Spring 2013 Catalog - Duke University Press

Imperial Debris
On Ruins and Ruination
ann laura stoler, editor
“Imperial Debris questions some of our deepest assumptions about violence
and its residues. This astute, wide-ranging, and ambitious volume refocuses
our attention on the incremental processes of ruination that are typically
overlooked in favor of official ruins. The result is a major intervention
in postcolonial and visual studies.”—ROB NIXON, author of Slow Violence
and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Imperial Debris redirects critical focus
from ruins as evidence of the past to
“ruination” as the processes through
which imperial power occupies the
present. Ann Laura Stoler’s introduction
is a manifesto, a compelling call
for postcolonial studies to expand its
analytical scope to address the toxic
but less perceptible corrosions and
violent accruals of colonial aftermaths,
as well as their durable traces on
the material environment and peoples’
bodies and minds. In their provocative, tightly focused responses
to Stoler, the contributors explore subjects as seemingly diverse
as villages submerged during the building of a massive dam in
southern India, Palestinian children taught to envision and document
ancestral homes razed by the Israeli military, and survival on
the toxic edges of oil refineries and amid the remains of apartheid
in Durban, South Africa. They consider the significance of Cold War
imagery of a United States decimated by nuclear blast, perceptions
of a swath of Argentina’s Gran Chaco as a barbarous void, and the
enduring resonance, in contemporary sexual violence, of atrocities
in King Leopold’s Congo. Reflecting on the physical destruction of
Sri Lanka, on Detroit as a colonial metropole in relation to sites
of ruination in the Amazon, and on interactions near a UNESCO World
Heritage Site in the Brazilian state of Bahia, the contributors attend
to present-day harms in the occluded, unexpected sites and situations
where earlier imperial formations persist.
Contributors
Ariella Azoulay, John F. Collins, Sharad Chari, E. Valentine Daniel, Gastón Gordillo,
Greg Grandin, Nancy Rose Hunt, Joseph Masco, Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao,
Ann Laura Stoler
Ann Laura Stoler is the Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor
of Anthropology and Historical Studies at the New School for Social
Research.
ANTHROPOLOGY/HISTORY/POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
May 336 pages, 29 illustrations
paper, 978–0–8223–5361–4, $25.95/£16.99
cloth, 978–0–8223–5348–5, $94.95/£71.00
general interest
Markets of Sorrow,
Labors of Faith
New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina
vincanne adams
“Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith is public anthropology at its finest.
Vincanne Adams has written a devastating portrait of market failure
in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and a cautionary tale about what
might happen if the private sector takes charge of the welfare state.”
—ERIC KLINENBERG, author of Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster
in Chicago
Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith
is an ethnographic account of
long-term recovery in post-Katrina
New Orleans. It is also a sobering
exploration of the privatization of
vital social services under marketdriven
governance. In the wake
of Hurricane Katrina, public agencies
subcontracted disaster relief
to private companies that turned
the humanitarian work of recovery
into lucrative business. These
enterprises profited from the very suffering that they failed to
ameliorate, producing a second-order disaster that exacerbated
inequalities based on race and class and leaving residents to
rebuild almost entirely on their own.
Filled with the often desperate voices of residents who returned
to New Orleans, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith describes the
human toll of disaster capitalism and the affect economy it has
produced. While for-profit companies delayed delivery of federal
resources to returning residents, faith-based and nonprofit groups
stepped in to rebuild, compelled by the moral pull of charity and
the emotional rewards of volunteer labor. Vincanne Adams traces
the success of charity efforts, even while noting an irony of neoliberalism,
which encourages the very same for-profit companies to
exploit these charities as another market opportunity. In so doing,
the companies profit not once but twice on disaster.
Vincanne Adams is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the
Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the
University of California, San Francisco.
CURRENT EVENTS/SOCIAL JUSTICE/ANTHROPOLOGY
March 232 pages, 12 photographs
paper, 978–0–8223–5449–9, $22.95/£14.99
cloth, 978–0–8223–5434–5, $79.95/£60.00
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