Genre: Cultural Studies+Critical Theory

One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

In One Thing Follows Another, boundary-crossing collection of ten poetic/experimental essays, Witte and Rosenthal explore the work of dancer-choreographers Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, both at various inflection points throughout their careers and in this particular moment. Through a combination of chance operations and intentional artistic choices that push the authors to unexpected places—including the[…]

Evil Twins and the Ultimate Insight: Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, and the Polarized Politics of Reading

Published: 10/05/2023

With the 2020 election, political polarization in the U.S. entered a ludicrous end-stage. Partisanship, once a pseudo-rational system of biases, has devolved to a conflict between incompatible realities. In search of some pathway toward consensus, Evil Twins and the Ultimate Insight: Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, and the Polarized Politics of Reading looks to the works[…]

The Ruins of Solitude

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

While we conventionally define solitude as the absence of relation, The Ruins of Solitude takes up solitude as a rubric of legible subjectivity that regulates what it means to interact with and make meaning within a material world. Working to imagine an alternative to solitude, the book considers how this mode of embodiment intersects with[…]

Works for Works, Book 2: “No Rights”

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

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[…]

Burning Diagrams in Anthropology: An Inverse Museum

Imprint:

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

Burning Diagrams in Anthropology examines the use of diagrams in anthropology to re-imagine how we think about, and challenge, intellectual histories. Highlighting the impossibility of escaping what different disciplines and institutions deem to be “past,” the author combines critical analysis of selected diagrams with an expansive, exploratory re-immersion in their aesthetic, ethical, and political potential.[…]

Speaking with the Dead: An Ethnography of Extrahuman Experience

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

If you tried speaking with a dead person and they gave you a clear response, how would you react? In Speaking with the Dead, Matt Tomlinson describes his experiences training as a medium with a Spiritualist congregation in Australia. Mediums develop their minds and bodies to communicate messages from the deceased to their living loved[…]

Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers: An American Tragedy

Imprint:

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

The convenient myth of Wilhelm Reich is that he “lost his mind” in the early 1950s, if not before, and that the last seven years of his life and work — the orgone and radiation experiments, the cloudbuster, and flying saucer intrigues — present an embarrassment. Even the counterculture that embraced Reich, not least William[…]