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Claiming Others
Transracial Adoption and National Belonging
Mark C. Jerng
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Transracial adoption has recently become a hotly contested subject of contemporary and critical concern, with scholars across the disciplines working to unravel its complex implications. In Claiming Others, Mark C. Jerng traces the practice of adoption to the early nineteenth century, revealing its surprising centrality to American literature, law, and social thought.

Jerng considers how adoption makes us rethink the parent-child bond as central to issues of race and nationality, showing the ways adoption also speaks to broader questions about our history and identity. He analyzes adoption through a diverse set of texts, including the 1851 Massachusetts statute that established adoption as we understand it today, early adoption manuals, the New York Times blog Relative Choices, and the work of John Tanner, Lydia Maria Child, William Faulkner, Charles Chesnutt, Chang-rae Lee, and David Henry Hwang.

Imaginative and social practices of transracial adoption have shaped major controversies, Jerng argues, from Native American removal to slavery to cold war expansionism in the twentieth century and the contemporary global market in children. As Claiming Others makes clear, understanding adoption is crucial not just to understanding the history between races in the United States, but also the meaning of emancipation and the role of family in nationhood.
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Class Action
Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools
Rand Quinn
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A compelling history of school desegregation and activism in San Francisco 


The picture of school desegregation in the United States is often painted with broad strokes of generalization and insulated anecdotes. Its true history, however, is remarkably wide ranging. Class Action tells the story of San Francisco’s long struggle over school desegregation in the wake of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education

San Francisco’s story provides a critical chapter in the history of American school discrimination and the complicated racial politics that emerged. It was among the first large cities outside the South to face court-ordered desegregation following the Brown rulings, and it experienced the same demographic shifts that transformed other cities throughout the urban West. Rand Quinn argues that the district’s student assignment policies—including busing and other desegregative mechanisms—began as a remedy for state discrimination but transformed into a tool intended to create diversity. Drawing on extensive archival research—from court docket files to school district records—Quinn describes how this transformation was facilitated by the rise of school choice, persistent demand for neighborhood schools, evolving social and legal landscapes, and local community advocacy and activism.

Class Action is the first book to present a comprehensive political history of post-Brown school desegregation in San Francisco. Quinn illuminates the evolving relationship between jurisprudence and community-based activism and brings a deeper understanding to the multiracial politics of urban education reform. He responds to recent calls by scholars to address the connections between ideas and policy change and ultimately provides a fascinating look at race and educational opportunity, school choice, and neighborhood schools in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education.

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Class And Its Others
J.K. Gibson-Graham
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

A surprising and innovative look at class that proposes new approaches to this important topic

While references to gender, race, and class are everywhere in social theory, class has not received the kind of theoretical and empirical attention accorded to gender and race. A welcome and much-needed corrective, this book offers a novel theoretical approach to class and an active practice of class analysis.

The authors offer new and compelling ways to look at class through examinations of such topics as sex work, the experiences of African American women as domestic laborers, and blue- and white-collar workers. Their work acknowledges that individuals may participate in various class relations at one moment or over time and that class identities are multiple and changing, interacting with other aspects of identity in contingent and unpredictable ways.

The essays in the book focus on class difference, class transformation and change, and on the intersection of class, race, gender, sexuality, and other dimensions of identity. They find class in seemingly unlikely places-in households, parent-child relationships, and self-employment-and locate class politics on the interpersonal level as well as at the level of enterprises, communities, and nations. Taken together, they will prompt a rethinking of class and class subjectivity that will expand social theory.

Contributors: Enid Arvidson, U of Texas, Arlington; Jenny Cameron, Monash U, Australia; Harriet Fraad; Janet Hotch; Susan Jahoda, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Amitava Kumar, U of Florida; Cecilia Marie Rio; Jacquelyn Southern; Marjolein van der Veen.

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Class Size in High School English, Methods and Results
Dora V. Smith
University of Minnesota Press, 1931

Class Size in High School English, Methods and Results was first published in 1931. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

More than half this book consists of concrete description of methods found useful in teaching classes of fifty or more pupils in ninth grade English. Subjects dealt with include the care of individual differences, assignment and motivation of work, stimulating pupil participation, insuring activity and variety in class work, and arranging for individual and group competition. Dr. Smith shows how different methods may be adapted to classes of different sizes, and also presents new data on relative opportunity and relative achievement of pupils in large and small classes, relative attitudes and character traits revealed by pupils, and comparative strain on the teacher in the different types of classes. The volume includes a complete account of all class size studies that appeared up to the middle of 1930, also analysis of trends in class size in high schools as revealed through published reports and through the hitherto unpublished study made by Dr. Earl Hudelson in 1929. Dr. Smith is specialist in secondary school English under the National Survey of Secondary Education.

"It is rich in suggestion of methods of teaching to be used with large and small classes in English, and, by inference, in other fields of instruction," –Leonard V. Koos, University of Chicago."Very useful and carefully work out techniques for handling large classes," –Allan Abbott, Teachers College, Columbia University.
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Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness
Daniel Bernardi
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

Leading scholars address the myriad ways in which America’s attitudes about race informed the production of Hollywood films from the 1920s through the 1960s. From the predominantly white star system to segregated mise-en-scènes, Hollywood films reinforced institutionalized racism. The contributors to this volume examine how assumptions about white superiority and colored inferiority and the politics of segregation and assimilation affected Hollywood’s classic period.

Contributors: Eric Avila, UCLA; Aaron Baker, Arizona State U; Karla Rae Fuller, Columbia College; Andrew Gordon, U of Florida; Allison Graham, U of Memphis; Joanne Hershfield, U of North Carolina; Cindy Hing-Yuk Wond, College of Staten Island, CUNY; Arthur Knight, William and Mary; Sarah Madsen Hardy, Bryn Mawr; Gina Marchetti, U of Maryland; Gary W. McDonogh; Chandra Mukerji, UC, San Diego; Martin F. Norden, U of Massachusetts; Brian O'Neil, U of Southern Mississippi; Roberta E. Pearson, Cardiff U; Marguerite H. Rippy, Marymount U; Nicholas Sammond; Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, U of Arizona; Peter Stanfield, Southampton Institute; Kelly Thomas; Hernan Vera, U of Florida; Karen Wallace, U of Wisconsin, Oshkosh; Thomas E. Wartenberg, Mount Holyoke; Geoffrey M. White, U of Hawai’i; and Jane Yi.

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Classifying Criminal Offenders with the MMPI-2
The Megargee System
Edwin I. Megargee
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
An essential resource for employing this widely used personality assessment test in correctional settings. Originally developed in the 1970s and now revised for the MMPI-2, the Megargee System provides a method for classifying criminal offenders into groups based on their MMPI-2 profiles. This empirically derived system has been investigated in a wide variety of criminal justice settings including corrections, probation, and parole. It has been tested in minimum, medium, and maximum federal, state, and military correctional institutions, in local jails, in halfway houses, and in forensic mental health units. Its use has been extended to female offenders, older men, and juvenile delinquents. Integrating thirty years of research, this new resource fully evaluates the reliability, validity, sources, and uses of the Megargee system. Classifying Criminal Offenders with the MMPI-2 describes how the system was originally derived and validated and gives instructions on how to classify the original MMPI and MMPI-2 profiles of male and female criminal offenders. It integrates the findings of more than one hundred independent studies with previously unpublished original research investigating the characteristics of each of the system's empirically derived male and female types. On the basis of these data, the authors recommend the optimal settings, change agents, and treatment programs for each type of offender. As the basic reference work on the MMPI-2 Megargee system, this volume will be an essential resource for criminal justice practitioners, psychologists interested in the MMPI-2, and researchers in criminal classification and personality assessment. Edwin I. Megargee is professor of psychology at Florida State University and recognized as the foremost expert on the use of the MMPI instruments in correctional settings. Joyce L. Carbonell is professor of psychology at Florida State University. Martin J. Bohn Jr. is chief psychologist at Florida State Hospital. Greta L. Sliger is a clinical psychologist in Tallahassee, Florida.
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Clement Greenberg
A Life
Florence Rubenfeld
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

The only book-length biography of this controversial critic, now in paperback for the first time!

Love him or hate him, admire him or revile him, there is no doubt that Clement Greenberg was the most influential critic of modern art in the second half of the twentieth century. His championing of abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and David Smith put the United States on the international art map. His support for color-field painters Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland dramatically accelerated their careers. The intellectual power of his polemical essays helped bring about the midcentury shift in which New York replaced Paris as the art capital of the Western world; his aggressive personality and fierce involvement in the New York art scene triggered a backlash so potent that one critic termed it a “patricide.”

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Clement Greenberg, Late Writings
Clement Greenberg
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) was a colossus of twentieth-century American art, achieving a degree of authority almost unimaginable for a critic today. For more than thirty years he was both lionized as a proponent of formalism and criticized for his perceived dogmatism. In the postwar period Greenberg used his position of influence to advocate the importance of abstract expressionism and color-field painting and to establish the careers of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning. With the coming of pop art, performance and conceptual art, and postmodernism, however, Greenberg found his position increasingly challenged.

