LITERATURE AND

CULTURAL STUDIES
2019
 HI G HL I G H TS IN L ITE R ATURE & CULTURAL STUDI ES
Cathay
A Critical Edition
EZRA POUND
Edited by Timothy Billings, Introduction by
Christopher Bush, Foreword by Haun Saussy
“A miracle of poetic reincarnation, Ezra Pound’s Cathay
finally gets a comprehensive and thorough treatment in this
critical edition. A marvel of scholarship that will be required
reading for all students of poetry.”—Yunte Huang
Ezra Pound’s Cathay is a masterpiece of modernism, but also
of world literature. The muscular precision of images that
mark Pound’s translations helped established a modern style
for American literature, at the same time creating a thirst
for classical Chinese poetry in English. Yet Pound wrote it
without knowing any Chinese, relying instead on word-for-
word “cribs” from notebooks that reveal a remarkable story
of sustained cultural exchange.
By placing Pound’s final text alongside the Chinese originals
and manuscript traces of Pound’s Japanese and American
interlocutors, the fully annotated critical edition resituates
Cathay as a classic of world literature.
364 PAGES, 7 X 9
9780823281060, HARDBACK, $34.95, £26.99
DECEMBER 2018
The Unconstructable Earth
An Ecology of Separation
FRÉDÉRIC NEYRAT
Translated by Drew S. Burk
“A vitally important book that stakes out a new position in
the environmental humanities.”—Steven Shaviro
The Anthropocene announces a post-natural planet that can
be remade at will through the prowess of geoengineering.
With it, a new kind of power, geopower, takes the entire
Earth, in its social, biological and geophysical dimensions, as
an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality.
This shift has been aided, wittingly or not, by theorists of the
constructivist turn who have likewise called into question
the divide between nature and culture.
Against both camps, this book confronts the unconstruc-
table Earth, proposing an “ecology of separation” that ac-
knowledges the wild, subtractive capacity of nature. Neyrat
shows what it means to appreciate Earth as an unsubstitut-
able becoming that always escapes the hubris of those who
would remake and master it.
256 PAGES, 3 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823282579, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99
Meaning Systems
www.fo rd h am p re ss .co m
Deep Time, Dark Times
On Being Geologically Human
DAVID WOOD
“A timely and transformative challenge to confront our
responsibilities in the face of climate disaster and the An-
thropocene, Deep Time, Dark Times draws insights from
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida to inform our emerging
geological consciousness. Playful while serious, sophisti-
cated yet disarmingly genuine, Wood leads us through the
conceptual brambles of our planetary plight and raises the
stakes for what it means to think philosophically in our time.
His lessons on thinking and living geohistorically will be es-
sential reading for environmental humanists, philosophers,
and anyone interested in avoiding the worst of our possible
futures.”—Ted Toadvine, University of Oregon
176 PAGES
9780823281350, PAPERBACK, $19.95, £14.99
Thinking Out Loud
DECEMBER 2018
Reoccupy Earth: Notes toward an Other Beginning
DAVID WOOD
Habit rules our lives. And yet climate change and the cata-
strophic future it portends, makes it clear that we cannot go
on like this.
Philosophy is about emancipation—from illusions, myths,
and oppression. In Reoccupy Earth, the noted philosopher
David Wood shows how an approach to philosophy attuned
to our ecological existence can suspend the taken-for-grant-
ed and open up alternative forms of earthly dwelling. Shar-
ing the earth, as we do, raises fundamental questions about
space and time, place and history, territory and embodi-
ment—questions that philosophy cannot directly answer but
can help us to frame and to work out for ourselves.
Bringing an uncommon lucidity, directness, and even prac-
ticality to sophisticated philosophical questions, Wood plots
experiential pathways that disrupt our habitual existence
and challenge our everyday complacency.
240 PAGES
9780823283538, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99
Groundworks: Ecological Issues in Philosophy and Theology
APRIL 2019
Killing Times
The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty
DAVID WILLS
“Killing Times makes an enormous contribution to under-
standing the logic of capital punishment in its disparate
practices, laws, and customs. For the first time we see that
capital punishment is not only about retribution through
state-imposed death, but it is also and above all about the
absolute mastery of time through the creation of a kind of
negative prosthesis—technology—that impossibly supple-
ments and completes the human by subtracting and destroy-
ing it. This is scholarship and theoretical analysis at the high-
est level: thorough, wide-ranging, and convincing.”—Allan
Stoekl, Pennsylvania State University
288 PAGES
9780823283491, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99
MARCH 2019
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 HI G HL I G H TS IN L ITE R ATURE & CULTURAL STUDI ES
Queer as Camp
Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality
Edited by Kenneth B. Kidd and Derritt Mason
To camp means to occupy a place and/or time provisionally
or under special circumstances. To camp can also mean to
queer. And for many children and young adults, summer
camp is a formative experience mixed with homosocial
structure and homoerotic longing. In Queer as Camp, edi-
tors Kenneth B. Kidd and Derritt Mason curate a collection
of essays and critical memoirs exploring the intersections
of “queer” and “camp,” focusing especially on camp as an
alternative and potentially nonnormative place and/or time.
