In so doing, it represents a vital new contribution to the ongoing debate over who, in the United States, should be allowed to have sex, reproduce, marry, and raise children.

Contemporary life is increasingly shaped through attunement to the atmospheric affordances of the media environment. Ambient Media delves into the use of music, video, film, and literature as tools to tune this atmospheric self. The book traces the emergence of mood-regulating media in Japan from the environmental art and Erik Satie boom of the 1960s and 70s to the more recent emphasis on “healing” styles. Focusing on how ambience reshapes those dwelling within it, Ambient Media explores the working of atmospheres designed for affective calm, rhythmic attunement, embodied security, and urban coexistence. The book argues for understanding ambient media as a specifically neoliberal response to mood regulation, serving as a way to atmospherically shape collective behavior while providing resources for emotional autonomy and attention restoration at the individual level. Ambient Media considers the adaptive side of atmosphere as an approach to self-care and social mobility. At the same time, the book considers the limits of mood regulation and the low-affect lifestyle when it comes to interpersonal life. Musicians, video artists, filmmakers, and writers in Japan have expanded on Brian Eno’s original idea of a style affording “calm, and a space to think,” providing materials to cultivate sensory serenity within the uncertain horizons of the contemporary social landscape. Offering a new way of understanding Japanese social demands to “read the air,” the book documents both the adaptive and the alarming sides of this turn to mediated moods.

American by Paper is a book about the consequences of papers—visas, green cards, and passports—for immigrant literacy. For immigrants, papers can mean the difference between family reunification and separation, a living wage and poverty, and sometimes life and death. Documented and undocumented, all 40 million migrants currently living in the U.S. must deal with papers. They often do so through everyday acts of writing. An ethnographic study, American by Papertells the story of how migrants write to attain papers, how they write when they cannot attain papers, and how their writing can function as papers. It describes how migrants in two communities—one from the Azores, largely documented, and one from Brazil, largely undocumented—come to experience literacy not as a means of assimilation, as educational policy makers often believe, nor as a means of empowerment, as literacy scholars often hope, but instead as enmeshed in papers, those authoritative bureaucratic objects that are the currency of highly literate societies and that powerfully regulate transnational lives.

Using research on popular culture of the Vietnamese diaspora, this book explores how people displaced by war reconstruct cultural identity in the aftermath of migration. Embracing American democratic ideals and consumer capitalism prior to arriving in the United States, postwar Vietnamese refugees endeavored to assimilate and live the American Dream. The text claims that nowhere are these fantasies played out more vividly than in the Vietnamese American entertainment industry. The book examines how live music variety shows and videos, beauty pageants, and websites created by and for Vietnamese Americans contributed to the shaping of their cultural identity. It shows how popular culture forms repositories for conflicting expectations of assimilation, cultural preservation, and invention, alongside gendered and classed dimensions of ethnic and diasporic identity. This text demonstrates how the circulation of images manufactured by both Americans and Vietnamese immigrants serves to produce these immigrants’ paradoxical desires. Within these desires and their representations, the book finds the dramatization of the community’s struggle to define itself against the legacy of the refugee label, a classification that continues to pathologize their experiences in American society.

Novelist, memoirist, diarist, and gay pioneer Christopher Isherwood left a wealth of writings. Known for his crisp style and his camera-like precision with detail, Isherwood gained fame for his Berlin Stories, which served as source material for the hit stage musical and Academy Award-winning film Cabaret. More recently, his experiences and career in the United States have received increased attention. His novel A Single Man was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film; his long relationship with the artist Don Bachardy, with whom he shared an openly gay lifestyle, was the subject of an award-winning documentary, Chris & Don: A Love Story; and his memoir, Christopher and His Kind, was adapted for the BBC. Isherwood’s colorful journeys took him from post-World War I England to Weimar Germany to European exile to Golden Age Hollywood to Los Angeles in the full flower of gay liberation. After the publication of his diaries, which run to more than one million words and span nearly a half century, it is possible to fully assess his influence. This book considers Isherwood’s diaries, his vast personal archive, and his published works and offers a multifaceted appreciation of a writer who spent more than half of his life in southern California.