Edited with an introduction by critic Robert C. Morgan, Clement Greenberg, Late Writings is the first collection from the period 1970 to 1990, and the only comprehensive resource for Greenberg’s thought during the last third of his life. While earlier works have covered Greenberg’s early and middle career, this volume spans his mature period, during which he reevaluates and refines many of his earlier tenets in some of his most carefully crafted and engaging work. Exploring a surprising breadth of issues and mediums and demonstrating a depth of aesthetic and philosophical insights, in these relatively unknown works Greenberg incites a new direction for modernism beyond the twentieth century.

This essential volume includes five interviews from the end of his life in which Greenberg revisits some of the concerns of his formative years, illuminating the progression of his thought. Late Writings is an integral resource as issues of quality and significance in the dynamic world of art continue to be redefined.

Clement Greenberg was the most influential art critic of the postwar period. He was the author of numerous books, and his essays appeared in art magazines as well as such publications as Partisan Review, Commentary, and The Nation.

Robert C. Morgan is the author of The End of the Art World and of a monograph on the optical painter Vasarely. In addition to his work as a critic, artist, art historian, and curator, he is visiting professor of art at Hunter College in New York City.

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Clinical Decisions and Laboratory Use
Donald Connelly
University of Minnesota Press, 1982
Clinical Decisions and Laboratory Use was first published in 1982.As the national expenditure for health care continues to mount, pressures from within and outside of medicine are encouraging more effective and economical use of medical resources. Though much of the current attention is focused on a few high-cost, technologically dramatic procedures, the rapidly growing use of laboratory tests makes up a substantial portion of heal care costs. Evidence suggests that a significant amount of laboratory use is ineffective and unnecessary and could be eliminated with no harmful effects on the quality of care.This book, which is based on the Conference on Clinical Decision Making and Laboratory Use held at the University of Minnesota in 1980, focuses on the problems faced by health care professionals as they attempt to control laboratory costs and suggests ways of making rational and effective decisions. The 32 chapters deal with the following topics: Medical Decisions, Technology, and Social Needs; The Process of Clinical Decision Making; Clinical Decisions and the Clinical Laboratory; Medical Education and Effective Laboratory Use; Tools for Supporting the Decision-Making Process; and Research Initiatives Toward Effective Decision Making and Laboratory Use. Physicians, clinic and hospital administrators, laboratory directors, and health care planners will find this book a useful source of information in establishing their own procedures for clinical decision making.
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Clocking Out
The Machinery of Life in 1960s Italian Cinema
Karen Pinkus
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

An original reflection on Italy’s postwar boom considers potentials for resistance in today’s neoliberal (dis)order

What can 1960s Italian cinema teach us about how to live and work today? Clocking Out challenges readers to think about labor, cinema, and machines as they are intertwined in complex ways in Italian cinema of the early ’60s. Drawing on critical theory and archival research, this book asks what kinds of fractures we might exploit for living otherwise, for resisting traditional narratives, and for anticapitalism. 

Italy in the 1960s was a place where the mass-producing factory was the primary mode of understanding what it meant to work, but it was also a time when things might have gone another way. This thinking and living differently appears in the cracks, lapses, or moments of film. Clocking Out is organized into scenes from an obscure 1962 Italian comedy (Renzo e Luciana, from Boccaccio 70). Reconsidering the origins of paradigms such as clocking in and out, “society is a factory,” and the gendered division of labor, Karen Pinkus challenges readers to think through cinema, enabling us to see gaps and breakdowns in the postwar order. She focuses on the Olivetti typewriter company and a little-known film from an Italian anthology movie, thinking with cinema about the power of the Autonomia movement, the refusal to work, and the questions of wages, paternalism, and sexual difference. 

Alternating microscopic attention to details and zooming outward, Pinkus examines rituals of production, automation, repetition, and fractures in a narrative of labor that begins in the 1960s and extends to the present—the age of the precariat, right-wing resentment, and nostalgia for an order that was probably never was.

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Cloning
A Biologist Reports
Robert Gilmore McKinnell
University of Minnesota Press, 1985

Cloning was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Cloning has become in recent years a subject of widespread speculation: the word is a source of fear and wonder, the concept a jumping-off point for the fantasies of cartoonists, film producers, and novelists. With this book, cell biologist Robert Gilmore McKinnell provides the first clear scientific explanation of the procedure for general readers.

Cloning is best defined as the asexual reproduction of genetic duplicates. The word clone derives from the Greek word for a twig or a slip, and the first "cloners" were in fact horticulturalists. Early attempts to clone animals culminated in 1952 when biologists reported that they had produced frogs by transplanting genetic material from an embryonic body cell into an egg from which the nucleus had been removed.

In this account, McKinnell traces the historical background of cloning and describes in detail the modern procedure used in the cloning of frogs—the highest animal thus far cloned. He emphasizes that the purpose of cloning is not to produce numerous frogs—or people—but rather to serve as a tool in biological research—to achieve greater understanding of cancer and aging, immunobiology and the differentiation of cells.

McKinnell also deals with questions about potential mammalian clones and examines the social, ethical, and biological problems we face in our considerations about human cloning. He concludes that human clones are not necessary for research purposes and that the diversity achieved with sexual reproduction is far more desirable than the sameness of cloned creatures.

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Close Encounters
Film, Feminism, and Science Ficiton
Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1991

Close Encounters was first published in 1991. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Offers new critical approaches to science fiction as represented in film, television, fan culture, and other non-literary media. Addresses the way conventional notions of sexual difference are reworked by science fiction film. Includes the complete script of Peter Wollen's 1987 film Friendship's Death.

Contributors: Raymond Bellour, Janet Bergstrom, Roger Dadoun, Harvey R. Greenberg, M.D., Henry Jenkins III, Enno Patalas, Constance Penley, Vivian Sobchak, Lynn Spigel, and Peter Wollen.

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Closed Encounters
Literary Politics and Public Culture
Jeffrey Wallen
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

Closed Encounters was first published in 1998. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

It's committed. It's political. It's socially engaged. It's academic criticism in the nineties. But what does it achieve? In a provocative and fair-minded look at current critical practices and the future of the academy, Jeffrey Wallen draws a disturbing picture of public intellectuals in search of a public and cultural critics unable to enter a dialogue with others.

Wallen argues that literary politics is no substitute for debate on genuine political issues. Taking up several of the most influential critics of recent years-Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Bérubé, Gerald Graff, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and many others-Wallen asks: Can their desire to persuade an audience beyond the classroom be fulfilled? And can cultural critics realize their ambitious social and institutional goals for change? In a work that is neither of the Left nor of the Right, but likely to unsettle both, Wallen argues that literary criticism actually undermines the prospects for the dialogue it calls out for.

In addition, Wallen argues that the institutionalization of critiques of truth and difference-critiques that appear to liberate us by revealing that knowledge and values are constructed, and can therefore be transformed-often leads to a further constraining of thought and narrowing of outlooks. In his analysis of the administration of conflict, Wallen describes the troubled state of academic freedom and points to a shift from the institutional protection of dissenting views to the institutional protection from views one finds unpleasant.

Yet the prospects are not bleak: Wallen emphasizes that academic critics continue to play a crucial role in crafting what we expect from discussion. In this spirit, Closed Encounters lays the groundwork for fashioning a truly public, socially engaged criticism.

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Coastal Marshes
Ecology and Wildlife Management
Robert H. Chabreck
University of Minnesota Press, 1988

Coastal Marshes was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The coastal regions of the United States form a highly diversified environment. In addition to sandy beaches and rocky shorelines, there are lagoons, rivers, estuaries, and marshes. The last are a dominant features of many coastal areas and serve as a transition between sea and uplands. Coastal marshes have been a zone for human development, attractive to industrial and residential building because they provide water frontage. But the public is becoming aware of the great value of these wetlands to fisheries and wildlife and to the local economy that depends on them.

This book describes coastal marshes in terms of form, function, ecology, wildlife value, and management. Robert H. Chabreck's emphasis is on the marshes of the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico (there are 5,500 square miles of marshland in Louisiana alone), but he also deals with marshes on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Plant and animal communities are each given a chapter, and the book concludes with considerations of future uses and needs. The author provides references, a glossary, and a list of scientific names, along with numerous illustrations, including a section of color photographs.

For thirty years, Robert H. Chabreck has been engaged in research and management of coastal marshes and has often served as a consultant in wetland ecology. He is a professor of wildlife at Louisiana State University.

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Code and Clay, Data and Dirt
Five Thousand Years of Urban Media
Shannon Mattern
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

For years, pundits have trumpeted the earthshattering changes that big data and smart networks will soon bring to our cities. But what if cities have long been built for intelligence, maybe for millennia? In Code and Clay, Data and Dirt Shannon Mattern advances the provocative argument that our urban spaces have been “smart” and mediated for thousands of years.

Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt goes far beyond the standard historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Mattern shows that in their architecture, laws, street layouts, and civic knowledge—and through technologies including the telephone, telegraph, radio, printing, writing, and even the human voice—cities have long negotiated a rich exchange between analog and digital, code and clay, data and dirt, ether and ore. 

Mattern’s vivid prose takes readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories, scenes, and locations, synthesizing a new narrative for our urban spaces. Taking media archaeology to the city’s streets, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt reveals new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories.

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Codes of Misconduct
Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay
Ashwini Tambe
University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, legislators in Bombay passed a series of repetitive laws seeking to control prostitution. During the same time, Bombay’s sex industry grew vast in scale. Ashwini Tambe explores why these remarkably similar laws failed to achieve their goal and questions the actual purpose of such lawmaking.

Against the backdrop of the industrial growth of Bombay, Codes of Misconduct examines the relationship between lawmaking, law enforcement, and sexual commerce. Ashwini Tambe challenges linear readings of how laws create effects and demonstrates that the regulation and criminalization of prostitution were not contrasting approaches to prostitution but different modes of state coercion. By analyzing legal prohibitions as productive forces, she also probes the pornographic imagination of the colonial state, showing how regulations made sexual commerce more visible but rendered the prostitute silent.

Codes of Misconduct engages with debates on state control of sex work and traces how a colonial legacy influences contemporary efforts to contain the spread of HIV and decriminalize sex workers in India today. In doing so, Tambe’s work not only adds to our understanding of empire, sexuality, and the law, it also sheds new light on the long history of Bombay’s transnational links and the social worlds of its underclasses.
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Cognitive Fictions
Joseph Tabbi
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

The first comprehensive look at the effect of new technologies on contemporary American fiction

Bringing together cognitive science and literary analysis to map a new "media ecology," Cognitive Fictions limns an evolutionary process in which literature must find its place in an artificial environment partly produced and thoroughly mediated by technological means. Joseph Tabbi provides a penetrating account of a developing consciousness emerging from the struggle between print and electronic systems of communication.

Central to Tabbi’s work is the relation between the arrangement of communicating "modules" that cognitive science uses to describe the human mind and the arrangement of visual, verbal, and aural media in our technological culture. He looks at particular literary works by Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, David Markson, Lynne Tillman, Paul Auster, and others as both inscriptions of thought consistent with distributed cognitive models, and as self-creations out of the media environment. The first close reading of contemporary American writing in the light of systems theory and cognitive science, Cognitive Fictions makes needed sense of how the moment-by-moment operations of human thought find narrative form in a world increasingly defined by competing and often incompatible representations.
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Cognitive Models of Science
Ronald Giere
University of Minnesota Press, 1992
Delineates the emerging impact the cognitive sciences are having on the content and methods of philosophy.
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Cold Comfort
Life at the Top of the Map
Barton Sutter
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

A whimsical look at the pleasures and challenges of living in the far north-now in paperback!

A whimsical look at the pleasures and challenges of living in the far north-now in paperback!

"Sutter knows Duluth and the hinterlands to the North the way Garrison Keillor knows Lake Wobegon and the prairies. With a nimble wit and a roving eye for detail, Sutter goes beneath the veneer of the North Country to expose its attraction, its quirks, and its characters. There isn’t a clinker in the collection, and even if you’ve lived your entire life in Duluth or the North Country, you’ll see your home place with new insight after reading Cold Comfort." Duluth News-Tribune"Mostly whimsical, sometimes meditative, but most often warmhearted, these essays explore Lake Superior, its neighboring rivers and streams, duck hunting, cross-country skiing, bridges, cider-pressing parties, and camping out in the family car. Sutter’s prose is clean, straightforward, and sometimes mirthful." Chicago New City "An oddly brilliant and lovely little book. . . . Resonant, evocative, and splendidly written." Jim HarrisonTemperatures that dive to forty degrees below zero are only part of life in northern Minnesota, according to award-winning writer Barton Sutter. Cold Comfort is his temperamental tribute to the city of Duluth, Minnesota, where bears wander the streets and canoe racks are standard equipment. Winner of a 1998 Northeast Minnesota Book AwardWinner of a 1998 Minnesota Book Award for Creative Nonfiction
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Cold War Exiles in Mexico
U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance
Rebecca M. Schreiber
University of Minnesota Press, 2008
The onset of the Cold War in the 1940s and 1950s precipitated the exile of many U.S. writers, artists, and filmmakers to Mexico. Rebecca M. Schreiber illuminates the work of these cultural exiles in Mexico City and Cuernavaca and reveals how their artistic collaborations formed a vital and effective culture of resistance.
 
As Schreiber recounts, the first exiles to arrive in Mexico after World War II were visual artists, many of them African-American, including Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, and John Wilson. Individuals who were blacklisted from the Hollywood film industry, such as Dalton Trumbo and Hugo Butler, followed these artists, as did writers, including Willard Motley. Schreiber examines the artists’ work with the printmaking collective Taller de Gráfica Popular and the screenwriters’ collaborations with filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, as well as the influence of the U.S. exiles on artistic and political movements.

The Cold War culture of political exile challenged American exceptionalist ideology and, as Schreiber reveals, demonstrated the resilience of oppositional art, literature, and film in response to state repression.
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The Collected letters of Sir Arthur Pinero
Arthur Wing PineroJ.P. Wearing, Editor
University of Minnesota Press, 1974

The Collected letters of Sir Arthur Pinero was first published in 1974. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Sir Arthur Pinero's letters, in the collection published in this volume, present a vivid, behind-the-scenes look at the theater in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sir Arthur was one of the most important and influential playwrights of the English stage during his lifetime. These letters, 337 in number, most of which have not been published before, span a period of sixty years, from 1873, when Pinero began his career as an actor at the age of eighteen, to 1933, the year before his death.

Pinero was totally absorbed with the theater, and his correspondence provides a record of his ideas about his own work and the contemporary theatrical climate. From his earlier years he gives us impressions of the famous actors and actresses of the period—Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and the Bancrofts, who were his favorites—and he later acted with them, too.

The letters trace well the growth of Pinero's work as a dramatist, and are especially valuable because he wrote little publicly on dramatic theory in general or on his own work in particular. They reveal a dramatist who knew exactly what he wanted in the theater and how he felt it ought to be realized on the stage. He devoted much time and discussion to the careful choosing of a cast and other aspects of production. The letters tell, with as well as reporting on the critical and public reception of his plays. The correspondence also demonstrates his involvement with the development of the native English drama in its own right, and includes forthright comments on Ibsen and on continental drama generally.

Many of the letters are addressed to such notables as Henry James, Edmund Gosse, George Bernard Shaw, Henry Irving, and Sir George Alexander, all major theatrical figures at the turn of the century.

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The Collected Poems Of Édouard Glissant
Édouard Glissant
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

The complete poems of the two-time finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature, available in English for the first time

This volume collects and translates—most for the first time—the nine volumes of poetry published by Édouard Glissant, a poet, novelist, and critic increasingly recognized as one of the great writers of the twentieth century. The poems bring to life what Glissant calls “an archipelago-like reality,” partaking of the exchanges between Europe and its former colonies, between humans and their geographies, between the poet and the natural world. 

Reciting and re-creating histories of the African diaspora, Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World, the slave trade, and the West Indies, Glissant underscores the role of poetic language in changing both past and present irrevocably. As translator Jeff Humphries writes in his introduction, Glissant’s poetry embraces the aesthetic creed of the French symbolists Mallarmé and Rimbaud (“The poet must make himself into a seer”) and aims at nothing less than a hallucinatory experience of imagination in which the differences among poem, reader, and subject dissolve into one immediate present.

Born in Martinique in 1928, influenced by the controversial Martinican poet/politician Aimé Césaire, and educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, Édouard Glissant has emerged as one of the most influential postcolonial theorists, novelists, playwrights, and poets not only in the Caribbean but also in contemporary French letters. He has twice been a finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature as well as the recipient of both the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Charles Veillon in France. His works include Poetics of Relation, Caribbean Discourse, Faulkner Mississippi, and the novel The Ripening. He currently serves as Distinguished Professor of French at City University of New York, Graduate Center.

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Collecting Mexico
Museums, Monuments, and the Creation of National Identity
Shelley E. Garrigan
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Collecting Mexico centers on the ways in which aesthetics and commercialism intersected in officially sanctioned public collections and displays in late nineteenth-century Mexico. Shelley E. Garrigan approaches questions of origin, citizenry, membership, and difference by reconstructing the lineage of institutionally collected objects around which a modern Mexican identity was negotiated. In doing so, she arrives at a deeper understanding of the ways in which displayed objects become linked with nationalistic meaning and why they exert such persuasive force.

Spanning the Porfiriato period from 1867 to 1910, Collecting Mexico illuminates the creation and institutionalization of a Mexican cultural inheritance. Employing a wide range of examples—including the erection of public monuments, the culture of fine arts, and the representation of Mexico at the Paris World’s Fair of 1889—Garrigan pursues two strands of thought that weave together in surprising ways: national heritage as a transcendental value and patrimony as potential commercial interest.