Highly interdisciplinary in scope, Queer as Camp reflects on
camp and Camp with candor, insight, and often humor.
256 PAGES, 6 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823283606, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99
MAY 2019
Messy Eating
Conversations on Animals as Food
Samantha King, R. Scott Carey, Isabel Macquarie,
Victoria Millious, and Elaine Power, Editors
Literature on the ethics and politics of food and that on
animal-human relationships have infrequently converged.
Representing an initial step towards bridging this divide,
Messy Eating features interviews with thirteen prominent
and emerging scholars about the connections between their
academic work and their approach to consuming animals as
food. The collection explores how authors working across
a range of perspectives—postcolonial, Indigenous, Black,
queer, trans, feminist, disability, poststructuralist, posthu-
manist, and multispecies—weave their theoretical and po-
litical orientations with daily, intimate, and visceral practices
of food consumption, preparation, and ingestion.
288 PAGES
9780823283651, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99
JUNE 2019
Reading Sideways
The Queer Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction
DANA SEITLER
Reading Sideways explores the pivotal role that various art
forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation
to the politics of gender and sexuality in works of modern
American literature. It tracks the crosswise circulation of
aesthetic ideas in fiction and argues that at stake in the aes-
thetic turn of these works was not only the theorization of
aesthetic experience, but also an engagement with political
arguments about available modes of sociability and sexual
expression. To track these engagements, author Dana Seitler
performs a method she calls “lateral reading,” a mode of
interpretation that moves horizontally through various
historical entanglements and across the fields of the arts to
make sense of—and see in a new light—their connections,
challenges, and productive frictions.
208 PAGES, 18, BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
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JULY 2019
www.fo rd h am p re ss .co m
Decolonial Love
Salvation in Colonial Modernity
JOSEPH DREXLER-DREIS
Bringing together theologies of liberation and decolonial
thought, Decolonial Love interrogates colonial frameworks
that shape Christian thought and legitimize structures of
oppression and violence within Western modernity. In
response to the historical situation of colonial modernity,
the book offers a decolonial mode of theological reflection
and names a historical instance of salvation that stands in
conflict with Western modernity.
Decolonial Love offers to theologians a foothold within the
modern/colonial context from which to commit to the
sacred and, from a historical encounter with the divine
mystery, face up to and take responsibility for the legacies
of colonial domination and violence within a struggle to
transform reality.
224 PAGES
9780823281879, PAPERBACK, $25.00, £18.99
DECEMBER 2018
The Supermarket of the Visible
Toward a General Economy of Images
PETER SZENDY
Translated by Jan Plug
“A gifted writer with real pedagogical talent, Szendy knows
just the appropriate dosage of theoretical fine points (which
he makes with surgical precision) and shifts register as
needed to quite accessible discussions of popular films and
television.”—Suzanne Guerlac
Images saturate our world now more than ever, constituting
the visibility in which we live. The Supermarket of the Vis-
ible analyzes this space and the icons that populate it as the
culmination of a history of the circulation and general com-
modification of images and gazes. From the first elevators
and escalators, to cinema, all the way down to contemporary
eye-tracking techniques that monitor the slightest saccades
of our eyes, Szendy offers an entirely novel theory of the
intersection of the image and economics.
160 PAGES, 55 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823283576, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99
Thinking Out Loud
APRIL 2019
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 RACE & ETHNIC STUDIES
Mapping Memory
Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas
KAITLIN M. MURPHY
In Mapping Memory, Kaitlin M. Murphy investigates the use
of memory as a means of contemporary sociopolitical inter-
vention. Mapping Memory focuses specifically on visual case
studies, including documentary film, photography, perfor-
mance, new media, and physical places of memory, from sites
ranging from the Southern Cone to Central America and the
US-Mexico borderlands. Murphy develops new frameworks
for analyzing how visual culture performs as an embodied
agent of memory and witnessing, arguing that visuality is
inherently performative. By analyzing the performative ele-
ments, or strategies, of visual texts – such as embodiment, re-
enactment, haunting, and the performance of material objects
and places, Murphy elucidates how memory is both anchored
in and extracted from specific bodies, objects, and places.
