QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion

We’re delighted to announce that the inaugural issue of QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion is now available! QTR is an open-access journal, published twice a year, dedicated to expanding both scholarly and public knowledge about the rich and complex connections between religion, gender, and sexuality.

Co-edited by Joseph Marchal and Melissa Wilcox, the journal features cutting-edge scholarship at the intersections of queer studies, trans studies, and religious studies, and aims to expand the depth and reach of what trans and queer studies in religion is becoming. QTR demonstrates the relevance of various modes of gender, sexuality, and embodiment wherever one might find religious people, practices, or ideas.

In the inaugural issue of QTR, contributors examine the current state of the queer and trans religious studies field. Through methodological reflections and leading-edge research, the authors cover topics that include queer world-making among Orthodox Jewish gays and lesbians in Israel; the religious lives of Latina and Black trans activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson; the importance of engaging trans and queer studies in religion during a time of anti-trans and anti-queer legislation; nonsecular transfeminism in Turkey; and the role of Jewishness in John Boswell’s historiography.
Vew the full Table of Contents.

“It’s true that some have used religious argumentation to target queer and trans people, and that many are traumatized by religious narratives. But it’s equally true that many queer and trans people are religious and find community and affirmation in religions.

There’s an assumption that to be religious is to be hostile to thinking about gender and sexuality and specifically thinking about queer and trans people. It’s just so clear that when we think about gender and sexuality and religion, the world needs better, more informed knowledge about those things.”

Dr. Joseph Marchal


In Conversation
The editors, along with contributors to issue 1:1, participated in a conversation hosted by the American Academy of Religion on May 14th. View the conversation in it’s entirety, here.


The Editors
Joseph Marchal (co-editor) is a professor of religious studies and women’s and gender studies at Ball State University. They are the author, editor, or co-editor of more than ten books, including Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures Before and After Paul’s Letters and Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies; and two forthcoming collections: on trans biblical interpretation, and the politics of respectability in Black, womanist, and queer approaches. They are also currently serving as chair of the Society of Biblical Literature’s first-ever committee for LGBTIQ+ scholars and scholarship. 

Melissa Wilcox (co-editor)  is a professor and Holstein Family and Community Chair of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where Dr. Wilcox organizes the annual UCR Conference on Queer and Trans Studies in Religion and the Holstein Dissertation Fellowship. A specialist in the study of gender, sexuality, and religion in the Global North/Global West, Dr. Wilcox has authored or edited seven books, including most recently Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody; Queer Religiosities: An Introduction to Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion; and Religion, the Body, and Sexuality. Dr. Wilcox’s current research is on religion and spirituality as sites of healing in queer, trans, and BIPOC leather and kink communities. 

Articles in QTR are published under a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-ND) and are open immediately upon publication. Authors are not charged any fees for publication and retain copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions in their articles. Readers may use the full text of articles as described in the license.

QTR would like to give special thanks to Duke University Press and the Henry Luce Foundation for making the publishing and production of this journal possible.


QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion is an open-access journal, published twice annually by Duke University Press. Print copies are available for purchase via POD.

Read online at Duke University Press
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Farewell to Gary Okihiro
An Asian man with greying hair and glasses smiles at the camera. He is wearing a flowered shirt and a beaded necklace. His left hand rests on his chin. A bookshelf and a plant are behind him.

We are sorry to learn of the death of Gary Y. Okihiro, a leading scholar in Asian American and ethnic studies, on May 20 in New Haven. He was 79 years old.

Okihiro was visiting professor of American studies and ethnicity, race, & migration at Yale University, where he taught a popular class on Third World studies, and professor emeritus of international and public affairs at Columbia University.  He received his PhD in African history from UCLA, and also taught at Humboldt State, Santa Clara, and Cornell.

Cover of Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation by Gary Y. Okihiro. Cover has a black background with a band of white cutting through the center of the cover. On the large band of white, the subtitle is featured in red lettering. The title is on the black background above the white band in white lettering, and the author name is below in yellow lettering.