Collecting Mexico shows that the patterns of institutional collecting reveal how Mexican public collections engendered social meaning. Using extensive archival materials, Garrigan’s close readings of the processes of collection building offer a new vantage point for viewing larger issues of identity, social position, and cultural/capital exchange.

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Collecting Visible Evidence
Jane Gaines
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

A redefinition of the nature of documentary film.

In documentary studies, the old distinctions between fiction and nonfiction no longer apply, as contemporary film and video artists produce works that defy classification. Coming together to make sense of these developments, the contributors to this book effectively redefine documentary studies. They trace the documentary impulse in the early detective camera, in the reenactment of battle scenes from World War I, and in the telecast of the Nevada A-bomb test in 1952. Other topics include experiments in virtual reality; the crisis of representation in anthropology; and video art and documentary work that challenge the asymmetry of the postcolonial us/them divide.

Contributors: Jenny Cool; Elizabeth Cowie, U of Kent; Faye Ginsburg, New York U; Tom Gunning, U of Chicago; Eithne Johnson; Alexandra Juhasz, Pitzer College; Neil Lerner, Davidson College; Akira Mizuta Lippit, San Francisco State U; Nancy Lutkehaus, USC; James M. Moran; Vivian Sobchack, UCLA; Linda Williams, U of California, Berkeley; Mark Williams, Dartmouth College; Mark J. P. Wolf, Concordia U, Wisconsin.
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The Colonial Construction of Indian Country
Native American Literatures and Federal Indian Law
Eric Cheyfitz
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

A guide to the colonization and projected decolonization of Native America

In The Colonial Construction of Indian Country, Eric Cheyfitz mounts a pointed historical critique of colonialism through careful analysis of the dialogue between Native American literatures and federal Indian law. Illuminating how these literatures indict colonial practices, he argues that if the decolonization of Indian country is to be achieved, then federal Indian law must be erased and replaced with independent Native nation sovereignty—because subordinate sovereignty, the historical regime, is not sovereignty at all.

 

At the same time, Cheyfitz argues that Native American literatures, specifically U.S. American Indian literatures, cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of U.S. federal Indian law: the matrix of colonialism in Indian country. Providing intersectional readings of a range of literary and legal texts, he discusses such authors as Louise Erdrich, Frances Washburn, James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, and others. Cheyfitz examines how American Indian writers and critics have responded to the impact of law on Native life, revealing recent trends in Native writing that build upon traditional modes of storytelling and governance. 

 

With a focus on resistance to the colonial regime of federal Indian law, The Colonial Construction of Indian Country not only elucidates how Native American literatures and federal Indian law are each crucial to any reading of the other, it also guides readers to better understand the genocidal assault on Indigenous peoples by Western structures of literacy, politics, and law.

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Colonial Harem
Malek Alloula
University of Minnesota Press, 1986

A collection of picture postcards of Algerian women exploited by the French, this “album” illustrates a powerful analysis of the distorting, denigrating effects of their presence on Algerian Society.

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Colonial Inscriptions
Race, Sex, and Class in Kenya
Carolyn Martin Shaw
University of Minnesota Press, 1995

In Kenyan colonialist imagery, the Kikuyu were vilified as deceitful servants while the Maasai were romanticized as noble savages in a fashion similar to American representation of the Black slave and the "wild" Indian. Carolyn Martin Shaw examines this imagery in the works of historians and ethnographers, as well as in novels and films.

Through the works of Louis Leakey, Jomo Kenyatta, Elspeth Huxley, and Isak Dinesen, along with her own ethnographic research, Martin Shaw investigates the discourses that shaped inequalities, rivalries, and fantasies in colonial Kenya. She explores narratives of domination and subordination, arguing that Europeans brought to Africa long-established ideas of difference that influenced racial inequalities in the colonial situation. Including discussion of the controversial practice of female genital mutilation, Colonial Inscriptions presents an African American woman's views of how images of African colonialism have been influenced by European and American racism and sexual fantasies.
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Colonization Of Psychic Space
A Psychoanalytic Social Theory Of Oppression
Kelly Oliver
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

Reveals the psychic and social costs of racial and sexual oppression

We are, Julia Kristeva writes, strangers to ourselves; and indeed much of contemporary theory, whether psychoanalytic, historical, social, or critical, describes the human condition as one of alienation. Eloquently arguing that we cannot explain the development of individuality or subjectivity apart from its social context, Kelly Oliver makes a powerful case for recognizing the social aspects of alienation and the psychic aspects of oppression.

Oliver’s work shows how existentialist and psychoanalytic notions of alienation cover up specific forms of racist and sexist alienation that serve as the underside of the human condition. She reveals that such notions are actually symptomatic of the subject’s anxiety and guilt over the oppression on which his privileged position rests. Not only does such alienation not embody subjectivity and humanity, it in fact undermines them.Asserting that sublimation and forgiveness—and not alienation—constitute subjectivity, Oliver explores the complex ways in which the alienation unique to oppression leads to depression, shame, anger, or violence; and how these affects, now often misread and misdiagnosed, can be transformed into agency, individuality, solidarity, and community.
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Colonizing Trick
National Culture And Imperial Citizenship In Early America
David Kazanjian
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

An illuminating look at the concepts of race, nation, and equality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America

The idea that “all men are created equal” is as close to a universal tenet as exists in American history. In this hard-hitting book, David Kazanjian interrogates this tenet, exploring transformative flash points in early America when the belief in equality came into contact with seemingly contrary ideas about race and nation. The Colonizing Trick depicts early America as a white settler colony in the process of becoming an empire-—one deeply integrated with Euro-American political economy, imperial ventures in North America and Africa, and pan-American racial formations.

Kazanjian traces tensions between universal equality and racial or national particularity through theoretically informed critical readings of a wide range of texts: the political writings of David Walker and Maria Stewart, the narratives of black mariners, economic treatises, the personal letters of Thomas Jefferson and Phillis Wheatley, Charles Brockden Brown’s fiction, congressional tariff debates, international treaties, and popular novelettes about the U.S.–Mexico War and the Yucatán’s Caste War. Kazanjian shows how emergent racial and national formations do not contradict universalist egalitarianism; rather, they rearticulate it, making equality at once restricted, formal, abstract, and materially embodied.
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The Color of Stone
Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America
Charmaine A. Nelson
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture was a highly politicized international movement. Based in Rome, many expatriate American sculptors created works that represented black female subjects in compelling and problematic ways. Rejecting pigment as dangerous and sensual, adherence to white marble abandoned the racialization of the black body by skin color.

In The Color of Stone, Charmaine A. Nelson brilliantly analyzes a key, but often neglected, aspect of neoclassical sculpture—color. Considering three major works—Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave, William Wetmore Story’s Cleopatra, and Edmonia Lewis’s Death of Cleopatra—she explores the intersection of race, sex, and class to reveal the meanings each work holds in terms of colonial histories of visual representation as well as issues of artistic production, identity, and subjectivity. She also juxtaposes these sculptures with other types of art to scrutinize prevalent racial discourses and to examine how the black female subject was made visible in high art.

By establishing the centrality of race within the discussion of neoclassical sculpture, Nelson provides a model for a black feminist art history that at once questions and destabilizes canonical texts.

Charmaine A. Nelson is assistant professor of art history at McGill University.

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Comedy Is A Man In Trouble
Slapstick In American Movies
Alan Dale
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

An enthusiast’s look at the art of physical comedy—now in paperback!

Legendary screen comedian Jerry Lewis once said, "The premise of all comedy is a man in trouble." The films that endeared Lewis and others to us hinged on the physical assault of their hero, the pie in the face or slip on the banana peel that reduced the movie star to the level of the audience. Alan Dale presents a lively and accessible look at slapstick, a form of comedy with roots in the circus and vaudeville that has been refashioned by actors ranging from Buster Keaton to the Marx Brothers, from Katharine Hepburn to Jim Carrey.

Winner of the Theater Library Association’s Special Jury Prize for Distinguished Achievement
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The Comic Self
Toward Dispossession
Timothy C. Campbell
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A provocative and unconventional call to dispossess the self of itself

 

Challenging the contemporary notion of “self-care” and the Western mania for “self-possession,” The Comic Self deploys philosophical discourse and literary expression to propose an alternate and less toxic model for human aspiration: a comic self. Timothy Campbell and Grant Farred argue that the problem with the “care of the self,” from Foucault onward, is that it reinforces identity, strengthening the relation between I and mine. This assertion of self-possession raises a question vital for understanding how we are to live with each other and ourselves: How can you care for something that is truly not yours?

The answer lies in the unrepresentable comic self. Campbell and Farred range across philosophy, literature, and contemporary comedy—engaging with Socrates, Burke, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Levinas; Shakespeare, Cervantes, Woolf, Kafka, and Pasolini; and Stephen Colbert, David Chappelle, and the cast of Saturday Night Live. They uncover spaces where the dispossession of self and, with it, the dismantling of the regime of self-care are possible. Arguing that the comic self always keeps a precarious closeness to the tragic self, while opposing the machinations of capital endemic to the logic of self-possession, they provide a powerful and provocative antidote to the tragic self that so dominates the tenor of our times.

