New This Month: January

New year, New month, New books! January marks the last month for our Fall 2023 catalog of books and we’re excited to share the remaining books we have publishing this season. You can find the full list, including any new in paperbacks, on our Hot Off the Press page. Plus, if you want updates in your inbox every month about new titles, sales, and what’s happening at UNC Press you can sign up for our monthly eNews.

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Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century by Julia F. Irwin

“A cautionary tale of constant pitfalls in provisioning aid, as well as humble suggestions for a better path through the calamities of the future—especially as once-a-century disasters become ever more frequent in our climate crisis.”—Megan Black, author of The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power

“Far beyond its explicit arguments about disaster aid, this book stands as a model of how to think and write about contingency in history.”—Jacob Remes, author of Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era

Black Time and the Aesthetic Possibility of Objects by Daphne Lamothe

“In this stunning book, Daphne Lamothe goes against a dominant grain in contemporary Black critical studies by advancing a case for aesthetic encounter as a way to engage a temporality of Blackness in the present. Smart and full of intellectual risk, and all the more substantial, elegant, and considered because of it.”—Kevin Quashie, Brown University

“This book offers a timely expansion on the scope of post-soul Black cultural production, extending scholarly attention to text, music video, and visual art from diverse Black sites…. This is a book with a capacious theoretical bibliography and exemplary close readings. Lamothe’s readings of artistic works are a master class in why the humanities matter. They are truly a joy to read.”—Tsitsi Jaji, Duke University

The Politics of Safety: The Black Struggle for Police Accountability in La Guardia’s New York by Shannon King

“We desperately need the history King shows in this book: one of Black people asserting rights to equal protection under the law and demanding that they not bear the brunt of overpolicing.”—Brian Purnell, author of Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn

“The Politics of Safety allows us to understand in significantly greater depth the long-standing nature of debates about safety, harm, and race/ism that continue to swirl in American politics down to the minute of this writing.”—Simon Balto, author of Occupied Territory: Policing Chicago from the Red Summer to Black Power