208 PAGES, 13 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823282531, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99
Alegal
Biopolitics and the Unintelligibility of Okinawan Life
ANNMARIA M. SHIMABUKU
“Through an analytic of ‘mixed race,’ Shimabuku offers an
incisive indictment of Japan’s middle-class ideology of het-
eronormativity and racial purity. Provocatively illuminating
the recalcitrant possibilities of Okinawan politics and life-
forms beyond law and the State, Alegal must be engaged by
everyone concerned with post-1945 Okinawa and fascism in
our time.”—Lisa Yoneyama, University of Toronto
“Shimabuku examines the complex relationship between the
United States and Japan as it played out through the racial-
ized and gendered bodies of Okinawa. While Okinawa may
seem at the periphery of two imperial powers, Shimabuku
puts it dead center in a brilliant and sharp-eyed account of
how zones of alegality are also zones of origin for the law
itself.“—James Martel, San Francisco State University
224 PAGES
9780823282654, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99
DECEMBER 2018
The Tongue-Tied Imagination
Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal
TOBIAS WARNER
Should a writer work in a former colonial language or in a
vernacular? The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the
language question came to matter. Focusing on Senegal,
Warner draws on extensive archival research and an under-
studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both French
and Wolof, as well as educational projects and popular peri-
odicals. In tracing the politics of language from colonization
through independence to the era of neoliberal development,
Warner reveals language debates as a site from which to
rethink the terms of world literature and chart a renewed
practice of literary comparison.
320 PAGES, 12 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823284290, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99
MARCH 2019
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Practicing Caste
On Touching and Not Touching
ANIKET JAAWARE
Foreword by Anupama Rao
“A remarkable exercise in showing what is possible when we
attend to caste as if we were confronting it for the first time.
. . . In posing caste as a problem for ethics, Jaaware returns
to that fundamental question of what it means to be-with-
others in a startlingly new manner.”—Anupama Rao, from
the Foreword
Practicing Caste attempts a fundamental break from the
historicist and sociological tradition of caste studies. Engag-
ing with the resources phenomenology, structuralism, and
poststructuralism offer to our thinking of the body, Jaaware
helps to illuminate the ethical relations that caste entails,
especially around its injunctions concerning touching. The
resulting insights offer new ways of thinking about sociality
that are pertinent not only to India but also to thinking the
common on a planetary basis.
256 PAGES
9780823282258, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99
Commonalities
DECEMBER 2018
Under Representation
The Racial Regime of Aesthetics
DAVID LLOYD
“The rigorous care with which David Lloyd examines and
challenges the entanglement of race, representation and the
aesthetic is irresistible and indispensable. Under Represen-
tation is a major, and singular, achievement.”—Fred Moten,
New York University
Under Representation shows how the founding texts of
aesthetic philosophy ground the racial order of the modern
world in our concepts of universality, freedom, and human-
ity. Late Enlightenment discourse on aesthetic experience
proposes a decisive account of the conditions of possibil-
ity for universal human subjecthood. The aesthetic forges a
powerful “racial regime of representation” whose genealogy
runs from Enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Schiller to
late Modernist critics like Adorno and Benjamin.
Both a genealogy and an account of our present, Under Rep-
resentation ultimately helps show how a political reading of
aesthetics can help us build a racial politics adequate for the
problems we face today, one that stakes claims more radical
than multicultural demands for representation.
240 PAGES
9780823282371, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99
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 POETRY & POETICS
Critical Rhythm
The Poetics of a Literary Life Form
Ben Glaser and Jonathan Culler, Editors
“This volume, with incandescent and defamiliarizing
rhythms of its own, takes up rhythm as the central, ever-
fugitive term in debates over sound and sense, the visible
and the audible, the history of prosodic discourses, and
methodological approaches to reading and performance.”—
Max Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania
Rhythm constitutes an untapped resource for understand-
ing poetry, making legible a range of ways poetry affects
us. Considering rhythm’s rich but also problematic roots in
nineteenth-century notions of primitive, oral, communal,
and sometimes racialized poetics, this book expands the
terms through which we understand poetry.