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Coming Community
Giorgio Agamben
University of Minnesota Press, 1993

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Coming Home to China
Yi-Fu Tuan
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

In the summer of 2005, distinguished geographer Yi-Fu Tuan ventured to China to speak at an international architectural conference, returning for the first time to the place he had left as a child sixty-four years before.  He traveled from Beijing to Shanghai, addressing college audiences, floating down the Yangtze River on a riverboat, and visiting his former home in Chongqing. 

In this enchanting volume, Tuan’s childhood memories and musings on the places encountered during this homecoming are interspersed with new lectures, engaging overarching principles of human geography as well as the changing Chinese landscape. Throughout, Tuan’s interactions with his hosts, with his colleague’s children, and even with a garrulous tour guide, offer insights into one who has spent his life studying place, culture, and self.

At the beginning of his trip, Tuan wondered if he would be a stranger among people who looked like him. By its end, he reevaluates his own self-definition as a hyphenated American and sheds new light on human identity’s complex roots in history, geography, and language.

Yi-Fu Tuan is author of Cosmos and Hearth, Dear Colleague, and Space and Place, all from Minnesota. He retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998.

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Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture
A Harvard Design Magazine Reader
William Saunders
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
More than ever, architectural design is seen as a means to promote commercial goals rather than as an end in itself. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, for example, simply cannot be considered apart from its intended role as a catalyst for the economic revitalization of Bilbao and its ability to attract tourist dollars, regardless of its architectural merits. A built environment intended to seduce consumers is more likely to offer instant gratification than to invite independent thought and reflection. But how harmful, if at all, is this unprecedented commercialization of architecture? 

Framed with a provocative introduction by Kenneth Frampton, the contributions to Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture stake out a variety of positions in the debate over the extent to which it is possible—or desirable—to escape from, resist, or suggest plausible alternatives to the dominant culture of consumer capitalism. Rejecting any dreamy nostalgia for an idealized present or past in which design is completely divorced from commerce—and, in some cases, celebrating the pleasures of spectacle—the individual essays range from indictments of particular architects and critiques of the profession to broader concerns about what the phenomenon of commodification means for the practice of democracy and the health of society. 

Bringing together an impressive and varied group of critics and practitioners, Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture will help to sharpen the discussion of how design can respond to our hypercommodified culture. 

Contributors: Michael Benedikt, Luis Fernández-Galiano, Thomas Frank, Kevin Ervin Kelley, Daniel Naegele, Rick Poynor, Michael Sorkin, Wouter Vanstiphout. 

William S. Saunders is editor of Harvard Design Magazine and assistant dean for external relations at the Harvard Design School. He is the author of Modern Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller

Kenneth Frampton is Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and author of many books, including Labour, Work, and Architecture.
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Commodities of Care
The Business of HIV Testing in China
Elsa L. Fan
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

How global health practices can end up reorganizing practices of care for the people and communities they seek to serve 

Commodities of Care examines the unanticipated effects of global health interventions, ideas, and practices as they unfold in communities of men who have sex with men (MSM) in China. Targeted for the scaling-up of HIV testing, Elsa L. Fan examines how the impact of this initiative has transformed these men from subjects of care into commodities of care: through the use of performance-based financing tied to HIV testing, MSM have become a source of economic and political capital. 

In ethnographic detail, Fan shows how this particular program, ushered in by global health donors, became the prevailing strategy to control the epidemic in China in the late 2000s. Fan examines the implementation of MSM testing and its effects among these men, arguing that the intervention produced new markets of men, driven by the push to meet testing metrics. 

Fan shows how men who have sex with men in China came to see themselves as part of a global “MSM” category, adopting new selfhoods and socialities inextricably tied to HIV and to testing. Wider trends in global health programming have shaped national public health responses in China and, this book reveals, have radically altered the ways health, disease, and care are addressed. 

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The Common Camp
Architecture of Power and Resistance in Israel–Palestine
Irit Katz
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

Seeing the camp as a persistent political instrument in Israel–Palestine and beyond

The Common Camp underscores the role of the camp as a spatial instrument employed for reshaping, controlling, and struggling over specific territories and populations. Focusing on the geopolitical complexity of Israel–Palestine and the dramatic changes it has experienced during the past century, this book explores the region’s extensive networks of camps and their existence as both a tool of colonial power and a makeshift space of resistance. 

Examining various forms of camps devised by and for Zionist settlers, Palestinian refugees, asylum seekers, and other groups, Irit Katz demonstrates how the camp serves as a common thread in shaping lands and lives of subjects from across the political spectrum. Analyzing the architectural and political evolution of the camp as a modern instrument engaged by colonial and national powers (as well as those opposing them), Katz offers a unique perspective on the dynamics of Israel–Palestine, highlighting how spatial transience has become permanent in the ongoing story of this contested territory. 

The Common Camp presents a novel approach to the concept of the camp, detailing its varied history as an apparatus used for population containment and territorial expansion as well as a space of everyday life and subversive political action. Bringing together a broad range of historical and ethnographic materials within the context of this singular yet versatile entity, the book locates the camp at the core of modern societies and how they change and transform. 

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The Common Pot
The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast
Lisa Brooks
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

Illuminates the significance of writing to colonial-era Native American resistance

Literary critics frequently portray early Native American writers either as individuals caught between two worlds or as subjects who, even as they defied the colonial world, struggled to exist within it. In striking counterpoint to these analyses, Lisa Brooks demonstrates the ways in which Native leaders—including Samson Occom, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, and William Apess—adopted writing as a tool to reclaim rights and land in the Native networks of what is now the northeastern United States.

“The Common Pot,” a metaphor that appears in Native writings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, embodies land, community, and the shared space of sustenance among relations. Far from being corrupted by forms of writing introduced by European colonizers, Brooks contends, Native people frequently rejected the roles intended for them by their missionary teachers and used the skills they acquired to compose petitions, political tracts, and speeches; to record community councils and histories; and most important, to imagine collectively the routes through which the Common Pot could survive.Reframing the historical landscape of the region, Brooks constructs a provocative new picture of Native space before and after colonization. By recovering and reexamining Algonquian and Iroquoian texts, she shows that writing was not a foreign technology but rather a crucial weapon in the Native Americans’ arsenal as they resisted—and today continue to oppose—colonial domination.
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Communication
Paula Bialski
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

On contemporary communication in its various human and nonhuman forms

Contemporary communication puts us not only in conversation with one another but also with our machinery. Machine communication—to communicate not just via but also with machines—is therefore the focus of this volume. Diving into digital communications history, Finn Brunton brings to the fore the alienness of computational communication by looking at network timekeeping, automated trolling, and early attempts at communication with extraterrestrial life. Picking up this fascination with inhuman communication, Mercedes Bunz then performs a close reading of interaction design and interfaces to show how technology addresses humans (as very young children). Finally, Paula Bialski shares her findings from a field study of software development, analyzing the communicative forms that occur when code is written by separate people. Today, communication unfolds merely between two or more conscious entities but often includes an invisible third party. Inspired by this drastic shift, this volume uncovers new meanings of what it means “to communicate.”  

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Communication and Development
A Study of Two Indian Villages
Y.V. Lakshmana Rao
University of Minnesota Press, 1966

Communication and Development was first published in 1966. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

What role does communication play in the economic, social, and political development of a community? The results of the study reported here, based on comprehensive field work in two small villages in India, throw considerable light on that question, one which is of fundamental importance to those concerned with rates and patterns of growth in any developing country.

In this study, the term "communication" refers to a social process—the flow of information, the circulation of knowledge and ideas in society, the propagation and internalization of thoughts. It does not refer to the media or means of communication, such as electronics, roads and railways, or vehicles.

The two villages studied, both in South India, were at contrasting stages of development. One was becoming industrialized, while the other still clung to such traditional ways as the barter system. To carry out the field work for his study, Dr. Rao lived in these villages for several months, talking at length with the people, obtaining information about their attitudes, beliefs, and opinions, and observing them and their surroundings with a trained eye. He also checked official records for pertinent information. He analyzes his findings from a psychological and sociological standpoint and, in addition, provides an intimate description of the village life.

The book will be of particular interest to communications specialists, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, economists, and others concerned with studies of the developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

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The Communist States in Disarray, 1965-1971
Adam Bromke and Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1972

The Communist States in Disarray, 1965–1971 was first published in 1972. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Through a survey and analysis of recent developments in the communist states and in their relations with one another and with other nations this volume provides a revealing picture of a changing communist world. Indeed, as the book makes clear, it is no longer appropriate to think of the communist countries as one world, since a major development during the period covered in this study has been the disintegration of the communist monolith and the reemergence of separate national entities in Eastern Europe.

The sixteen chapters by fifteen contributors provide studies of the individual communist states as well as several chapter-length discussions of general trends and patterns. The contributors also project the likely course of developments for the rest of the 1970s. Throughout the book the twin themes of an aggregation of the Sino-Soviet conflict and the spread of nationalism point to the conclusion that the communist states are now in disarray.

