Books Books Press imprint: 2592 books
Stages of Emergency
Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense
Language: English
Release Date: June 27, 2007
In an era defined by the threat of nuclear annihilation, Western nations attempted to prepare civilian populations for atomic attack through staged drills, evacuations, and field exercises. In Stages of Emergency the distinguished performance historian Tracy C. Davis investigates the fundamentally...
Theater Enough
American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607–1789
Language: English
Release Date: April 10, 1991
The early settlers in America had a special relationship to the theater. Though largely without a theater of their own, they developed an ideology of theater that expressed their sense of history, as well as their version of life in the New World. Theater Enough provides an innovative analysis of...
Broadcasting Modernity
Cuban Commercial Television, 1950-1960
Language: English
Release Date: April 19, 2015
The birth and development of commercial television in Cuba in the 1950s occurred alongside political and social turmoil. In this period of dramatic swings encompassing democracy, a coup, a dictatorship, and a revolution, television functioned as a beacon and promoter of Cuba’s identity as a modern...
Nothing Happens
Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday
Language: English
Release Date: February 9, 1996
Through films that alternate between containment, order, and symmetry on the one hand, and obsession, explosiveness, and a lack of control on the other, Chantal Akerman has gained a reputation as one of the most significant filmmakers working today. Her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce,...
Salsa Crossings
Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles
Language: English
Release Date: June 18, 2013
In Los Angeles, night after night, the city's salsa clubs become social arenas where hierarchies of gender, race, and class, and of nationality, citizenship, and belonging are enacted on and off the dance floor. In an ethnography filled with dramatic narratives, Cindy García describes how local salseras/os...
So Much Wasted
Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance
Language: English
Release Date: October 25, 2010
In So Much Wasted, Patrick Anderson analyzes self-starvation as a significant mode of staging political arguments across the institutional domains of the clinic, the gallery, and the prison. Homing in on those who starve themselves for various reasons and the cultural and political contexts in which...
The Oriental Obscene
Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era
Language: English
Release Date: November 9, 2011
The Oriental Obscene is a sophisticated analysis of Americans’ reactions to visual representations of the Vietnam War, such as the photograph of the “napalm girl,” news footage of the Tet Offensive, and feature films from The Deer Hunter to Rambo: First Blood Part II. Sylvia Shin Huey Chong...
Real Country
Music and Language in Working-Class Culture
Language: English
Release Date: October 6, 2004
In Lockhart, Texas, a rural working-class town just south of Austin, country music is a way of life. Conversation slips easily into song, and the songs are full of conversation. Anthropologist and musician Aaron A. Fox spent years in Lockhart making research notes, music, and friends. In Real Country,...
The Selling Sound
The Rise of the Country Music Industry
Language: English
Release Date: November 7, 2007
Few expressions of popular culture have been shaped as profoundly by the relationship between commercialism and authenticity as country music has. While its apparent realism, sincerity, and frank depictions of everyday life are country’s most obvious stylistic hallmarks, Diane Pecknold demonstrates...
by Sarah Schulman
Language: English
Release Date: October 12, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: October 12, 2012
In this chronicle of political awakening and queer solidarity, the activist and novelist Sarah Schulman describes her dawning consciousness of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Invited to Israel to give the keynote address at an LGBT studies conference at Tel Aviv University, Schulman declines,...
Freedom with Violence
Race, Sexuality, and the US State
Language: English
Release Date: October 21, 2011
In Freedom with Violence, Chandan Reddy develops a new paradigm for understanding race, sexuality, and national citizenship. He examines a crucial contradiction at the heart of modernity: the nation-state’s claim to provide freedom from violence depends on its systematic deployment of violence against...
by Didier Eribon, Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg
Language: English
Release Date: July 7, 2004
Language: English
Release Date: July 7, 2004
A bestseller in France following its publication in 1999, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an extraordinary set of reflections on “the gay question” by Didier Eribon, one of France’s foremost public intellectuals. Known internationally as the author of a pathbreaking biography of Michel...
Divide And Conquer Or Divide And Subdivide?
How Not to Refight the First International
Language: English
Release Date: September 21, 2017
The battles between Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx in the First International (aka the International Working Men's Association, 1864 1876) began a pattern of polemics and rancor between anarchists and Marxists that still exists today. Outlining the profound similarities between Bakunin and Marx in...
Indigenous Mestizos
The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991
Language: English
Release Date: February 28, 2000
In the early twentieth century, Peruvian intellectuals, unlike their European counterparts, rejected biological categories of race as a basis for discrimination. But this did not eliminate social hierarchies; instead, it redefined racial categories as cultural differences, such as differences in education...