Duke University Press Log

Karen Ho Interviewed in Time Magazine

Anthropologist Karen Ho, author of Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, is interviewed in Time Magazine this week. Ho argues that the American worker has become "liquid." She says, "I mean that there's constant job insecurity, constant downsizing, constant restructuring, a constant need to retrain to have an adaptable skill set and be flexible. In a sense, job security and stability have been liquidated."

Go Wins Mary Douglas Prize

Duke Press is pleased to announce that Julian Go has won the 2009 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book from the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association for his book, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism. Congratulations, Julian!

Newly found document brings insight into Chinese-American "Paper Families"

Today's New York Times "City Room" blog has a fascinating post about a recently-found notebook filled with Chinese characters, apparently a crib sheet for use by an illegal immigrant. As Estelle T. Lau wrote in her book Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made the Chinese the first immigrant group officially excluded from the United States. Chinese Americans took advantage of the system’s loophole: children of U.S. citizens were granted automatic eligibility for immigration. The result was an elaborate system of "paper families," in which U.S. citizens of Chinese descent claimed fictive, or "paper," children who could then use their kinship status as a basis for entry into the United States. This subterfuge necessitated the creation of crib sheets outlining genealogies and providing village maps and other information that could be used during immigration processing. The newly found crib sheet apparently belonged to Chung Fook Wing, who attempted to gain entry into the U.S. in 1923 by pretending to be the son of George Sing of Yonkers. His crib sheet apparently worked and he was allowed into the country, but seventeen years later on a drug possession charge and the notebook was found in a search of his papers at a New York City opium den. The notebook then found its way to the National Archives in New York City, where it languished unstudied until quite recently.

Dwyer Wins SECOLAS Award

Congratulations to John J. Dwyer for winning the Alfred B. Thomas Book Prize from SECOLAS (The Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies). Dwyer's 2008 book, The Agrarian Dispute, was recognized as the best book on a Latin American subject published by a SECOLAS member in the previous year.

Dwyer also recently received Honorable Mention for the 2009 McGann Prize given by the Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies.

Tehran Bureau Interviews Negar Mottahedeh

The influential blog Tehran Bureau interviews Negar Mottahedeh, author of Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema. Mottahedeh analyzes photos of protests in Iran in 1953, 1979, and 2009. She talks about the role of women in all three time periods and the way the camera captures them."It is precisely the presence of women in the public sphere in these photographs that continually amaze and attract the camera gaze in 1953, again in 1979 and again in 2009," she comments. "It is important to understand that the history of camera technology—its ability to capture the present—corresponds globally with the transformation of the public sphere and the threat of the feminization of power."

Wacquant Interviewed in Chronicle Review

Karen J. Winkler interviews sociologist Loïc Wacquant in this week's Chronicle Review. Wacquant's new book Punishing the Poor explains how over the past two decades neoliberal societies have sought to control the poor through a combination of penal sanction and welfare supervision. In the interview, Wacquant talks about "prisonfare," the role of the neoliberal state in regulation of the lower classes, and why scholars of criminal justice and scholars of welfare ignore each other.

Willmington Star News Reviews Bricks Without Straw

"Duke University Press has performed a public service by releasing, in an inexpensive ($23.95) paperback edition, a North Carolina classic," writes Ben Steelman in his Willimgton Star News review of Bricks Without Straw, the novel of Reconstruction by North Carolina judge Albion W. Tourgée. Steelman writes about how Tourgée countered other contemporary accounts of Reconstruction, rejecting "Southern charges that it was marked by corruption and incompetence (at least, any more corruption and incompetence than the governments its followed and preceded). Rather, he shows how black efforts at self-determination were sabotaged by Klan violence, once the protective umbrella of federal occupation was removed."

Gay Rights Victory in India

Gay rights activists in India won a major victory today when the Delhi high court overturned a 148-year-old colonial era law criminalizing homosexuality. The BBC reports that the ruling "promises to change the discourse on sexuality in a largely conservative country, where even talking about sex is largely taboo." For a glimpse at homosexual life in India in an earlier era, readers may want to check out our new translation of stories by Pandey Bechan Sharma titled Chocolate and Other Writings on Male Homoeroticism. Published under the pseudonym "Ugra," in 1927, the stories were first work of Hindi fiction to focus on male same-sex relations, and its publication sparked India’s first public debates about homosexuality.  An introduction by Ruth Vanita places the stories and their author in a historical context.

Happy Canada Day!

Happy Canada Day to everyone. Seems like the perfect day to tell people about our great new collection, The Canadian Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurschou. The reader brings together for the first time in one volume recent writing in Canadian cultural studies and work by significant Canadian cultural analysts of the postwar era. It includes classic writings by Harold Cardinal, Northrup Frye, Harold Innis, and Marshall McLuhan as well as contributions from contemporary critcs like Yves Laberge, Jody Berland, and Will Straw. Want to win a copy? Check out our contest on our Facebook page!