Contributors: Derek Attridge, Tom Cable, Jonathan Culler, Natalie
Gerber, Ben Glaser, Virginia Jackson, Simon Jarvis, Ewan Jones,
Erin Kappeler, Meredith Martin, David Nowell Smith, Yopie Prins,
Haun Saussy
312 PAGES, 9 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823282036, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99
Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics
JANUARY 2019
Midden
JULIA BOUWSMA
Foreword by Afaa M. Weaver
“Vividly reimagined and gorgeously rendered, Julia Bouws-
ma’s Midden gives voice to the citizens of Malaga Island, off
the coast of Maine, who early in the twentieth century were
removed from their homes, their lives destroyed. Bouwsma
writes, ‘I tried to write the island / to life.’ In this devastating
and beautiful collection, she does just that, as she expands
the field of documentary poetics. These poems bear wit-
ness to the tragedy of Malaga Island and demand that we
remember our country’s violence to people and land. Julia
Bouwsma’s voice is eloquent and urgent.”—Nicole Cooley
96 PAGES, 8 X 9, 4 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823280988, PAPERBACK, $22.00, £16.99
Poets Out Loud
Lives of the Dead Poets
Keats, Shelley, Coleridge
KAREN SWANN
“This is one of the most exquisitely-crafted books I have ever
had the privilege of reading. Swann sets out to complicate
the idea that biographical fascination is simply retrograde,
sentimental, canonizing, or ideological. With the assurance
of a deeply felt calling, this book addresses the largest ques-
tions that we face as readers of literature.”—Marc Redfield,
Brown University
“Swann is possessed of a prose style that is both clear and,
at times, breath-takingly surprising. A beautifully conceived,
organized, and written study.”—Adela Pinch, University of
Michigan
192 PAGES
9780823284177, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99
Lit Z
APRIL 2019
Forms of a World
Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization
WALT HUNTER
“In a field dominated by the novel, we need smart critics like
Walt Hunter to reveal poetry’s very different engagements
with politics and economics. From territorial dispossession
to environmental devastation, Hunter shows the agonies
of globalization prompting subtle and inventive poetic re-
sponses.”—Caroline Levine, Cornell University
“This smart, engaging, and timely book sets rethinks peri-
odization according to the rhythms of capitalism. Finely
written, with many moments of startling beauty and poetic
nuance, Forms of a World offers a crucial reassessment of
poetry’s importance today.”—Christopher Nealon, Johns
Hopkins University
192 PAGES
9780823282210, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99
JANUARY 2019

Xamissa
HENK ROSSOUW
“Voices in the singular and plural compel Henk Rossouw’s
Xamissa with such ‘ecstatic stride’ as to match the inten-
sity of human spectacle advancing the procession of Cape
Town’s history. The collective effect of alternating scenes and
incantations reflect an ethical imperative of uncertainty—
destabilizing shifts of mood and matter; of the external
and internal viewpoint. With formal ambition and acoustic
scales of mind, Rossouw confronts a past haunted by racial
brutality, even as it imagines an eventual social unity and the
durational ‘anyway’ that poetry’s historical imagination is
able to contain.”—Roberto Tejada
136 PAGES, 8 X 9, 6 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823281107, PAPERBACK, $24.00, £17.99
Poets Out Loud

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 LITERARY CRITICISM
The Two Cultures of English
Literature, Composition, and the Moment of Rhetoric
JASON MAXWELL
“The Two Cultures of English takes a new look at the rise
of theory in literary studies. Despite myriad claims about
breaking down boundaries, theory also enforced some,
generally taking the mantle of pure thought in contrast to
the practical work of composition. Maxwell focuses on how
both met on the terrain of rhetoric. It is one of the first stud-
ies that puts the two together in a sustained way, versed in
both literary and composition scholarship. Reassessing the
recent past, The Two Cultures is an excellent addition to
new histories of criticism and theory.”—Jeffrey J. Williams,
author of How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Cul-
ture, and the University
256 PAGES
9780823282456, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99
JANUARY 2019
Maurice Blanchot
A Critical Biography
CHRISTOPHE BIDENT
Translated by John McKeane
“An essential addition to the library of anyone seriously
interested in Maurice Blanchot and the evolutions of literary
and philosophical thinking in twentieth-century France.”
—Lydia Davis
“An event of the first magnitude, illuminating the life and
writing of perhaps the most compelling, unsettling, and
wondrously enigmatic author of the last century.”—Tom
Conley, Harvard University
Maurice Blanchot has long inspired writers, artists, and
philosophers with some of the most incisive statements of
what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the
twentieth century. Bident’s magisterial biography provides
the first full-length account of Blanchot’s itinerary, drawing
on unpublished letters and interviews with the writer’s close
friends, while also providing a sophisticated genealogy of his
thought.