The contents: Patters of Political change, Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone; Polycentrism in Eastern Europe, Adam Bromke; The Sino-Soviet Dispute, John W. Strong; Czechoslovakia, H, Gordon Skilling; East Germany, Melvin Croan; Rumania, Gabriel Fischer; Yugoslavia, John C. Campbell; Albania, Peter R. Prifti; Outer Mongolia, Paul F. Langer; North Korea and North Vietnam, Paul F. Langer; Cuba, C. Ian Lumsden; Patterns of Economic Relations, Philip E. Uren; External Forces in Eastern Europe, Andrew Gyorgy.

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The Comparative Anatomy and Histology of the Cerebellum
From Monotremes through Apes
Olof LarsellJan Jansen, Editor
University of Minnesota Press, 1970

The Comparative Anatomy and Histology of the Cerebellum was first published in 1970. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This is the second volume of the late Dr. Larsell's comprehensive monograph on the cerebellum, the first volume of which is described below. A third volume, on the human cerebellum, will be published by the University of Minnesota Press next spring to complete the work.

This second volume deals with the morphogenetic development and morphology of the cerebellum of all orders of mammals from monotremes through apes. The descriptions cover the cerebellum in about forty species with special emphasis on the cerebellum of the albino rate, rabbit, cat, and rhesus monkey. Dr. Larsell's comparative anatomical studies over a period of many years led to the conclusion that fundamentally the mammalian cerebellum is composed of ten subdivisions. With few exceptions (the smallest and most primitive cerebella) the subdivisions are identified in all mammals. The descriptions of the cerebella are based on the author's personal investigations but the relevant literature is thoroughly reviewed also.

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The Comparative Anatomy and Histology of the Cerebellum
The Human Cerebellum, Cerebellar Connections, and Cerebellar Cortex
Olof Larsell and Jan JansenForeword by Robert S. Dow
University of Minnesota Press, 1972

The Comparative Anatomy and Histology of the Cerebellum was first published in 1972. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This is the third and final volume of the late Dr. Larsell's definitive work on the cerebellum, brought to completion for publication by Dr. Jansen. Two additional contributing authors for this volume are Enrico Mugnaini, M.D., and Helge K. Korneliussen, M.D.

The first section of this volume deals with the morphology of the human cerebellum. The morphogenetic development, the fissure formation, and the differentiation of the cerebellar lobules are described in detail, and followed by a comprehensive account of the adult cerebellum, its lobes and lobules. It is shown that the ten major lobules which Dr. Larsell distinguished in other mammals are recognizable also in man.

Chapters on the cerebellum connections include detailed accounts of all afferent and efferent cerebellar tracts. A subsequent chapter, by Drs. Jansen and Korneliussen, is devoted to the fundamental plan of cerebellar organization. The final chapters, by Dr. Mugnaini, deal with the histology and cytology of the cerebellar cortex. A comprehensive account is given of electron micrographs, a virtual atlas of the ultrastructure of the cerebellar cortex, illustrate the description.

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Compelling Visuality
The Work Of Art In And Out Of History
Claire Farago
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Explores what we actually see, touch, and experience when looking at art

Typically, art history is an enterprise of recovery—of searching out the provenance, the original intentions, the physical setting, and historical conditions behind a work of art. The essays in Compelling Visuality address some of the other questions that are less frequently asked—and, in doing so, show how much is to be learned and gained by going beyond the traditional approaches of art history.

In particular, the contributors take up the commonly unexplored question of what is actually present in a work of art—what we see, touch, and experience when confronted with Renaissance or Baroque works that have survived the vicissitudes of time. International and interdisciplinary, this volume conducts readers into an ongoing discussion of the value and significance of personal response to works of art. Contributors: F. R. Ankersmit, U of Groningen; Mieke Bal, U of Amsterdam and Cornell U; Oskar Bätschmann, U of Bern; Georges Didi-Huberman, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris; Michael Ann Holly, Clark Art Institute; Donald Preziosi, UCLA and Oxford U; Renée van de Vall, U of Maastricht.
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Compendium of General Sociology
Vilfredo Pareto
University of Minnesota Press, 1980
Compendium of General Sociology was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) was a social scientist who plated a significant role in the development of sociology, economics, and political science. Society, to Pareto, was governed principally by non-rational forces, and he was critical of all rational explanations and ideologies. He contributed to the development of functionalist and systems theories of social and economic life and was a major influence on the work of talcott Parsons. He was also and advocate of empirical and experimental methods in the social sciences as well as of mathematical sociology and economics.Pareto’s classic work, the Trattato di Sociologia Generale (1916), was published by his student Giulio Farina in 1920. Farina was able to rely upon Pareto for corrections and approval of the abridgement. Now, for the first time, this abridged work is available in an English translation, as the Compendium of General Sociology. Elisabeth Abbott participated in the Livingston-Bongiorno translation of the complete Trattato in the 1930s, and she has drawn upon that notable translation (now out of print) in her work on the Compendium. A substantial introduction by sociologist Joseoh Lopreato of the University of Texas provides a historical context for Pareto’s work and calls attention to the main lines in his thought.
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Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy
David Lyon and Elia Zureik, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

From computer networks to grocery store checkout scanners, it is easier and easier for governments, employers, advertisers, and individuals to gather detailed and sophisticated information about each of us. In this important new collection, the authors question the impact of these new technologies of surveillance on our privacy and our culture.

Although surveillance-literally some people "watching over" others-is as old as social relationships themselves, with the advent of the computer age this phenomenon has acquired new and distinctive meanings. Technological advances have made it possible for surveillance to become increasingly global and integrated-both commercial and government-related personal data flows more frequently across national boundaries, and the flow between private and public sectors has increased as well.

Addressing issues of the global integration of surveillance, social control, new information technologies, privacy violation and protection, and workplace surveillance, the contributors to Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy grapple with the ramifications of these concerns for society today. Timely and provocative, this collection will be of vital interest to anyone concerned with resistance to social control and incursions into privacy.

Contributors: Jonathan P. Allen, Colin J. Bennett, Simon G. Davies, Oscar H. Gandy Jr., Calvin C. Gotlieb, Rob Kling, Gary T. Marx, Abbe Mowshowitz, Judith A. Perrolle, Mark Poster, Priscilla M. Regan, James B. Rule.

David Lyon is professor of sociology at Queen's University, Canada. His previous books include The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (Minnesota, 1994). Elia Zureik is also professor of sociology at Queen's University, Canada, and coedited (with Dianne Hartling) The Social Context of the New Information and Communication Technologies (1987).

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The Computer's Voice
From Star Trek to Siri
Liz W. Faber
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A deconstruction of gender through the voices of Siri, HAL 9000, and other computers that talk

Although computer-based personal assistants like Siri are increasingly ubiquitous, few users stop to ask what it means that some assistants are gendered female, others male. Why is Star Trek’s computer coded as female, while HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey is heard as male? By examining how gender is built into these devices, author Liz W. Faber explores contentious questions around gender: its fundamental constructedness, the rigidity of the gender binary, and culturally situated attitudes on male and female embodiment.

Faber begins by considering talking spaceships like those in Star Trek, the film Dark Star, and the TV series Quark, revealing the ideologies that underlie space-age progress. She then moves on to an intrepid decade-by-decade investigation of computer voices, tracing the evolution from the masculine voices of the ’70s and ’80s to the feminine ones of the ’90s and ’00s. Faber ends her account in the present, with incisive looks at the film Her and Siri herself.

Going beyond current scholarship on robots and AI to focus on voice-interactive computers, The Computer’s Voice breaks new ground in questions surrounding media, technology, and gender. It makes important contributions to conversations around the gender gap and the increasing acceptance of transgender people. 

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The Concept of Development
An Issue in the Study of Human Behavior
Dale Harris
University of Minnesota Press, 1967
The Concept of Development was first published in 1967.In the various disciplines which make up the behavioral sciences, the concept of development plays a useful and significant role. The need has existed, however, for more unity of thought regarding the meaning of the concept, and this volume represents a long step ahead toward that goal.The book contains a series of 17 papers by as many contributors from the fields of psychology, philosophy, the natural sciences, medical science, social science, and the humanities. The chapters are arranged in five sections: Issues in the Study of Development, Biology and Growth, The Development of Human Behavior, The Concept of Development in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and Social Applications of the Developmental Concept.The contributors are Dale B. Harris, Ernest Nagel, John E. Anderson, Viktor Hamburger, J. P. Scott, T. C. Schneirla, Howard V. Meredith, Heinz Werner, Robert R. Sears, Wallace A. Russell, Norman J. DeWitt, Herbert Heaton, Robert F. Spencer, John A. Anderson, M.D., Hyman S. Lippman, M.D., John C. Kidneigh, and Willard C. Olson.The book is especially appropriate for text use or collateral reading in courses in psychology, education, sociology, or child development.
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Concepts, Theories, and the Mind-Body Problem
Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and Grover Maxwell, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1958

Concepts, Theories, and the Mind-Body Problem was first published in 1958. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This is Volume II of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, a series published in cooperation with the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota. The series editors are Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell, who are also co-editors, with Michael Scriven, of this volume.