This book reveals how visual representations of racialized motherhood shape and reflect national citizenship. By means of a sustained engagement with Roland Barthes’s suturing of race, death, and the maternal in Camera Lucida, the book contends that the contradictory essence of the photograph is both a signifier of death and a guarantor of resurrection. The book explores the implications of this argument for racialized productions of death and the maternal in the context of specific cultural moments: the commemoration of Princess Diana in U.S. magazines; the intertext of Toni Morrison’s and Hollywood’s Beloved; the social and cultural death in teen pregnancy, imaged and regulated in California’s Partnership for Responsible Parenting campaigns; and popular constructions of the “Widows of 9/11” in print and televisual journalism. Taken together, these various visual media texts function in American Pietàs as cultural artifacts and as visual nodes in a larger network of racialized productions of maternal bodies in contexts of national death and remembering. To engage this network is to ask how and toward what end the racial project of the nation imbues some maternal bodies with resurrecting power and leaves others for dead. In the spaces between these different maternities, states this book, U.S. citizen-subjects are born—and reborn.

The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation sets the stage for the radical politics of possibility and freedom through a discussion of the insurrectionary geographies that suffuse our daily experiences. This book is the first major study of the concept of anarchist geographies. It realigns radical geography away from Marxism and back to its original trajectory of anarchism. It ultimately encourages a relational understanding of space, wherein anarchism is recognized as a holistic and everyday form of emancipationfrom statistic, capitalistic, homophobic, racist, sexist, and imperialistic ideas.

Beginning with a historical account of why animal stories pose endemic critical challenges to literary and cultural theory, this book argues that key creative developments in narrative form became inseparable from shifts in animal politics and science in the past century. The book traces representational patterns specific to modern and contemporary fictions of cross-species companionship through a variety of media—including novels, films, fine art, television shows, and digital games—to show how nothing less than the futures of all species life is at stake in narrative forms. The book’s investigations into fictions of people relying on animals in civic and professional life—most obviously those of service animal users and female professional horse riders—showcase distinctly modern and human–animal forms of intersubjectivity. But increasingly graphic violence directed at these figures indicates their ambivalent significance to changing configurations of species.

This book shows that anime is far more than a style of Japanese animation. Beyond its immediate form of cartooning, anime is also a unique mode of cultural production and consumption that led to the phenomenon that is today called “media mix” in Japan and “convergence” in the West. According to the book, both anime and the media mix were ignited on January 1, 1963, when Astro Boy hit Japanese TV screens for the first time. Sponsored by a chocolate manufacturer with savvy marketing skills, Astro Boy quickly became a cultural icon in Japan. He was the poster boy (or, in his case, “sticker boy”) both for Meiji Seika’s chocolates and for what could happen when a goggle-eyed cartoon child fell into the eager clutches of creative marketers. It was only a short step, Steinberg makes clear, from Astro Boy to Pokémon and beyond. The book traces the cultural genealogy that spawned Astro Boy to the transformations of Japanese media culture that followed—and forward to the even more profound developments in global capitalism supported by the circulation of characters like Doraemon, Hello Kitty, and SuzumiyaHaruhi. It details how convergence was sparked by anime, with its astoundingly broad merchandising of images and its franchising across media and commodities. It also explains, for the first time, how the rise of anime cannot be understood properly—historically, economically, and culturally—without grasping the integral role that the media mix played from the start.

Answer the Call explores the daily, psychic journeys Indian call center agents undergo as they virtually migrate between India and the U.S. The new time-space relations generated by this virtual contact create conditions for these workers to undergo a global “migration” from India and to America, even as their bodies remain bounded within the national homeland. This temporal arrangement displaces them from the daily rhythms of Indian life, generating a sense of loss, longing, and nostalgia for “India.” Further, while agents experience a sense of distance from India, they also experience a movement toward “America.” Agents’ accounts suggest a feeling of living between worlds, yet their movement is decoupled from physical migration. Call center agents migrate not through space, but through time. While virtual migration has no geographically distant point of arrival, the experience of moving between India and America is not merely imagined. Something is happening to agents’ sense of place and time, and yet this something falls somewhere, as agents explain, in-between: between India and America, migrating and remaining within the homeland, diasporic subject and Indian citizen; between experience and imagination; between class mobility and consumption; between here and there, then and now, past and future, tradition and modernity. Call center agents live and work between these multiple cracks of material culture. Our detailed investigation of their stories unpacks the dense cultural lives agents live as they dwell in the potentiality of virtual migration that affords them spatio-temporal, class, and citizenship mobility.