632 PAGES
9780823281756, PAPERBACK, $40.00, £32.00
www.fo rd h am p re ss .co m
Literature and the Remains
of the Death Penalty
PEGGY KAMUF
“A capstone book. Kamuf ’s scholarship is careful and hon-
est, and the book is a delight to read.”—Diane Rubenstein,
Cornell University
“This is a superb book, with rich readings of essential texts
that offer a fresh start to an urgent but often ignored ques-
tion of justice. Without moralizing, Kamuf takes a strong
position against the death penalty, directly confronting
the actual legal, political, ethical, social, and philosophical
questions it raises. In one blow, she overhauls the debate
and makes us look at what really matters in it. The book will
find a wide, hungry, and receptive audience across a range of
fields and disciplines.”—Thomas Keenan, Bard College
176 PAGES
9780823282296, PAPERBACK, $25.00, £18.99
Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory
Death Now
Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1944
MAURICE BLANCHOT
Translated by Michael Holland
“The time has come to attend to Blanchot’s early literary
and political journalism (his missteps included) which,
surprisingly, the first generation of his postwar admirers
barely noteds. It reminds us that this major theoretician of
literary modernity has never been associated with academia:
the newspaper was the site of his first critical exercise. Death
Now provides a rich overview of the French literary atmo-
sphere during the fateful final period of the Occupation. It
is also unmistakably haunted by the ghost of a Blanchot to
come.”—Denis Hollier, New York University
176 PAGES
9780823281794, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99
Ecstasy in the Classroom
Trance, Self, and the Academic Profession
in Medieval Paris
AYELET EVEN-EZRA
Can ecstatic experiences be studied with the academic in-
struments of rational investigation? What kinds of religious
illumination are experienced by academically minded peo-
ple? And what is the specific nature of the knowledge of God
that university theologians of the Middle Ages enjoyed com-
pared with other modes of knowing God, such as rapture,
prophecy, the beatific vision, or simple faith? Ecstasy in the
Classroom explores the interface between academic theology
and ecstatic experience in the first half of the thirteenth cen-
tury, formative years in the history of the University of Paris,
medieval Europe’s “fountain of knowledge.”
312 PAGES
9780823281916, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99
Fordham Series in Medieval Studies
DECEMBER 2018
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 LITERARY CRITICISM
Systems of Life: Biopolitics, Economics, and
Literature on the Cusp of Modernity
Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag, Editors
Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emer-
gence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to
the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among
literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences
of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here
reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable,
and human life, among other biological registers, had an im-
pact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and
economics as a joint enterprise. The volume’s contributors
consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct,
semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations re-
quired inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual
mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary interven-
tion, or aesthetic representation.
280 PAGES, 22 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
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Forms of Living
Poetics of History
Rousseau and the Theater of Originary Mimesis
PHILIPPE LACOUE-LABARTHE
Translated by Jeff Fort
“Now available in Jeff Fort’s impeccable translation, The Poet-
ics of History is the culmination of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s
lifetime work on the question of mimesis in Rousseau—a
question of crucial importance that had never before been
posed or answered in this form. Identifying in Rousseau an
onto-technology so radical that it challenges his supposed anti-
theatricality, The Poetics of History redefines both poetics and
history even as it offers a new way of understanding the French
reception of Heidegger.”—Andrew Parker, Rutgers University
176 PAGES, 5 X 7 ½
9780823282333, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99
JANUARY 2019
Ecological Form
System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire
Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer, Editors
Afterword by Karen Pinkus
Ecological Form brings together leading voices in nineteenth
century ecocriticism to suture the lingering divide between
postcolonial and ecocritical approaches. Together, these
essays show how Victorian thinkers used aesthetic form to
engage problems of system, interconnection, and disposses-
sion that remain our own. The authors reconsider Victorian
literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe;
coordinate “natural” questions with sociopolitical ones; and
underscore the category of form as a means for generating
environmental—and therefore political—knowledge. Eco-
logical Form demonstrates how nineteenth-century thinkers
conceptualized the circuits of extraction and violence link-
ing Britain to its global network. Yet the book’s most press-
ing argument is that this past thought can be a resource for
reimagining the present.
256 PAGES, 6 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
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DECEMBER 2018
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Exterranean
Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene
PHILLIP JOHN USHER
“For anyone who might be suffering from Anthropocene
fatigue, this is a book to jolt you from your slumbers. What
happens to the globe when we shift attention from the out-
ward projection of emissions to extraction? The Earth we
thought we knew, and were already mourning, takes on a
stunning new critical light.”—Claire Colebrook, Pennsylva-
nia State University
Exterranean concerns the extraction of stuff from the Earth.
Through a rich archive of nonmodern texts and images
from across Europe, Usher offers a bracing riposte to several
critical trends in ecological thought. Shifting emphasis from
emission to extraction, the book reorients our perspective
away from Earthrise-like globes and shows what is gained by
opening the planet to depths within.
240 PAGES, 34 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823284214, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99
Meaning Systems
MARCH 2019
Novel Shocks
Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism
MYKA TUCKER-ABRAMSON
Throughout the 1950s, a coalition of developers, politicians,
and planners bulldozed vast areas of land deemed “slums”
or “blighted” to make way for freeways, public and private
housing projects, cultural centers, and skyscrapers. While
the program was national, New York was ground zero, and
the demolition and monumental reconstruction of the city
created a distinctive urban sensorium, rooted in the new
segregated landscapes of prosperous white private space and
poor black public space.