The ten papers by eleven authors which make up the content of this volume are the result of collaborative research of the Center in philosophical and methodological problems of science in general and psychology in particular. The contributors are Paul Oppenheim, Hilary Putnam, Carl G. Hempel, Michael Scriven, Arthur Pap, Wilfrid Sellars,

H. Gavin Alexander, P.F. Strawson, Karl Zener, Herbert Feigl, and Paul E. Meehl. In addition, an extensive discussion of "Internationality and the Mental" by Wilfrid Sellars and Roderick Chisholm is presented in an appendix.

In a review of this volume the journal Psychiatric Quarterly commented: "These essays will not prove easy for the layman to read, but he can hardly fail to find his effort rewarded if he is persistent. For the professional behavioral scientist increased awareness and caution—in his use of scientific language, and thinking about scientific theory—should result."

One of the papers in this volume, "The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'" by Herbert Feigl, has been published by the University of Minnesota Press with further discussion by Dr. Feigl as a separate book, The "Mental" and the "Physical": The Essay and a Postscript.

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Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe
John Nichols
University of Minnesota Press, 1994

The most up-to-date resource for those interested in the linguistic and cultural heritage of the Anishinaabe, A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe contains more than 7,000 of the most frequently used Ojibwe words. Presented in Ojibwe-English and English-Ojibwe sections, this dictionary spells words to reflect their actual pronunciation with a direct match between the letters used and the speech sounds of Ojibwe. It contains many ancient words and meanings as well as language added in the twentieth century.

Most entries give several sample inflected forms such as the plural, diminutive, and locative forms of nouns and first person and participle forms of verbs. The basic patterns of Ojibwe word structure and the organization of the dictionary entries are clearly explained in the introduction. The most widely used modern standard writing system for Ojibwe is used throughout, and some of the key objects of Ojibwe life are authentically illustrated by coauthor and artist Earl Nyholm.Acknowledged as one of the three largest Native American languages, Ojibwe is spoken in many local varieties in the Upper Midwest and across Central and Eastern Canada. Minnesota Ojibwe is spoken in Central and Northern Minnesota, and is very similar to the Ojibwe spoken in the Ontario-Minnesota border region, Wisconsin, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe is an essential reference for all students of Ojibwe culture, history, language, and literature.
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A Concordance to Finnegans Wake
Clive Hart
University of Minnesota Press, 1963

A Concordance to Finnegans Wake was first published in 1963. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This concordance, the first full-scale work dealing with the language of James Joyce's last period, provides a finding-list and analytical index for his last work, Finnegans Wake. There are three parts: the first consisting of a complete alphabetical index to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake,the second comprising a list of syllabifications (showing the inner parts of compound words), and the third providing a list of some 10,000 English words suggested by Joycean distortions.

The primary word-index, similar in most respects to those which have already been published for Joyce's Ulysses and Stephen Hero, list in alphabetical order all of the 63,924 different words which make up the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake and provides page-line references for every occurrence of all but a small handful of the most common English words. Except for punctuation marks, every typographical unit in the book is accounted for, and each is listed just as it appears in the text.

The second on syllabification lists in alphabetical order the inner parts of over 10,000 complex words in Finnegans Wake which are built up out of simpler elements and which would be impossible to find from the primary index alone.

In the last section, called "Overtones," the aim is to list the English words suggested by Joyce's puns and distortions. Much information gleaned from the Joycean research of the past decade is gathered together here.

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Concubines And Power
Five Hundred Years In A Northern Nigerian Palace
Heidi J. Nast
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

African Studies Association Women’s Caucus’s Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize winner

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title

The monumental palace of Kano, Nigeria, was built circa 1500 and is today inhabited by more than one thousand persons. Historically, its secluded interior housed hundreds of concubines whose role in the politics, economics, and culture of Kano city-state has been largely overlooked. In this pioneering work, Heidi J. Nast demonstrates how human-geographical methods can tell us much about a site like the palace, a place bereft of archaeological work or relevant primary sources.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic work and mapping data, Concubines and Power presents new evidence that palace concubines controlled the production of indigo-dyed cloth centuries before men did. The women were also key players in the assessment and collection of the state's earliest grain taxes, forming a complex and powerful administrative hierarchy that used the taxes for palace community needs. In addition, royal concubines served as representatives of their places of origin, their freeborn children providing the king with additional human capital to cement territorial alliances through marriage.

Social forces undoubtedly shaped and changed concubinage for hundreds of years, but Nast shows how the women’s reach extended far beyond the palace walls to the formation of the state itself.

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Condensing The Cold War
Reader’s Digest and American Identity
Joanne P. Sharp
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

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Confessions of an American Scholar
Simon O’Toole
University of Minnesota Press, 1970

Confessions of an American Scholar was first published in 1970. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Professor O'Toole, a well-known American literary scholar (Simon O'Toole is a pseudonym), gives us a candid, amusing, and, on the whole, frightening look at what really goes on in academic life. He has taught at black and white colleges, private and public colleges, Ivy Leagues and brick colleges; and over the years he has found himself transformed from a good teacher and no scholar into a prolific scholar and a tired teacher. Along the way he fought Joe McCarthy and told his students to burn their draft cards. At the conclusion of his tale he makes some serious proposals for a solution to what he calls the mess of American education. At the core of his suggestions is the opinion that America needs less education instead of more, an idea that seems certain to evoke cries of treason from many of his academic brethren.

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Confessions of the Letter Closet
Epistolary Fiction and Queer Desire in Modern Spain
Patrick Paul Garlinger
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
By the beginning of the twentieth century, epistolary novels in Spain increasingly grappled with homoerotic and homosexual desire, treating it as a secret communicated through private letters from one reader to another. Patrick Paul Garlinger reveals how this confidential model persists in these fictions of letter writing from the early twentieth century to the present, framing expressions of queer desire in confessional terms: secrecy, guilt, morality, and shame.Confessions of the Letter Closet draws on queer theory and psychoanalysis, archival research on letter writing as a social practice and on the advent of the postal system in Spain, and historical insights into the impact of Spanish laws regarding the inviolability of correspondence on epistolary fiction. Garlinger examines how the epistolary novel represents - and is implicated in - the homophobia and psychic ambivalence around sexuality and identity with which Spanish gays and lesbians struggle, despite significant legal advances and increased social tolerance.Addressing both male and female desire and drawing links to epistolary traditions outside of Spain, Confessions of the Letter Closet goes beyond the specifics of Spanish literature to contribute more broadly to queer theory, the study of epistolary fiction, and an understanding of autobiography and confessional discourse.
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Congenial Souls
Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern
Stephanie Trigg
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

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Congress Versus the Supreme Court, 1957-1960
C. Herman Pritchett
University of Minnesota Press, 1961

Congress Versus the Supreme Court, 1957–1960 was first published in 1961. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This is an account of the effort made in the last two sessions of Congress to curb the Supreme Court because of certain liberal decisions of the Court, and an analysis of the reasons for the congressional failure. Many times in history Congress has objected to Court decisions and has tried to retaliate against the Court. The most recent period of difficulty traces back to the Court's school segregation decisions in 1954, but not until the Court took a liberal line in certain national security cases in 1956 and 1957 was an organized effort made in Congress to attack it. Professor Pritchett analyzes the specific decisions which aroused congressional concern and reviews the methods by which their reversal was sought. The failure of this effort to curb the Court is important to an understanding of the role of the Supreme Court in the American governmental system. This book is an expansion of the Guy Stanton Ford lectures given by Mr. Pritchett at the University of Minnesota.

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Connected
Or What It Means To Live In The Network Society
Steven Shaviro
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
In the twenty-first century, a network society is emerging. Fragmented, visually saturated, characterized by rapid technological change and constant social upheavals, it is dizzying, excessive, and sometimes surreal. In this breathtaking work, Steven Shaviro investigates popular culture, new technologies, political change, and community disruption and concludes that science fiction and social reality have become virtually indistinguishable. 
Connected is made up of a series of mini-essays-on cyberpunk, hip-hop, film noir, Web surfing, greed, electronic surveillance, pervasive multimedia, psychedelic drugs, artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, and the architecture of Frank Gehry, among other topics. Shaviro argues that our strange new world is increasingly being transformed in ways, and by devices, that seem to come out of the pages of science fiction, even while the world itself is becoming a futuristic landscape. The result is that science fiction provides the most useful social theory, the only form that manages to be as radical as reality itself. 
Connected looks at how our networked environment has manifested itself in the work of J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, K. W. Jeter, and others. Shaviro focuses on science fiction not only as a form of cultural commentary but also as a prescient forum in which to explore the forces that are morphing our world into a sort of virtual reality game. Original and compelling, Connected shows how the continual experimentation of science fiction, like science and technology themselves, conjures the invisible social and economic forces that surround us.  
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Conrad Aiken - American Writers 38
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Reuel Denney
University of Minnesota Press, 1964

Conrad Aiken - American Writers 38 was first published in 1964. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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Conrad’s Models of Mind
Bruce Johnson
University of Minnesota Press, 1971

Conrad's Models of Mind was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In a new approach to understanding the psychological assumptions that lie behind the creation of a work of fiction, Professor Johnson analyzes a number of Joseph Conrad's novels and short stories, identifying and explaining Conrad's changing conceptions or models of mind. As he points out in his introduction: "Every writer makes assumptions about the nature of the mind, whether they may be elaborate theories, metaphors that seem simple but imply a great deal, downright beliefs, or vague gestalten. And such assumptions color his whole creation, the way his characters think and feel and react, possibly even his choice of subject matter."

