CSSC Books

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex

Eric Stanley
2015

Edited by Eric A. Stanley amd Nat Smith: Captive Genders was the first book of its kind. It remains the touchstone for studies of trans and gender-queer people in prison. It has been revamped to appeal to recent broadened interest. With a new Foreword by CeCe MacDonald and essay by Chelsea Manning.

Pindar, Song, and Space: Towards a Lyric Archaeology

Leslie V. Kurke
2019

By Richard Neer and Leslie Kurke: In this volume, Richard Neer and Leslie Kurke develop a new, integrated approach to classical Greece: a "lyric archaeology" that combines literary and art-historical analysis with archaeological and epigraphic materials. At the heart of the book is the great poet Pindar of Thebes, best known for his magnificent odes in honor of victors at the Olympic Games and other competitions. Unlike the quintessentially personal genre of modern lyric, these poems were destined for public performance by choruses of dancing men. Neer and Kurke go further...

Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora

Nadia Ellis
2026

By Nadia Ellis: Nadia Ellis attends to African diasporic belonging as it comes into being through black expressive culture. Living in the diaspora, Ellis asserts, means existing between claims to land and imaginative flights unmoored from the earth—that is, to live within the territories of the soul. Drawing on the work of Jose Muñoz, Ellis connects queerness' utopian potential with diasporic aesthetics. Occupying the territory of the soul, being neither here nor there, creates in diasporic subjects feelings of loss, desire, and a sensation of a pull from elsewhere....

To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women's Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua

Courtney Desiree Morris
2023

By Courtney Desiree Morris: To Defend this Sunrise examines how black women on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua engage in regional, national, and transnational modes of activism to remap the nation’s racial order under conditions of increasing economic precarity and autocracy. The book considers how, since the 19th century, black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression. Specifically, it explores how the new Sandinista state under Daniel...

Thinking About Dementia: Culture, Loss, and the Anthropology of Senility

Lawrence Cohen
2006

By Annette Leibing and Lawrence Cohen: Bringing together essays by nineteen respected scholars, this volume approaches dementia from a variety of angles, exploring its historical, psychological, and philosophical implications. The authors employ a cross-cultural perspective that is based on ethnographic fieldwork and focuses on questions of age, mind, voice, self, loss, temporality, memory, and affect.

Taken together, the essays make four important and interrelated contributions to our understanding of the mental status of the elderly. First, cross-...

No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, The Bad Family, and Other Modern Things

Lawrence Cohen
2000

By Lawrence Cohen: From the opening sequence, in which mid-nineteenth-century Indian fishermen hear the possibility of redemption in an old woman's madness, No Aging in India captures the reader with its interplay of story and analysis. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic work, Lawrence Cohen links a detailed investigation of mind and body in old age in four neighborhoods of the Indian city of Varanasi (Banaras) with events and processes around India and around the world. This compelling exploration of senility—encompassing not only the aging...

Disorientation: France, Vietnam, and the Ambivalence of Interculturality

Karl Britto
2004

By Karl Britto: This book explores literary representations of cultural hybridity spanning nearly half a century, a period marked by major shifts in Franco-Vietnamese relations.

How can identity be thought and represented outside of the oppositional categories that divide cultures, histories, languages and races? Can the intercultural subject be understood as more than a site of cultural contestation, as anything other than a confrontation between incompatible binary opposites? This book offers compelling responses to these questions through a series of close...

Beverley Ditsie's Fearless Speech: A Dialogue on the Pitfalls of Queer Struggle

Sharad Chari
2027

By Sharad Chari with Beverley Palesa Ditsie: Insights from the life and thought of an iconic South African lesbian activist on queer struggles at apartheid’s end and their implications for African liberation

Beverley Palesa Ditsie is a key South African Black lesbian activist, part of a world of queer activism during South Africa’s decade of transition from apartheid, when sexuality was crucial to recircuiting post-apartheid power and possibility. Part of the Gay and Lesbian Organization of the Witwatersrand (GLOW), which organized the...

Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India

Sharad Chari
2004

By Sharad Chari: Fraternal Capital examines class, gender, and work in Tiruppur, South India, where export of knitted garments has been led by a networked fraternity of owners of working-class and Gounder caste origins, who explain their class mobility as hinging on their "toil." This book asks how these self-made men drew from their agrarian past to turn Gounder toil into capital, and how they continue to make an entire town work for the global economy.

Fraternal Capital decenters understandings of global capitalism by linking agrarian transition...

Apartheid Remains

Sharad Chari
2024

By Sharad Chari: 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. Through long-term historical and ethnographic research, Chari portrays South Africa’s twentieth century as a palimpsest that conserves the remains of multiple pasts, including attempts by the racial state to remake territory and personhood while instead deepening spatial contradictions and struggles. When South Durban’...