Joseph Masco is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and author of The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making, also published by Duke University Press.

Lisa Wedeen is Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and author of Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria.

Introduction: Conspiracy/Theory / Joseph Masco and Lisa Weeden
Part I. Organizing Fictions
1. Impasse and Genre in American Politics and Literature / George Shulman 37
2. Where Did AIDS Come from? / Lochlann Jain 61
3. A False Flag / Joseph Masco 81
4. Conspiracy Attunement and Context: The Case of the President’s Body / Elizabeth Anne Davis 104
5. Conspiracy, Theory, and the “Post-Truth” Public Sphere / Timothy Melley 127
Part II. Atmospheres of Doubt
6. On Certainty and the Question of Judgment / Lisa Wedeen 149
7. Resonant Apophenia / Susan Lepselter 174
8. The Play of Conspiracy in Plato’s Republic / Demetra Kasimis 190
9. An Economy of Suspicion: On the “Military-Civilian Divide” and the New American Militarism / Nadia Abu El-Haj 210
Part III. The Force of Capital
10. Conspiracies of Theory: Of Gold in the Shadow of Deindustrialization / Rosalind C. Morris 235
11. Adrian Piper and Alien Conspiracies of Bullying and Whistleblowing / Joseph Dumit 264
12. Humanitarian Profiteering in the Central African Republic as Conspiracy and Rumor / Louisa Lombard 291
13. Confessions of an Accused Conspiracy Theorist: The Financialization of Higher Education / Robert Meister 314
Part IV. The Politics of Enmity
14. Conspiracy and Its Curious Afterlives / Faith Hillis 341
15. Comedy of Terrors: National Security Fictions and the Origins of al-Qa‘ida / Darryl Li 362
16. After Muslims: Authority, Suspicion, and Secrecy in the Liberal Democratic State / Hussein Ali Agrama 386
17. Flame and Steel inside the Capitol / Kathleen Belew 409
Epilogue / Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen 425
Acknowledgments 435
References 437
Contributors 483
Index