Okihiro was the author of twelve books, including Third World Studies (2016), which presents the intellectual history of the core ideas, concepts, methods, and theories of Third World studies—an academic field first proposed in 1968—in order to provide tools for understanding power and ending oppression. George Lipsitz called the book “a generative and thought provoking-work by a sophisticated and advanced thinker.” This fall we are publishing a second edition of this important book, revised and expanded. In the new edition, Okihiro emphasizes the work of Third World intellectuals such as M. N. Roy, José Carlos Mariátegui, and Oliver Cromwell Cox, foregrounds the importance of Bandung and the Tricontinental, and adds discussions of eugenics, feminist epistemologies, and religion.

Okihiro was also a great friend of Duke University Press. He read manuscripts for us, offered endorsements for other scholars’ work, and also contributed an article to our journal Radical History Review.

Senior Executive Editor Ken Wissoker says, “Gary Okihiro was a warm and generous person and one of the most important architects of Asian American studies as a field. In everything from his invention of East of California to provide a network for Asian Americans teaching at PWIs in the rest of the country, to his own historical scholarship, and his intersectional and international approach, his work was crucial and will be long-remembered.”

Gary Okihiro’s family, friends, and colleagues are in our thoughts as we remember him and his scholarly contributions.

Buy recent special and thematic journal issues during the Spring Sale!
Blue banner reading 50% OFF Available Books & Journal Issues with Code: MAY50 May 17-24

Now is a great time to save on recent special issues from our many journals! Use coupon code MAY50 through May 24th to save 50% on all in-stock and pre-order books and journal issues.

Indigenous Feminisms Across the World, Part 1
An issue of: Meridians


Rooted in activism, creative works, and epistemic innovation within and across hemispheric Indigenous politics, economies, histories, and peoples, the articles in this special issue expose, challenge, and resist contemporary (i.e., settler) colonial realities. Keeping with Meridians‘ mission, the contributors explore forms and meanings of resistance and activist strategies within contemporary feminisms.
Issue Editor: Basuli Deb

The Shape of Trans Yet to Come
An issue of: TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly

Cover of TSQ issue 10:3-4


This special double issue celebrates the tenth anniversary of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly by reflecting on the journey from the inaugural issue, “Postposttranssexual,” to now. In this current issue, “The Shape of Trans Yet to Come,” contributors meditate on the current state of the trans studies field and speculate on the directions and conversations in our future.
Issue Editors: Abe Weil, Francisco J. Galarte, Jules Gill-Peterson

Polarization, Politics, and Health in the United States
An issue of: Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law


Contributors to this special issue examine how partisanship and polarization—which are at their highest in 150 years—shape health policy and politics in the United States. Highlighting examples such as the Affordable Care Act and the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors explore how political struggles over health care laws are fought on increasingly partisan laws; how partisan conflict reshapes a law’s implementation and post-enactment political trajectory; how polarization expands the scope of conflict to a wider set of institutions and issues; how partisanship shapes Americans’ health behaviors and, in some cases, impacts their health outcomes; and how partisanship can widen differences in state health policies.
Editor: Jonathan Oberlander

Reproductive Racial Capitalism
An issue of: History of the Present


Contributors to this special issue explore the histories and afterlives of hereditary racial slavery and the radical refusals of its logics, arguing that contemporary racial capitalism is always already reproductive. The authors demonstrate that reproductive labor and the experiences of conception, gestation, parturition, and childrearing are the heart and engine of both slave racial capitalism and contemporary forms of reproductive racial capitalism. At the same time, the authors assert, reproductive labor and experiences are also the sites from which reproductive racial capitalism and its exploitative conditions have been resisted, are currently being challenged, and might still be altogether refused.
Issue Editors: Jennifer L. Morgan, Alys Eve Weinbaum

Labor and Science
An issue of: Labor


This special issue covers the intimate connections between labor history and the history of science, from the “labor” in laboratory to the “science” in scientific management. Given the pressing scholarly and political questions these two historical subfields share, contributors seek to approach scientific knowledge production as a variety of work—one effectively analyzed through the methodologies and questions of labor history.
Issue Editors: Seth Rockman, Lissa Roberts, Alexandra Hui

the good life in late-socialist asia: aspirations, politics, and possibilities
An issue of: positions


