New This Week

It’s our first New Books Tuesday of 2024 and we’re excited to share two new books that are officially on-sale today. You can see everything new this month, including any new in paperbacks, on our Hot Off the Press page. Plus, sign up for our monthly eNews and you will get updates on new releases, sales, and other news on what’s happening at UNC Press delivered right to you inbox.

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