The president's day

The President’s Day is a groundbreaking study of the history, theory, and practice of modern presidential time management.

The adoption plan

The Adoption Plan offers a new history of the rise of global humanitarianism that places the recipients, administrators, and critics of humanitarian aid in China at the center of the story.

Taiwan under japanese colonial rule, 1895–1945

The first study of colonial Taiwan in English, this volume brings together seventeen essays by leading scholars to construct a comprehensive cultural history of Taiwan under Japanese rule. Contributors from the United States, Japan, and Taiwan explore a number of topics through a variety of theor...

Pasta

Ranging from the imperial palaces of ancient China and the bakeries of fourteenth-century Genoa and Naples all the way to the restaurant kitchens of today, Pasta tells a story that will forever change the way you look at your next plate of vermicelli. Pasta has become a ubiquitous food, present i...

The red wind howls

A remarkable novel by one of Tibet’s foremost authors, The Red Wind Howls is a courageous and gripping portrayal of Tibetan suffering under Mao’s regime.

Dark ecology

Timothy Morton explores the foundations of the ecological crisis to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and rediscover playfulness and joy. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere and our belonging to a species in a sense ...

The mingjia and related texts

The Mingjia (School of Names) is a notional grouping of philosophers living between the sixth and third centuries BCE whose identifying feature was a concern with linguistic issues particularly involving the correct use of names. This is a comprehensive work on this school of thought.

Dis/consent

Sexual violence is prevalent in our society. We know this directly because of the courage survivors have shown in facing their perpetrators in courts, online and in the public eye. But society is hesitant, incapable or unwilling to hold offenders to account: they keep their jobs — or get promoted...

Inventing english

A masterful history of the English language from the age of Beowulf to the rap of Eminem.

Black utopia

Alex Zamalin offers a groundbreaking examination of African American visions of utopia and their counterutopian counterparts. Considering figures linked to racial separatism, postracialism, anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism, he argues that the black utopian tradition continues to ...

The political clinic

Carolyn Laubender examines cases from Britain and its former colonies to show that clinical psychoanalytic practice constitutes a productive site for novel political thought, theorization, and action.

Images on the move

This edited volume re-examines the historical, aesthetical, and theoretical relevance of image mobility. The contributors provide a materialist account of images on the move—ranging from wired photography to postcards to streaming media.

Evolution

Donald R. Prothero’s Evolution is an entertaining and rigorous history of the transitional forms and series found in the fossil record. In this second edition, Prothero describes new transitional fossils from various periods, and reframes creationism as a case study in denialism and pseudoscience.

Portal

Portal presents the diary of the owner of a small photography studio in Calcutta, maintained sporadically from 1994 to 1996, before his sudden unexplained disappearance. The diary is a fictional found archive that attempts to trace photographic ‘evidence’ and information about an elusive woman wh...

The capitalist unconscious

The unification of North and South Korea is globally volatile, but Hyun Ok Park argues capital has already unified Korea in a transnational form. The capitalist unconscious drives the current unification, imagining the capitalist integration of the Korean peninsula and the Korean diaspora as a ne...

A materialism for the masses

Blanton challenges the idea of Paulinism as a pop Platonic worldview or form of social control.

Crisis under critique

Didier Fassin, Axel Honneth, and an assembly of leading thinkers examine how people experience, interpret, and contribute to the making of and the response to critical situations. Featuring analysis from below as well as above, from the inside as well as the outside, Crisis Under Critique is a si...

The voice over

Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution.

Heinous crime

What circumstances lead someone to commit murder, rape, or acts of child molestation? Why does society have such a deep-seated wish for vengeance against perpetrators of heinous crimes? Can those found guilty of such crimes ever be rehabilitated? What are the long-term consequences of incarcerati...

Famine in north korea

In the mid-1990s, as many as one million North Koreans died in one of the worst famines of the twentieth century. The socialist food distribution system collapsed primarily because of a misguided push for self-reliance, but was compounded by the regime's failure to formulate a quick response-incl...

