Recent uc_libraries_oabooks_monographs_dukeup items

Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun: An Elegy

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun, Crystal Mun-hye Baik blends different genres, from narrative prose to epistles to ancestral mourning rites, to offer an intimate cultural history of war, illness, and estrangement through the experiential lens of her family.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the University of California Libraries.

Indigenous Archives: The Maya Diaspora and Mobile Cultural Production

Tue, 3 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Indigenous Archives analyzes the modes through which young Guatemalan Mayas in Los Angeles and Guatemala make sense of and respond to transnational structures of settler colonialism. Drawing on in-depth analysis of cultural production and interviews with Guatemalan Maya youth and young adults, Floridalma Boj Lopez examines how Mayas in diaspora craft and circulate narratives about their experiences across borders. Citing a more active practice of “archives in formation,” Boj Lopez depicts Indigenous archives as a cross-generational, collective conversation rooted in memory, survival, and cultural expression where Indigenous cultural practices and artifacts move, adapt, and assert their presence in the contemporary. Indigenous Archives invites readers to consider Indigeneity as a process, lived experience, and historical perspective, rather than as a static identity, and shows how extending analysis across borders is critical to understanding Latinidad and Indigeneity.

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Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands

Tue, 3 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Lauren Derby explores storytelling traditions between the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, focusing on shapeshifting spirit demons called baka/bacá as a way to reckon with a shared history of enslavement, colonialism, and exploitation.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the University of California Libraries.

The Aesthetic Character of Blackness: Sounds Like Us

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In The Aesthetic Character of Blackness, Jemma DeCristo theorizes the means by which black art liberates the free world but does not and cannot liberate black people. Drawing on Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke and as well as the aesthetic thought of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Theodor Adorno, DeCristo critiques the exaltation of black culture and art’s saving power by analyzing the violence underneath aesthetic production. She tracks black music’s representational and anti-representational capacities in projects of black non/humanization from nineteenth-century abolitionism and the founding of the recording industry to the emergence of black queer blues performers and the rise of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Theorizing the contemporary neoliberalization of black audio-visual spectacle, DeCristo ultimately demonstrates that the voluptuous world of black aesthetics beautifies an anti-black world that wields...

The Possible Form of an Interlocution: W. E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber in Correspondence

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In The Possible Form of an Interlocution, Nahum Dimitri Chandler provides an epistemological and theoretical elaboration of the correspondence between W. E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber in 1904 and 1905. Their interlocution took place under the heading of Du Bois’s famous formulation “the problem of the color line.” This study takes as its incipient reference Weber’s statement to Du Bois that “I am absolutely convinced that the ‘color-line’ problem will be the paramount problem of the time to come, here and everywhere in the world.” Chandler provides a concise statement of Du Bois’s thought of “the problem of the color line” as a general formulation for understanding African American matters within modern historicity on a worldwide scale. He then examines Weber’s earliest writings to understand in just what way “the ‘color-line’ problem", served as a problematization for Weber in both his thought and itinerary, across the 1890s and through the time of their interlocution.

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Queer Traffic: Sex, Panic, Free Trade

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In Queer Traffic, Jennifer Tyburczy traces how sexual dissidents across the Mexico-Canada-US borderlands transport the objects and experiences that nourish their sexual and social lives. She situates the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a pivot point in the formation of panics aimed at stamping out these outlaw sex practices. Highlighting NAFTA’s erotic investments in hetero- and homonormativity, racial capitalism, markets of dispossession, and neocolonialism, Tyburczy directly engages with art, activism, and archives to revisit the struggles of people who invented circuits of sexual exchange through four decades of violence and criminalization. In conversing with actors from bureaucrats to pornographers and in studying choreographies, social movements, and street vocabularies, she examines an array of tactics that undermine the market logics of trade law and policy. Dreaming of other forms of living that go beyond mere survival, Queer Traffic guides...

Knowing as Moving: Perception, Memory, and Place

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In Knowing as Moving, Susan Leigh Foster theorizes how the act of moving in and through the world creates the potential for individual and collective bodies to connect. Starting from the assertion that knowing takes place through bodily movement, Foster moves away from the Western philosophical traditions of dance, critiquing the Cartesian mind-body duality and its colonizing politics. She draws on Native and Indigenous studies, ecological cognitive science, disability studies, phenomenology, and new materialism to explore how knowledge is neither static nor storable. Thinking is a physical action and the product of an entire neuromuscular system with its mobile postural and gestural configurations, perceptual systems, and brain activity. Foster outlines how reading, examining, talking, and remembering are all forms of moving and contends that any process of knowing establishes one’s identity and relationality. By focusing on the centrality of bodily movement to thought and...