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Written by New Yorker’s inimitable first pop music critic, this book presents the perspective of a radical and rational political realm, to look at rock-and-roll, sexuality, and above all, freedom. Here the text captures the thrill of music, the disdain of authoritarian culture, and the rebellious spirit of the 1960s and 1970s.

In The Construction of Equality, Jennifer Mack shows how Syriac-instigated architectural projects and spatial practices have altered the Swedish city’s built environment “from below.” Combining architectural, urban, and ethnographic tools through archival research, site work, participant observation, and interviews, Mack provides a unique take on urban development, social change, and the immigrant experience in Europe over a fifty-year period.

It is commonplace to say that criminals pay their debt to society by spending time in prison, but what is a “debt to society?” How is crime understood as a debt? How has time become the equivalent for crime? And how does criminal debt relate to the kind of debt held by consumers and university students? This book explores modes of accounting as they are used to create, sustain, or transform social relations. Envisioning accounting broadly to include financial accounting, managerial accounting of costs and performance, and the calculation of “debts to society” owed by criminals, the book argues that accounting technologies have a powerful effect on social dynamics by attributing credits and debts. From sovereign bonds and securitized credit card debt to student debt and mortgages, there is no doubt that debt and accounting structure our lives. Exploring central components of neoliberalism (and neoliberalism in crisis) from incarceration to personal finance and university management, this text exposes the uneven distribution of accountability within American society. It demonstrates how ubiquitous the forces of accounting have become in shaping all aspects of our lives, proposing that we appropriate accounting and offer alternative accounts to turn the present toward a more widely shared well-being.

This book offers an interrogation into the position of racialized communities in the European Union, arguing that the tension between a growing nonwhite, non-Christian population and insistent essentialist definitions of Europeanness produces new forms of identity and activism. Moving beyond disciplinary and national limits, the text explores structures of resistance, tracing a Europeanization from below in which migrant and minority communities challenge the ideology of racelessness that places them firmly outside the community of citizens. Using a notable variety of sources, from drag performances to feminist Muslim activism and Euro hip-hop, the book draws on the largely ignored archive of vernacular culture central to resistance by minority youths to the exclusionary nationalism that casts them as threatening outcasts. At the same time, it reveals the continued effect of Europe’s suppressed colonial history on the representation of Muslim minorities as the illiberal Other of progressive Europe.

This volume is dedicated to clothes and accessories donned in the 19th century in Europe and in the US. This volume also addresses the question of fashion as it became known and practiced by most social classes. References are made to the nineteenth- century theoreticians who saw fashion as a common denominator that “democratized” people, while subtly creating a gap in time (higher classes invented what later lower classes copied) that maintained the established class division. Such American authors as Hawthorne, James, and Chopin or British ones as Carlyle, for instance, definitely used clothing as a language to talk about their wearers’ identity (including their gender identity) and their social class.

From call centers, overseas domestic labor, and customer care to human organ selling, gestational surrogacy, and knowledge work, such as software programming, life itself is channeled across the globe from one population to another. In Life Support, Kalindi Vora demonstrates how biological bodies become a new kind of global biocapital. Vora examines how forms of labor serve to support life in the United States at the expense of the lives of people in India. She exposes how even seemingly inalienable aspects of human life such as care, love, and trust—and biological bodies and organs—are commodifiable entities as well as components essential to contemporary capitalism. As with earlier modes of accumulation, this new global economy has come to rely on the reproduction of life for expansion. Human bodies and subjects are playing a role similar to that of land and natural resource dispossession in the period of capitalist growth during European territorial colonialism. Indeed, the rapid pace at which scientific knowledge of biology and genetics has accelerated has opened up the human body as an extended site for annexation, harvest, dispossession, and production.

Life, Emergent advocates for an affirmative life-politic that places the social squarely in the ‘meaning of life’, animating contemporary theory and practice on life in unexplored terrains. It privileges the social by exploring life-worlds of mass violence and questions the ability of the bio-political paradigm to contain a politics of life in the biological. What does an inquiry into life from the ‘social’ look like? Life, as it lives or dies in conditions of violence, in its momentum after damage, inscribes an emerging, dynamic, fluid, ever-changing explosion of relationalities in the cognizable realm called society. While the making and unmaking of life unfolds through these relationalities, so does the making and unmaking of the social. In privileging the social, this book intervenes in the bio-political paradigm and questions its ability to exhaust the ‘meaning of life’.

This book addresses democracy as: “a commitment to individual freedom and egalitarian self-government in every area of social, economic, and cultural life.” The text confronts the conservative backlash that has slowly eroded democratic ideals and advances of the 1960s as well as the internal debates that have frequently splintered the left.

What does it mean to be Black? If Blackness is not biological in origin but socially and discursively constructed, does the meaning of Blackness change over time and space? In Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, Michelle M. Wright argues that although we often explicitly define Blackness as a “what,” it in fact always operates as a “when” and a “where.” By putting lay discourses on spacetime from physics into conversation with works on identity from the African Diaspora, Physics of Blackness explores how Middle Passage epistemology subverts racist assumptions about Blackness, yet its linear structure inhibits the kind of inclusive epistemology of Blackness needed in the twenty-first century. Wright then engages with bodies frequently excluded from contemporary mainstream consideration: Black feminists, Black queers, recent Black African immigrants to the West, and Blacks whose histories may weave in and out of the Middle Passage epistemology but do not cohere to it. Physics of Blackness takes the reader on a journey both known and unfamiliar—from Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravity to the contemporary politics of diasporic Blackness in the academy, from James Baldwin’s postwar trope of the Eiffel Tower as the site for diasporic encounters to theoretical particle physics’ theory of multiverses and superpositioning, to the almost erased lives of Black African women during World War II. Accessible in its style, global in its perspective, and rigorous in its logic, Physics of Blackness will change the way you look at Blackness.

Loichot traces the evolution of the Caribbean response to the colonial gaze, or rather, colonial mouth, from the late 19th century to the inception of the 21st. The ubiquitous presence of food and hunger in Caribbean folktales, political and historical treatises, fiction, and poetry signals the various traumas that have marked the Caribbean from the Middle Passage, to Slavery, Colonialism, WW2, and Departmentalization. The Francophone and Anglophone authors featured in The Tropics Bite Back bite back at the controlling images of the cannibal, the starved, the cunning cook, or the sexualized sugary octoroon, with the ultimate goal of constructing humanity through structural, literal, or allegorical acts of ingesting, cooking, and eating. Deviating from monographs that identify food solely as a cultural trope, the book privileges literary cannibalism, which Loichot reads in parallel with theories of Relation and Creolization, and which she distinguishes from cultural assimilation. Unlike other “Food Studies” monographs, the book does not focus primarily on cookbooks or “food novels,” but rather constructively explores “culinary coups” in unexpected places, such as Glissant’s essays. The book culminates with an investigation of the complexity of Suzanne Césaire’s practice of literary cannibalism, focusing on the Martinican writer’s critique of surrealist André Breton. The Tropics Bite Back features a transnational network of Caribbean authors writing from or about Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, or the Caribbean Diasporas of the United States, Canada, and France, whose culinary acts resonate with American, Brazilian, Cuban, and Barbadian voices.