Finding everything you need? See our Contact/FAQ if you have any questions.
1. In the Event: An Introduction-Lloyd Pratt
2. The Historical Event: Hayden White
3. World History according to Katrina-Wai Chee Dimock
4. Babo's Razor; or, Discerning the Event in an Age of Differences-Jonathan Elmer
5. Bourdieu, Ambiguity, and the Significance of Events-Andrew Aisenberg
6. The Era of Lost (White) Girls: On Body and Event-Rebecca Wanzo
7. Aftereffects of the End of the World ("I ♥ NY")-Akira Mizuta Lippit
If you are requesting permission to photocopy material for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at copyright.com;
If the Copyright Clearance Center cannot grant permission, you may request permission from our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).
If you are requesting permission to reprint DUP material (journal or book selection) in another book or in any other format, contact our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).
Many images/art used in material copyrighted by Duke University Press are controlled, not by the Press, but by the owner of the image. Please check the credit line adjacent to the illustration, as well as the front and back matter of the book for a list of credits. You must obtain permission directly from the owner of the image. Occasionally, Duke University Press controls the rights to maps or other drawings. Please direct permission requests for these images to permissions@dukeupress.edu.
For book covers to accompany reviews, please contact the publicity department.
If you're interested in a Duke University Press book for subsidiary rights/translations, please contact permissions@dukeupress.edu. Include the book title/author, rights sought, and estimated print run.
Instructions for requesting an electronic text on behalf of a student with disabilities are available here.
September 11, the subway bombings in Europe, and Hurricane Katrina occurred in rapid succession. The outsized relationship between their historical significance and chronological span also marked these episodes as “events.” Focusing on the recent rise of “the event” as a form of experience and its simultaneous reemergence as a central term in critical theory, this special issue of differences links contemporary critical discourse on the event—Badiou, Sewell, Derrida—to long-standing conversations in philosophy, history, literary studies, media studies, and cultural theory. It also indicates how event analysis might begin to provide an analytic framework different from the conventional modes of historicism currently dominating cultural studies.
One essay identifies flash points when “the event” has preoccupied Western thought from Plato to Freud. Others show how particular events—Hurricane Katrina, the Algerian War, the Haitian Revolution—betray the inadequacy of traditional nation-based frameworks for understanding the course of history. Media representations also are a central concern, as in one contributor’s analysis of how child abductions turn some (white girls’) bodies into events while other (brown girls’) bodies are denied that status. The final essay is a meditation on the end of the world that explores how the idea of the end as event transforms everyday language into cryptic signs.
Contributors: Andrew Aisenberg, Wai Chee Dimock, Jonathan Elmer, Akira Lippit, Lloyd Pratt,Rebecca Wanzo, Hayden White