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Mainstream media and film theory are based on the ways that media technologies operate in Europe and the United States. This work provides a history and ethnography of media in Nigeria, asking what media theory looks like when Nigeria rather than a European nation or the United States is taken as the starting point.

An ethnography of Wall Street, investment bankers and the cultural logics of finance.

A compilation of the primary texts-by Foucault, Arendt, Agamben, Badiou, and other theorists-that laid the ground for contemporary thinking about biopolitics, or the relations between life and politics.

Examining the chronic, widespread poverty in India, the world's fourth largest economy, Akhil Gupta theorizes the relation between the state in India and the poor as one of structural violence.

This follow-up volume to our book The Age of the World Target collects interconnected entangled essays of literary and cultural theorist Rey Chow. The essays take up ideas of violence, capture, identification, temporality, sacrifice, and victimhood, engaging with theorists from Derrida and Deleuze to Agamben and Ranciere.

Argues that we need to understand the appeal and persistence of the outbreak narrative because the stories we tell about disease emergence have consequences. This title presents cautionary tale about how the stories we tell circumscribe our thinking about global health and human interactions as the world imagines the next Great Plague.

For many years, kisses were the only sexual acts to be seen in mainstream American movies. This title investigates how sex acts have been represented on screen for more than a century and, just as important, how we have watched and experienced those representations.

A social history of the earthquake-tsunami that struck Lima in October 1746, looking at how people in and beyond Lima understood and reacted to the natural disaster.

An exploration of the visual meaning of the color line and racial politics through the analysis of archival photographs collected by W.E.B. Du Bois and exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1900

The award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity.

In Duress Ann Laura Stoler traces how imperial formations and colonialism's presence shape current inequities around the globe by examining Israel's colonial practices, the United State's imperial practices, the recent rise of the French right wing, and affect's importance to governance.

In Can Politics Be Thought?-published in French in 1985 and appearing here in English for the first time-Alain Badiou offers his most forceful and systematic analysis of the crisis of Marxism in which he argues for the continuation of Marxist politics.

The preeminent political theorist Etienne Balibar examines what he calls "equaliberty," the fundamental tension in modern democracies between equality and liberty, humanity and citizenship.

Theorizes the political agency of things and natural phenomena-such as trash, food, weather, and electricity-to examine how non-human elements exert force on human politics and social relations.

The Problem with Work develops a Marxist feminist critique of the structures and ethics of work, as well as a perspective for imagining a life no longer subordinated to them.

Offers a historical guide through the metamorphoses and tumultuous debates that have defined literary study in recent decades, as viewed by one of critical theory's most astute thinkers.

Proposes "low theory" as a means of recovering ways of being and forms of knowledge not legitimized by existing systems and institutions

Eminent critic Achille Mbembe reevaluates history and racism, offering a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness-from the Atlantic slave trade to the present-to show how the conjoining of the biological fiction of race with definitions of Blackness have been and continue to be used to uphold oppression.

Provides an understanding of the vital role of performance in the Americas. This title shows how the repertoire of embodied memory - conveyed in gestures, the spoken word, movement, dance, song, and other performances - offers alternative perspectives to a reconsideration of historical processes of transnational contact.