Contributors to this special issue examine the notion of “the good life” and its influence on late socialist social life through the perspectives of communities living amid political economic transformation across China, Laos, and Vietnam. The essays feature ethnographic analyses of diverse social domains—from pop culture, religion, and consumption to environmental discourses and philanthropic activities—to reveal how the contradictions of late socialism limit the possibilities of living well together and the moral agency of people negotiating seemingly incommensurable value frameworks and social orders.
Issue Editors: Minh T. N. Nguyen, Phill Wilcox, Jake Lin

Indigenous Responses to Disease: Ethnohistory inspired by COVID
An issue of: Ethnohistory


Contributors to this special issue explore how Indigenous peoples of the Americas experienced and responded to disease across time. Inspired by the global struggle with COVID-19, the authors reveal the transhistorical dimension of disease and its impact on the Americas.
Editors: Denise I. Bossy, Robert C. Schwaller

Crisis Theory
An issue of: South Atlantic Quarterly


This special issue covers the challenges of theorizing the present through the notion of crisis. Analyzing different incidents of contemporary political upheaval to examine the various temporal forms constitutive of the present, the authors argue that temporalities of crisis must be understood not simply as punctual events but as longer and more complex durational rhythms exemplified by ongoing racial and colonial histories.
Issue Editor: Eugene Brennan

Visual Culture Issue
An issue of: New German Critique


In this special issue, contributors explore the interface of screens, photography, film, and visual documentation in popular culture. Topics covered include an early media genealogy of screen culture in early twentieth-century Weimar; Adorno’s rare reflections on architecture and the possibility of a collective “good life” in postwar Germany; documentation and its shortcomings in Austrian attempts to memorialize the war; the uncanny photos of abandoned Jewish homes under Nazism; the culture industry’s ongoing fascination with Nazism; and the poetics of screenwriting among German authors in the postwar era.
Editor: NGC Editorial Collective

Feminists Confront State Violence
An issue of: Radical History Review


Contributors to this special issue examine the state’s capacity to affirm life given its structural investments in violence, paying specific attention to how activists theorize and devise strategies to win redress from extant institutions. The authors document the ways feminists have negotiated a fundamental contradiction, asking how and why one makes demands for the equitable distribution of care, safety, and life in a state that inequitably distributes violence, immiseration, and death. Altogether, the essays in this issue provide an archival tool kit of Black, abolitionist, anarchist, anticolonial, and anticapitalist feminist strategies to radically remake worlds inside this one.
Issue Editors: Anne Gray Fischer, Sara Matthiesen, Marisol LeBrón

Entanglements of Coerced Labor and Colonial Science in the Atlantic World and Beyond | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for May 18, 2024, is “Entanglements of Coerced Labor and Colonial Science in the Atlantic World and Beyond,” a roundtable conversation with Zachary Dorner, Patrick Anthony, Jody Benjamin, Nicholas B. Miller, and Kate Luce Mulry. It was published in “Labor and Science,” a recent special issue of Labor: Studies in Working Class History (21:1), guest edited by Seth Rockman, Lissa Roberts, and Alexandra Hui.

Read this article for free through June 30, 2024.
Buy this special issue for 50% off during our Spring Sale. Use coupon code MAY50 through May 24.

Cover of Labor and Science, a special issue of Labor Studies in Working-Class History volume 21, issue 1. A purple toned vintage photograph of workers in a lab space attending materials on shelves. The journal's logo is in cyan blue in the top left, issue information is in white text at the bottom.

The five participants in this conversation have followed different paths to the intersection of labor history and the history of science but share common research questions regarding the relationship of coercion, colonialism, and scientific knowledge production. Collectively their scholarship is global in scope and offers the opportunity to think comparatively across a range of colonial regimes, populations, scientific disciplines, and modes of labor mobilization. Their inquiries emphasize the importance of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries to the structures of knowledge and power that continue to organize the modern world, while also suggesting that historians of more recent periods might gain theoretical insights from studies of a more distant past. This conversation began in Philadelphia in June 2022, unfolded diachronically in early 2023, and has been edited for clarity. An appendix contains citations for scholarship mentioned in the text.

The labor question—who will do the work and under what economic and political terms?—beckons today with renewed global urgency. As a site for both historical research and commentary, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History hopes to provide an intellectual scaffolding for understanding the roots of continuing social dilemmas.

The official journal for the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA).

