Cultural Studies Book Award Committee

Chair: Jose Bernard Capino—University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Members: Camilla Fojas—DePaul University

Shilpa Dave—Brandeis University

Co-winners:

Chandan Reddy, The Violence of Freedom: Race, Sexuality and the State (Duke University Press)

Reddy’s innovative book argues that national individual rights and protections from violence (i.e. civil rights and hate crime legislation) are passed and grounded and tied to the state’s interest in developing a national narrative against a global or foreign other. In other words, that one group’s freedom from violence is rooted in sanctioned violence against an Other. He has researched a large body of work with meticulous detail and presents an influential theoretical model framed by the passage Shepherd-Byrd Hate Crimes prevention act amendment to the defense bill in 2009. Reddy’s work offers a theoretical perspective that will become an integral model in critical race and sexuality studies. He grounds an analysis of the legitimation of state violence through the ideology of freedom as it relates to the mutually constitutive formations of race and sexuality. Using examples drawn from current legislation, popular culture, and literary works, he explores a fault line in state formation, particularly through how the nation-state enacts the very violence it purports to eliminate.

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion. (Duke University Press)

The Beautiful Generation is a well-researched and innovative intervention in the field of cultural studies. The author discusses both the history of Asians in the fashion industry and the emergence of “Asian chic” as an aesthetic. Her expert weaving together of kinship and family networks between designers and workers re-examines how we think about “intimacy” and relationships in commodity markets and the material conditions of production and re-envisions Asian American fashion in new and exciting ways.