Filming history from below

In recent decades, a type of historical documentary has emerged that focuses on tightly circumscribed subjects, personal archives, and first-person perspectives. Efrén Cuevas categorizes these films as “microhistorical documentaries” and examines how they push cinema’s capacity as a producer of h...

On suicide bombing

Like many people in America and around the world, Talal Asad experienced the events of September 11, 2001, largely through the media and the emotional response of others. For many non-Muslims, "the suicide bomber" quickly became the icon of "an Islamic culture of death"—a conceptual leap that str...

Border wall aesthetics

Is there a deeper significance in the artistic encounter with border walls? Elisa Ganivet revisits the history of border wall aesthetics and compares more recent border-related works by artists including Joseph Beuys, Banksy, and Frida Kahlo.

The great east asian war and the birth of the korean nation

JaHyun Kim Haboush offers a compelling counternarrative to Western historiography, which ties Korea's idea of nation to the imported ideologies of modern colonialism. This book instead elevates the formative role of the conflicts that defined the second half of the Chosôn Dynasty.

Vital and valuable

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are a crucial element of higher education in the United States. In Vital and Valuable, two distinguished economists provide a groundbreaking empirical analysis of HBCUs and offer actionable policy recommendations.

The columbia guide to the holocaust

Offering a multidimensional approach to one of the most important episodes of the twentieth century, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust offers readers and researchers a general history of the Holocaust while delving into the core issues and debates in the study of the Holocaust today. Each of th...

Japan on american tv

Japan on American TV explores political, economic, and cultural issues underlying depictions of Japan on U.S. television comedies and the programs they inspired. The book examines six main categories of television portrayals representing different genres and comedic forms.

Wombs in labor

Surrogacy is India's new form of outsourcing, as couples from all over the world hire Indian women to bear their children for a fraction of the cost of surrogacy elsewhere with little to no government oversight or regulation. In the first detailed ethnography of India's surrogacy industry, Amrita...

Geopolitical imagination

In this timely book, Mikhail Suslov discusses contemporary Russian geopolitical culture and argues that a better knowledge of geopolitical concepts and fantasies is instrumental for understanding Russia’s policies. He analyzes concepts such as “Eurasianism,” “Holy Russia,” “Russian civilization,”...

Politics and cultural nativism in 1970s taiwan

In recent decades Taiwan has increasingly come to see itself as a modern nation-state. A-chin Hsiau traces the origins of Taiwanese national identity to the 1970s, when a surge of domestic dissent and youth activism transformed society, politics, and culture in ways that continue to be felt.

Assuming a body

We believe we know our bodies intimately—that their material reality is certain and that this certainty leads to an epistemological truth about sex, gender, and identity. By exploring and giving equal weight to transgendered subjectivities, however, Gayle Salamon upends these certainties. Conside...

Urban heritage planning in tehran and beyond

Solmaz Yadollahi maps the historical trajectory of conservation and urban heritage planning in Iran.

China's hegemony

Many have viewed the tribute system as China's tool for projecting its power and influence in East Asia, treating other actors as passive recipients of Chinese domination. China's Hegemony sheds new light on this system and shows that the international order of Asia's past was not as Sinocentric ...

Three steps on the ladder of writing

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of 'the strange science of writing.' In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for 'great' writing: The School of the Dea...

Beyond liberalism

This book is a Marxist critique of liberalism. Prabhat Patnaik brings together political philosophy and political economy to offer a renewed vision of socialism.

Dictating reality

Dictating Reality shows how states are battling to control and shape the news in order to entrench their power, evade scrutiny, and ensure that their political narratives are accepted.

Globalectics

A masterful writer working in many genres, Ngugi wa Thiong'o entered the East African literary scene in 1962 with the performance of his first major play, The Black Hermit, at the National Theatre in Uganda. In 1977 he was imprisoned after his most controversial work, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Mar...

The mahabharata

Pakistan at the crossroads

Top international scholars assess Pakistan’s politics and economics and the challenges faced by its civil and military regimes. Contributors examine the state’s handling of internal threats, tensions among political parties, law-enforcement reform, the rise of border conflicts, financial entangl...