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

Spring Sale Begins Today
Blue banner reading 50% OFF Available Books & Journal Issues with Code: MAY50 May 17-24

We’re excited to announce that our Spring Sale starts today. Save 50% on all in-stock and pre-order books and journal issues with coupon code MAY50 through May 24.

Our distributor in the UK, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific, Combined Academic Publishers, is pleased to extend the same 50% off discount to our customers there. Since overseas shipping can be slow and expensive, we highly encourage everyone in their territory to order directly from them using the same MAY50 coupon code.

Customers in Canada may order directly from the University of Toronto Press. UTP is our distribution partner in Canada and can offer significantly improved shipping times. No coupon code is needed to receive the 50% discount code.

Here’s the usual fine print: The discount does not apply to e-books, apparel, journals subscriptions, or society memberships. Regular shipping applies and all sales are final. We now accept pre-orders on books within 5 months of publication. Look for “Availability: Pre-Order” below the buy button and a release date on the product page to identify titles eligible for pre-publication order. You may use coupon code MAY50 on titles in pre-order status. You will receive those books when they are published. The discount may not be combined with any other offers.

If you have any difficulty ordering via our website, you can call our customer service department at 888-651-0122 during regular business hours (Monday-Friday, 8-5 Eastern Time).

This sale is one week only and ends at midnight Eastern time on Friday, May 24. Shop now!

Introducing our Fall 2024 Catalog

We are excited  to unveil our Fall 2024 catalog, which is full of fantastic new books and journal issues that will be published between July 2024 and January 2025. Many of these titles are available for preorder on our website now. Here are just a few highlights.

The cover image is from Six Paintings from Papunya: A Conversation by Fred R. Myers and Terry Smith. It is entitled The Trial and is by Charlie Tjaruru (Tarawa) Tjungurrayi. In the book anthropologist Myers and art critic Smith discuss six paintings by Indigenous Australian artists featured in a 2022 exhibition in New York.

Other art titles include A Sense of Arrival by Kevin Adonis Browne, which blends literary, visual, and material forms to present a narrative of Caribbean Blackness and Grime, Glitter, and Glass, in which Nikki A. Greene examines the sonic elements of Black art. In Heavyweight, Jordana Moore Saggese closely examines depictions of Black boxers at the turn of the twentieth century in order to reveal the racist stereotypes implicit in them that continue to structure ideas of Black men. Both The Politics of Collecting by Eunsong Kim and Paloma Checa-Gismero’s Biennial Boom contribute to the study of museums and exhibitions. And Your History with Me by Sarah Nuttall is a comprehensive look at the short films of South African artist Penny Siopis.

Duke basketball fans will be thrilled by New York Times-bestselling-author John Feinstein’s Five Banners: Inside the Duke Basketball Dynasty, which tells the inside history of Coach Mike Krzyzewski’s forty-two-year career at Duke and the five NCAA championships the team won during his tenure. Feinstein, a Duke alum and award-winning sportswriter, tells the story as no one else could.

When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader, showcases the work of the foundational figures in trans studies, from the 1990s to the present. It’s edited and introduced by McKenzie Wark. We are also publishing The Essential Jill Johnston Reader, edited by Clare Croft, which collects the work of the influential Village Voice dance columnist and lesbian activist, along with Croft’s study of Johnston, Jill Johnston in Motion. Other titles of LGBTQ interest include Blood Loss by Keiko Lane, which tells the story of her queer and AIDS activism with the Los Angeles chapters of Queer Nation and ACT UP; Indie Porn, by queer activist Zahra Stardust; Left Turns in Brown Study by Sandra Ruiz; Survival of a Perverse Nation by Tamar Shirinian; and a book of poetry by trans writer Miller Oberman, Impossible Things.

We’re offering several new titles in Latinx studies. In Learning to Lead, Jennifer R. Nájera explores the intersections of education and activism among undocumented college students, showing how they build political consciousness and learn to become leaders. In Excited Delirium, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines the emergence of a fabricated medical diagnosis used to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities in the United States. We’ve also got Fitness Fiesta! in which Petra R. Rivera-Rideau analyzes how Zumba uses Latin music and dance to create and sell a vision of Latinness that’s tropical, hypersexual, and party-loving, and Made in NuYoRico, Marisol Negrón’s cultural history of salsa music.