Novel Shocks situates these landscapes at the center of the
mid-century novel, arguing that James Baldwin, Ralph El-
lison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs,
Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller all registered these new ur-
ban spaces as traumatic “shocks” that required new aesthetic
forms.
208 PAGES
9780823282692, PAPERBACK, $25.00, £18.99
DECEMBER 2018
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 PHILOSOPHY & THEORY
Levels of Organic Life and the Human
An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology
HELMUTH PLESSNER
Translated by Millay Hyatt
Introduction by J. M. Bernstein
“This twentieth-century work was a pioneering effort to
articulate an alternative to mechanistic-reductive accounts
of life. Neglected for too long, it is now available to a wider
audience in a new climate, where it will have its full impact.”
—Charles Taylor, Author of A Secular Age
This key work by a titan of modern thought draws on phe-
nomenological, biological, and social scientific sources in
a systematic account of nature, life, and human existence,
including social existence.
Initially obscured by the ascent of Heidegger and by the
author’s persecution by the Nazis, Plessner’s vision has once
again become appreciated by scholars concerned with ani-
mality, human dignity, materialism, and the philosophy of
cognition, technology, and nature. A powerful and sophisti-
cated account of embodiment, the Levels helps us approach
philosophy and social theory together with science, without
reducing the former to the latter.
448 PAGES, 4 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823283989, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99
Forms of Living
JULY 2019
Thinking with Adorno:The Uncoercive Gaze
GERHARD RICHTER
“The chapters of this book are among the finest I have ever read
on Adorno.”—Daniel Purdy, Pennsylvania State University
What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from
how he says it, and what he thinks cannot be isolated from
how he thinks it. Richter’s book teaches us to think with
Adorno—both alongside him and in relation to his diverse
contexts and constellations, from aesthetic theory to politi-
cal critique, from the problem of judgment to the question of
how to lead a right life within a wrong one.
240 PAGES
9780823284023, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99
Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory
JULY 2019
The Mathematical Imagination
On the Origins and Promise of Critical Theory
MATTHEW HANDELMAN
“Against the familiar lament that the inappropriate ap-
plication of mathematical reasoning abets social reifica-
tion and instrumental rationality, Matthew Handelman
rescues forgotten attempts to argue otherwise. This search
for a ‘negative mathematics’ that has critical potential has
foreshadowed ways in which the yawning gap between the
humanities and STEM fields may be overcome in our digital
age.”—Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley
256 PAGES, 6 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823283828, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99
MARCH 2019
www.fo rd h am p re ss .co m
The Reproduction of Life Death
Derrida’s La vie la mort
DAWNE MCCANCE
“This is a superbly researched, written, and argued book
on two of the most important though neglected aspects of
Derrida’s work: his reading of biology and his closely related
work on academic institutions. It is a work that anyone who
is serious about Derrida will want to read and will have to
take into account.”—Michael Naas, DePaul University
Based on archival translations of a soon-to-be-published semi-
nar by Jacques Derrida, The Reproduction of Life Death offers an
unprecedented study of Derrida’s engagement with molecular
biology and genetics. McCance shows how Derrida ties bio-
logical accounts of reproduction to the reproductive program of
teaching, challenging an auto-reproductive notion of pedagogy,
while also reinterpreting the work of psychoanalysis.
224 PAGES, 4 BLACK AND WHITE, ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823283903, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99
JULY 2019
For the Love of Psychoanalysis
The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida
ELIZABETH ROTTENBERG
“This brilliant, pathbreaking, witty, and lucidly argued book
will undoubtedly become a major point of reference—if not
the major point of reference—for anyone interested in psy-
choanalysis and deconstruction for years to come”—Elissa
Marder, Emory University
“A tour de force of critical writing. Rottenberg has a unique,
lively, and witty philosophical voice. She stands out as one
of the most interesting scholars working at the intersection
of deconstruction and psychoanalysis”—Rebecca Comay,
University of Toronto
For the Love of Psychoanalysis is a book about what exceeds
or resists calculation—in life and in death. Rottenberg ex-
amines what emerges from the difference between psycho-
analysis and philosophy.
272 PAGES
9780823284108, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99
JUNE 2019
Murderous Consent
On the Accommodation of Violent Death
MARC CRÉPON
Translated by Michael Loriaux, and Jacob Levi
Foreword by James Martel
“Murderous Consent is a bold and principled argument against
the strategic rationality that governs violence in our times.
Crépon asks us to consider the myriad ways that consent and
complicity sustain murderous acts and policies, arguing that
we cannot understand violence without taking into account the
consent to violence. This book provocatively helps us to rethink
settled forms of ethical reasoning that directly or indirectly
license violence and lets us imagine a world in which complicit
realism gives way to much needed affirmation of non-violence.
