Masks

Imprint:

Published: 04/26/2024

The mask is the classic disguise. But as alter ego, it reveals as much as it conceals. Why are masks so often creepy, even outside of horror movies? Can a mask change expression while you’re wearing it? How much of someone’s self can inhabit a mask? Why would anyone make a plaster cast of a[…]

In Defense of Don Giovanni: A Feminist Mythobiography

Published: 03/28/2024

Who wants to champion the figure of Don Giovanni in the time of Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo? Don Giovanni is a rapist, murderer, serial seducer, and liar. Can he ever be held up as a role model or seen as a figure to be enjoyed? This is the task that the eminent Italian historian and[…]

Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency

Published: 02/09/2024

Echoing the edgy, disjunctive, ever-emergent city of Nairobi that it explores, Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency strives to be several things-in-the-making. It is a historically and anthropologically minded examination of a shifting cityscape, an experimental, collaborative exercise in curated juxtaposition and assemblage, and an interdisciplinary, subjunctive urban ethnography. It brings together curated interventions by twenty-seven[…]

Imagining What We Don’t Know: Creative Theory and Critical Bodies

FORTHCOMING Summer 2025

Bringing together perception, ecology, community, lingual value, and quantum life, Imagining What We Don’t Know: Creative Theory and Critical Bodies presents twenty-four essays and theory poems that blend interpretive neologisms — wild dialectics, distributed centrality, membranism, deformance, bioautography, transplace, soft text, and more — with readings of visionary philosophers and the art and writing of[…]

Works for Works, Book 2: “No Rights”

FORTHCOMING Spring 2025

Works for Works, Book 2: “No Rights,” privileges works-based agency (praxis) in literary-artistic scholarship. The principal focus of the Franciscan-inspired embrace of a “no rights” status for works of literary-artistic scholarship is toward freeing both author and works from forms of technocratic determinism and neo-utilitarianism associated with regimes of intellectual property rights law and platform[…]

Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds

Published: 08/24/2023

Superhero meaning making is a site of struggle. Superheroes (are thought to) trouble borders and normative ways of seeing and being in the world. Superhero narratives (are thought to) represent, and thereby inspire, alternative visions of the real world. The superhero genre is (thought to be) a repository for radical or progressive ideas. In the[…]