Other notable music titles include Bangtan Remixed, the first academic book on the K-pop band BTS; Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters by Masi Asare, which explores the explores the singing practice of Black women singers in US musical theatre in the twentieth century; and Fantasies of Nina Simone, in which Jordan Alexander Stein uses an archive of Simone’s performances, images, and writings to examine the space between our collective and individual fantasies about Simone the performer, Civil Rights activist, and icon, and her own fantasies about herself.

We’re excited to be collecting fifty years of writing by Puerto Rican Jewish feminist and radical thinker Aurora Levins Morales in her new book The Story of What Is Broken Is Whole. We also have a new addition to the Stuart Hall: Selected Writings series, Selected Writings on Visual Arts and Culture, edited by Gilane Tawadros. Another cultural studies pioneer, Lawrence Grossberg,  introduces the major ways of thinking that provide the backstory for contemporary Western theory in his new book, On the Way to Theory.

In feminist studies, check out Shadow of My Shadow by Jennifer Doyle, a searing account of her experience with harassment complaints on college campuses, showing how harassment profoundly reshaped her relationship to her work, writing, and ultimately to herself. In How We Write Now Jennifer C. Nash examines how Black feminists use beautiful writing to allow writers and readers to stay close to the field’s central object and preoccupation: loss. And in Open Admissions Danica Savonick traces the largely untold story of the teaching experience of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich at the City University of New York (CUNY) in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

There’s so much more! Read and download the catalog to find all of our new fall books and journal issues in a variety of disciplines.

A Tranifesto for the Dolls: Toward a Trans Femme of Color Theory | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for May 11, 2024, is “A Tranifesto for the Dolls: Toward a Trans Femme of Color Theory,” a roundtable with Erique Zhang, Julian Kevon Glover, Ava L. J. Kim, Tamsin Kimoto, Nathan Alexander Moore, æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil, and LaVele Ridley. The article appears in “The Shape of Trans Yet to Come,” a recent special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (10:3-4), edited by Abraham B. Weil, Francisco J. Galarte, and Jules Gill-Peterson.

Read this article for free through June 30, 2024.
Buy this special issue and use coupon code SAVE30 for a 30% discount.

On November 12, 2022, a group of trans women and femme scholars of color held a roundtable session titled “For the Dolls: Toward a Trans Femme of Color Theory” at the annual meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) in Minneapolis. Organized by Erique Zhang and featuring Julian Kevon Glover, Ava L. J. Kim, Tamsin Kimoto, Nathan Alexander Moore, æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil, and LaVelle Ridley, the roundtable sought to intervene into the growing field of trans studies to carve out a space that centers, rather than marginalizes, trans femme of color perspectives and experiences. The panelists represent various academic traditions and disciplinary backgrounds: Black studies, Asian American studies, literary theory, performance studies, philosophy, women and gender studies, queer and trans studies, and media and communication studies.

In this written dialogue, the authors build on the initial roundtable discussion to articulate what a trans femme of color theory might look like, one that positions trans femmes of color not only as objects of study but also as producers of knowledge and subjects central to the field of trans studies. While there are numerous overlaps, the authors do not theorize in unison or reach a consensus on the topics discussed. These divergences reveal the individual and collective intellectual strengths of the contributions without rendering the differences and distinctions to be threatening or antagonistic. Furthermore, the multiplicity of the authors’ theorizations reflects their ongoing commitment to tethering theory with praxis to reflect the boundless embodied knowledge that characterizes trans of color communities.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly offers a high-profile venue for innovative research and scholarship that contest the objectification, pathologization, and exoticization of transgender lives. It publishes interdisciplinary work that explores the diversity of gender, sex, sexuality, embodiment, and identity in ways that have not been adequately addressed by feminist and queer scholarship. Its mission is to foster a vigorous conversation among scholars, artists, activists, and others that examines how “transgender” comes into play as a category, a process, a social assemblage, an increasingly intelligible gender identity, an identifiable threat to gender normativity, and a rubric for understanding the variability and contingency of gender across time, space, and cultures.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

At the Vanguard of Vinyl | The Weekly Read
Cover of At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz by Darren Mueller. Cover text is in black and white over a photo of Duke Ellington, with a cigarette in his mouth, sitting at a piano. Billy Strayhorn stands next to him, looking down. A microphone hangs over them.