An all too timely meeting of ethics and politics.”—Judith Butler
224 PAGES
9780823283743, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99
Perspectives in Continental Philosophy
MAY 2019
8 L I T E R AT U R E & C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 2 0 1 9
 L AW
Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places
Justice Beyond and Between
Marianne Constable, Leti Volpp,
and Bryan Wagner, Editors
“This extraordinary collection is a veritable lost and found
of law’s traces. Moving across disciplines, it offers rich and
surprising refractions of law’s ephemera: What do we learn
about the opacity of governance when we look for justice be-
yond its expected ‘place’ in the confines of textual or rhetori-
cal jurisprudence? What is revealed when the legal inhabits
the sacred, informs the literary, performs geography, polices
time, seeps through the agora, regenerates itself within bod-
ies? This indispensable book excavates how seemingly
robust juridical processes may teeter in concert with more
fragile norms for mobility, status, and human affinity.”—Pa-
tricia J. Williams, Columbia Law School
For many, the right place to look for law is in constitutions,
statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the
“wrong places”—sites and spaces where no formal law appears.
Contributors: Kathryn Abrams, Daniel Boyarin, Wendy Brown,
Marianne Constable, Samera Esmeir, Daniel Fisher, Sara Ludin,
Saba Mahmood, Rebecca McLennan, Ramona Naddaff, Beth Pi-
atote, Sarah Song, Christopher Tomlins, Leti Volpp, Bryan Wagner
272 PAGES, 28 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823283705, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99
Berkeley Forum in the Humanities
MARCH 2019
Administering Interpretation
Derrida, Agamben, and the Political Theology of Law
Peter Goodrich and Michel Rosenfeld, Editors
“Peter Goodrich and Michel Rosenfeld underline to impor-
tant effect the woeful marginality of critical jurisprudence
and critical legal interpretation in the contemporary U.S.
legal academy, in contrast to transoceanic points of compari-
son. The collection itself is an effective advertisement for
the absurdity of that marginality.”—Christopher Tomlins,
University of California, Berkeley, School of Law
Contributors: Giovanna Borradori, Marinos Diamantides, Allen
Feldman, Stanley Fish, Pierre Legrand, Bernadette Meyler, Michel
Rosenfeld, Bernhard Schlink, Jeanne Schroeder, Laurent de Sut-
ter, Katrin Trüstedt, Marco Wan
352 PAGES, 15 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823283781, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99
Just Ideas
MAY 2019
www.fo rd h am p re ss .co m
MEDIA STUDIES
Figuring Violence
Affective Investments in Perpetual War
REBECCA A. ADELMAN
“Figuring Violence is a challenging, highly original contribu-
tion to critical research on affect and the visual culture of
militarization. Adelman vividly analyses the people and non-
human animals around whom militarized affect gets assem-
bled in contemporary US culture, scaling the fine granularities
of militarized feeling and the larger imaginaries of war-time
mediation, and their devastating consequences. This book
calls us in and challenges us to take on the struggle against
militarized violence and its powerful structures of feeling. It
is a critical read for anyone willing to ‘stay with the trouble’ of
doing the emotional and political work that de-militarization
requires of us.”—Carrie Rentschler, McGill University
352 PAGES, 19 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823281688, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99
The Blind Man
A Phantasmography
ROBERT DESJARLAIS
The Blind Man: A Phantasmography examines the compli-
cated forces of perception, imagination, and phantasms of
encounter in the contemporary world. In considering pho-
tographs he took while he was traveling in France, Desjarlais
reflects on a few pictures that show the features of a man,
apparently blind, who begs for money at a religious site in
Paris. Composed of an intricate weave of text and image, The
Blind Man attends to pressing issues in contemporary life:
the fraught dimensions of photographic capture; encounters
with others and alterity; the politics of looking; media im-
ages of violence and abjection; and the nature of fantasy and
imaginative construal.
232 PAGES, 64 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS,
9780823281114, PAPERBACK, $29.95, £22.99
Thinking from Elsewhere
Allied Encounters
The Gendered Redemption of World War II Italy
MARISA ESCOLAR
Allied Encounters uniquely explores Anglo-American and
Italian literary, cinematic and military representations
of World War II Italy in order to trace, critique and move
beyond the gendered paradigm of redemption that has
conditioned understandings of the Allied-Italian encounter.
The arrival of the Allies’ global forces in an Italy torn by civil
war brought together populations that had long mytholo-
gized one another, yet “liberation” did not prove to be the
happy ending touted by official rhetoric. Instead of a ‘hon-
eymoon,’ the Allied-Italian encounter in Naples and Rome
appeared to be a lurid affair, where the black market reigned
and prostitution was the norm.
