Imaginary Death

FORTHCOMING Winter 2025

“A man dies. He dies because he must—because without his death, there is no story, and, in the end, no history itself.” So starts Nagai’s Imaginary Death, a nonfiction book that examines how an ordinary man born in a small village is unmade and remade into a perfect Japanese Imperial soldier by the era he[…]

On the Trail of the Morning Star: Psychosis as Self-Discovery

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Published: 05/15/2024

In 1936, at age nineteen, Dorothea Buck followed the trail of a star along the mudflats of her North Sea home, Wangerooge Island in Germany. Hospitalized at a Christian institution called Bethel, she was sterilized under Nazi law upon a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Buck lost her lifelong dream of becoming a teacher—the sterilized could not[…]

Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies 8

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Published: 06/27/2023

Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies offers a platform in which the old meets the new, in which archaeological, papyrological, and philological research into Meroitic, Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic sources confront current investigations in modern anthropology and ethnography, Nilo-Saharan linguistics, and the critical and theoretical approaches of postcolonial and African studies. Dotawo gives[…]

Tall, Slim & Erect: Portraits of the Presidents

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Published: 08/03/2023

After stumbling upon a wooden box containing a complete set of miniature wax mold figurines of US presidents at a flea market, artist Alex Forman began photographing each little man, minus their pedestals. Presented for the first time in book format, Forman’s elegant black and white portraits are accompanied by brief biographies composed entirely of[…]

Irradiated Cities

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Published: 05/25/2023

The before, the after, and the event that divides. In Irradiated Cities, Mariko Nagai seeks the dividing events of nuclear catastrophe in Japan, exploring the aftermath of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Nagai’s lyric textual fragments and stark black and white photographs act as a guide through these[…]

Northeastern Asia and the Northern Rockies: Treasures from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Daryl S. Paulson Collection

Published: 12/31/2022

The philosophical ties between Northeastern Asia and the Northern Rockies as represented in a selection of fine art — including Daoist nature deities and immortals, Confucian scholar brushes and inkstones, and Buddhist guardian kings and compassionate bodhisattvas — have never been explicated. This catalog lays the groundwork for a serious discussion of trans-Pacific acculturation: first[…]

Fascism, Vulnerability, and the Escape from Freedom: Readings to Repair Democracy

Published: 11/11/2022

A worldwide struggle between democracy and authoritarianism set against a backdrop of global surveillance capitalism is unmistakable. Examples range from Myanmar, China, and the Philippines to Hungary, Turkey, Russia, and the United States. Fascism, Vulnerability, and the Escape from Freedom offers a multidisciplinary analysis drawing on psychology and literature to provide readers with a deeper[…]

The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World

Published: 09/22/2022

The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World explores how liberal humanism first enlivened, racialized, and gendered global cartographies, and how memory, ancestry, expression, and other aspects of social identity founded in its theories and practices made for the advent of the category of the posthuman through the dimensions of cultural, geographic, political, social,[…]