The Weekly Read is At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz by Darren Mueller. The book examines how musicians used the jazz industry’s adoption of the long-playing record to redefine the uneven power relations of the heavily segregated music business. Kevin Fellezs writes, “A profound reconception of jazz historiography, At the Vanguard of Vinyl forces us to confront our deepest-held notions about jazz through close attention to the musicians and record-industry personnel who shaped the ways in which we hear and appreciate the music.” Darren Mueller is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, and coeditor of Digital Sound Studies, also published by Duke University Press. Read this fascinating book now for free! This title is made open-access due to funding from the University of Rochester.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

New Books in May

It’s the end of the semester! Celebrate the start of summer with some of the great new titles we have coming out in May.

For twenty years, Terry Bisson published a regular “This Month in History” column in the science fiction magazine Locus. Tomorrowing collects these two decades of memorable events—four per month—each set in a totally different imaginary yet possible, inevitable yet avoidable future.

A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History by Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow is a guide for college and high school educators who are teaching Indian Ocean histories for the first time or who want to reinvigorate their courses.

In The Ethnographer’s Way, Kristin Peterson and Valerie Olson guide students and scholars through the process of turning an initial idea into an in-depth research project.

The contributors to Feminism against Cisness, edited by Emma Heaney, showcase the future of feminist historical, theoretical, and political thought freed from the conceptual strictures of cisness: the fallacy that assigned sex determines sexed experience.

Duke University: The First One Hundred Years by Carolyn Gerber presents a visual and narrative history of Duke University from its naming in 1924 to the celebration of its Centennial in 2024.

In Geologic Life, Kathryn Yusoff examines the history of geology as a discipline to theorize how race and racialization emerged from Western production of geologic knowledge.

The tenth edition of Developments in Russian Politics, edited by Henry E. Hale, Juliet Johnson, and Tomila V. Lankina, offers critical discussion of contemporary Russian politics and its fundamental principles and covers established topics such as executive leadership, parties and elections as well as newer issues of national identity, protest, and Russia and Greater Eurasia.

Cover of Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures edited by Margot Weiss. Cover features an abstract, colorful background composed of overlapping patterns, lines, and hues.

Consisting of fourteen original essays by both distinguished and new voices, Unsettling Queer Anthropology, edited by Margot Weiss, foregrounds both the brilliance of anthropological approaches to queer and trans life and the ways queer critique can reorient and transform anthropology.

In Apartheid Remains, Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. 

In Secularism as Misdirection, Nivedita Menon traces how the discourse of secularism hyper-visualizes women and religion as a means of obscuring forms of capitalist, racialized, caste, and anti-minoritarian violence throughout the global South.

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International Jazz Day

Happy International Jazz Day! To celebrate, we are highlighting a few of our new and recent titles on all things jazz.

In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. Mueller demonstrates that the LP emerges as a medium of sound and culture that maps onto the more expansive sonic terrain of Black modernity in the 1950s.

In Dreams in Double Time Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities. Bebop’s complexity and radicality, Leal contends, made it possible for those who grappled daily with state-sanctioned violence to challenge a racially supremacist, imperial nation, all while hearing and making the world anew.

In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. In The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra’s participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of Black Los Angeles. 

In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media, and in every context, individual intermediaries such as educators, producers, writers, and radio deejays imbued African American music with new meaning, value, and political power.

Cover of Ain't But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Stories by Willard Jenkins. Cover features pink spotted border on left with purple background to the right. Various sized rectangles across the center feature pictures of hands, someone writing, and instruments. Orange subtitle is bottom-right of images, white title is above, and word US in captial pink. Author's name is below-right images in yellow.

Despite the fact that most of jazz’s major innovators and performers have been African American, the overwhelming majority of jazz journalists, critics, and authors have been and continue to be white men. Ain’t But a Few of Us, edited by Willard Jenkins, presents over two dozen candid dialogues with black jazz critics and journalists ranging from Greg Tate, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Robin D. G. Kelley to Tammy Kernodle, Ron Welburn, and John Murph. 

Soundworks is Anthony Reed’s term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. In this work, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes. 

You can save 30% on these titles and any others that catch your eye with coupon code SAVE30.