Informed by the historical context as well as their respec-
tive traditions, these texts become more than mirrors of the
encounter or generic allegories.
248 PAGES, 16 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823284498, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99
World War II: The Global, Human, and Ethical Dimension
JULY 2019
9 L I T E R AT U R E & C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 2 0 1 9
 JEWISH STUDIES
Jewish Studies as Counterlife
A Report to the Academy
ADAM ZACHARY NEWTON
“Jewish Studies needs Adam Zachary Newton’s book. New-
ton enacts interdisciplinarity as a powerful form of critique
for and in Jewish Studies, rather than the conservative mode
of appropriation-as-retrenchment that it has so frequently
become in the post-Theory academy.”—Benjamin Schreier,
Pennsylvania State University
Jewish Studies offers a unique perspective on the academic
humanities because it has spanned disciplinary locations
and configurations, from nineteenth-century philology to
the emancipatory politics of the Enlightenment, from post-
war ethnic pluralism to interdisciplinary cultural studies.
Newton harnesses the possibilities offered this evolving col-
lection of forces in order to open, refashion, and exemplify
possibilities for a humanities to come.
256 PAGES, 1 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATION
9780823283941, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99
JUNE 2019
Jews and the Ends of Theory
Shai Ginsburg, Martin Land, and
Jonathan Boyarin, Editors
“A powerful collection that opens new vistas in our approach
to social, cultural, and literary critical theories.”—Seyla Ben-
habib, Yale University
Theory has often been coded as “Jewish”—not merely be-
cause Jewish intellectuals have been central participants, but
also because certain problematics of modern Jewishness en-
rich theoretical questions across the humanities. In the range
of violence and agency that can attend the appellation “Jew,”
Jewishness is revealed as a rhetorical and not just social fact,
one tied to profound questions of power, subjectivity, iden-
tity, figuration, language, and relation that are also central to
modern theory and modern politics.
Contributors: Svetlana Boym, Andrew Bush, Sergey Dolgopolski,
Jay Geller, Sarah Hammerschlag, Hannan Hever, Martin Land,
Martin Jay, James I. Porter, Yehouda Shenhav, Elliot R. Wolfson
336 PAGES
9780823281992, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99
DECEMBER 2018
www.fo rd h am p re ss .co m
RENAISSANCE STUDIES
Last Acts
The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage
MAGGIE VINTER
Last Acts argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater
offered important opportunities to practice arts of dying.
While theater is often understood as a form of mourning,
early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions
that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or
grief than as an action to be performed, well or badly.
Active deaths belie mortality narratives of helplessness and loss
and instead suggest how marginalized and constrained subjects
might participate in the political, social, and economic manage-
ment of life. Analyzing death scenes in Marlowe, Shakespeare,
and Jonson alongside devotional texts and contemporary bio-
political theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables,
and contests the politicization of life and death.
224 PAGES, 6 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATION
9780823284252, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99
MAY 2019
Saint Marks: Words, Images, and What Persists
JONATHAN GOLDBERG
“Saint Marks finds and forges material connections among
things, images, and words. In these connections, Goldberg
persuades us, the biographical subject exceeds his or her own
life, living through matter. The book concerns Venice and
its patron saint—what it means to construct the identity of
each and then identify the one with the other, as well as the
natural, historical, pictorial, and literary forces that undo such
constructions. With chapters titled ‘atmospherics,” “gravity,”
“stones,” and “secrets,” the book is a magisterial shift of the
biographical and historical into the geographical that will ap-
peal to a broad readership across art history and literary stud-
ies.”—Amy Knight Powell, University of California, Irvine
212 PAGES, 24 COLOR AND 4 B/W ILLUSTRATIONS
9780823282074, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99
DECEMBER 2018
Unknowing Fanaticism
Reformation Literatures of Self-Annihilation
ROSS LERNER
“Lerner presents a thoughtful and penetrating study of how
England’s major seventeenth-century writers came to terms
with a tradition of prophecy, messianism, and divine grace
that can be utopian and critical, but also militant and de-
structive. In gesturing toward twenty-first century politics
Lerner never chains his analyses to the contemporary situa-
tion but instead gives us tools to think about jihadism, right
wing terror, fundamentalism, and liberation theology.”—Ju-
lia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine
The term fanatic, from the European Reformation to today,
has never been a stable one. Unknowing Fanaticism rejects the
simplified binary of fanatical religion and rational politics, turn-
ing to Renaissance literature to demonstrate that fanaticism was
integral to how both modern politics and poetics developed.
224 PAGES
9780823283866, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99
APRIL 2019
10 L I T E R AT U R E & C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 2 0 1 9
 O R D E R FOR M

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