The author traces Conrad's steady progression away from deductive psychology, involving such entities as will, passion, ego, or sympathy, toward a flexible, and, for the period, new psychology that had implications for his entire development as a writer.

Professor Johnson finds certain affinities between Conrad's models of mind and those of a number of other writers, among them, Schopenhauer, Sartre, and Pascal. He shows that one aspect of Conrad's psychology was closely allied to the Schopenhauerian concept of will but that when he wrote Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo Conrad moved toward an existential concept of self-image and self-creation similar to Sartre's psychology in Being and Nothingness. Finally, Professor Johnson examines Conrad's novel The Rescue and shows how hopeless it was for Conrad to return to earlier conceptions of mind after he had explored the new existential models.

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Consequences Of Pragmatism
Essays 1972-1980
Richard Rorty
University of Minnesota Press, 1982
Rorty seeks to tie philosophy’s past to its future by connecting what he sees as the positive (and neglected) contributions of the American pragmatic philosophers to contemporary European developments. What emerges from his explorations is a revivified version of pragmatism that offers new hope for the future of philosophy.“Rorty’s dazzling tour through the history of modern philosophy, and his critical account of its present state (the best general introduction in print), is actually an argument that what we consider perennial problems--mind and body, consciousness and objects, the foundations of knowledge, the fact/value distinction--are merely the dead-ends this picture leads us into.” Los Angeles Times Book Review“It can immediately be said that Consequences of Pragmatism must be read by both those who believe that they agree and those who believe that they disagree with Richard Rorty. [He] is far and away the most provocative philosophical writer working in North America today, and Consequences of Pragmatism should make this claim even stronger.”The Review of Metaphysics“Philosophy, for Rorty, is a form of writing, a literary genre, closer to literary criticism than anything else, a criticism which takes for one of its major concerns the texts of the past recognized as philosophical: it interprets interpretations. If anyone doubts the continued vigor and continuing relevance of American pragmatism, the doubts can be laid to rest by reading this book.” Religious Studies Review
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The Conspiracy Against Hitler in the Twilight War
Harold C. Deutsch
University of Minnesota Press, 1968

The Conspiracy Against Hitler in the Twilight War was first published in 1968. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This is the first detailed account in English of the German anti-Nazi plot of September 1939 - May 1940, a conspiracy which involved the services of Pope Pius XII as in intermediary. Much new information is presented, and the book puts the whole story of the German resistance movement in a clearer light than has been possible before.

Much of the account is based on the testimony of over fifty witnesses whom Professor Deutsch interviewed or interrogated, comprising virtually all the participants or observers who survived the period. He also had access to previously unavailable French and Belgian documents as well as to diaries and other private material.

As the author explains, there were four major rounds of opposition to the Hitler regime, the conspiracy described in this volume being the second. IN many ways it was the round in which circumstances were the most favorable for success. High military quarters were the most fully committed, it was the only plan in which a foreign power at odds with Germany (britain) took a supporting position, and it was the only instance in which a notable outside figure, Pius XII, made his good offices available as an intermediary.

The role of the Pope in this conspiracy has been known in a general way since 1946, but Professor Deutsch's investigation is the first intensive study were at the core of the affair, Josef Muller, the Opposition agent who dealt with the Pope and who later became the Bavarian Minister o Justice, and Rev. Robert Leiber, S.F., the Pope's confidential aide.

In his conclusion Professor Deutsch points out that the story of this conspiracy clearly testifies to the moral nature of the German resistance movement. The author writes: "No term recurred more often in these months to define the conflict with the Third Reich then 'the decent Germany.'"

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Conspiracy Theories
Secrecy and Power in American Culture
Mark Fenster
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

The popular study of conspiracy theories and why we should pay attention—completely updated for the post-9/11 world

JFK, Karl Marx, the Pope, Aristotle Onassis, Howard Hughes, Fox Mulder, Bill Clinton, both George Bushes—all have been linked to vastly complicated global (or even galactic) intrigues. Two years after Mark Fenster first published Conspiracy Theories, the attacks of 9/11 stirred the imaginations of a new generation of believers. Before the black box from United 93 had even been found, there were theories put forth from the implausible to the offensive and outrageous.

In this new edition of the landmark work, and the first in-depth look at the conspiracy communities that formed to debunk the 9/11 Commission Report, Fenster shows that conspiracy theories play an important role in U.S. democracy. Examining how and why they circulate through mass culture, he contends, helps us better understand society as a whole. Ranging from The Da Vinci Code to the intellectual history of Richard Hofstadter, he argues that dismissing conspiracy theories as pathological or marginal flattens contemporary politics and culture because they are—contrary to popular portrayal—an intense articulation of populism and, at their essence, are strident calls for a better, more transparent government. Fenster has demonstrated once again that the people who claim someone’s after us are, at least, worth hearing.
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Conspiracy Theories
Secrecy and Power in American Culture
Mark Fenster
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
JFK, Karl Marx, the Pope, Aristotle Onassis, Queen Elizabeth II, Howard Hughes, Fox Mulder, Bill Clinton--all have been linked to vastly complicated global (or even galactic) intrigues. In this enlightening tour of conspiracy theories, Mark Fenster guides readers through this shadowy world and analyzes its complex role in American culture and politics. Fenster argues that conspiracy theories are a form of popular political interpretation and contends that understanding how they circulate through mass culture helps us better understand our society as a whole. To that end, he discusses Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics, the militia movement, The X-Files, popular Christian apocalyptic thought, and such artifacts of suspicion as The Turner Diaries, the Illuminatus! trilogy, and the novels of Richard Condon. Fenster analyzes the "conspiracy community" of radio shows, magazine and book publishers, Internet resources, and role-playing games that promote these theories. In this world, the very denial of a conspiracy's existence becomes proof that it exists, and the truth is always "out there." He believes conspiracy theory has become a thrill for a bored subculture, one characterized by its members' reinterpretation of "accepted" history, their deep cynicism about contemporary politics, and their longing for a utopian future. Fenster's progressive critique of conspiracy theories both recognizes the secrecy and inequities of power in contemporary politics and economics and works toward effective political engagement. Probing conspiracy theory's tendencies toward scapegoating, racism, and fascism, as well as Hofstadter's centrist acceptance of a postwar American "consensus," he advocates what conspiracy theory wants but cannot articulate: a more inclusive, engaging political culture. "Fenster, a lone writer (the literary equivalent of a lone gunman, perhaps), segues from the novels of Thomas Pynchon to the Clinton Death List. . . . Conspiracy Theories is a dangerous book. I suspect 'they' (and you know who I mean, of course) will take care of this lone writer any day now."--Bookforum "Fenster makes a powerful argument for regarding conspiracism as an integral product of the political system, reflecting inadequacies the establishment itself is blind to and expressing strong desires for the realization of frustrated ideals. Conspiracy Theories is a fascinating look at an important, little-studied topic. Informative and thought-provoking." --Philadelphia City Paper "Fenster culls the liveliest counterintelligences out there--the Michigan Militia, religious millennialists, Chris Carter, even Oliver Stone--and sets them up as the last idealists. They might be obsessive and maniacal, but they're after a transparent political system, where big business and the government can be held accountable. Their 'paranoid style,' according to Fenster, is just old-school populism refitted for the media age." --Voice Literary Supplement "Fenster makes a powerful argument for regarding conspiracism as an integral product of the political system, reflecting inadequacies the establishment itself is blind to and expressing strong desires for the realization of frustrated ideals. Conspiracy Theories is a fascinating look at an important, little-studied topic. Informative and thought-provoking." Philadelphia City Paper "Fenster's careful examination of conspiratorial beliefs as evidence by right-wing groups, by various media, and even by those who devise such theories as a form of ludic or satiric endeavor (like Robert Anton Wilson) is revealing. And his articulation of the set of political-rather than pathological-reasons for their behavior is salutary." --American Book Review "Fenster's extensive and impressive research provided a means of coming to terms with the radical disjunction between the interpretive framework which I used to understand events such as the one at Littleton, and a framework at odds with my own which was now confronting me on a daily basis." --Canadian Journal of Communication "In this lively and wide-ranging critique, Fenster argues that conspiracy theories are attempts to engage in a more inclusive political culture." --Religious Studies Review "Mark Fenster has provided a solid and illuminating study of the public's fascination with conspiracy theories and sets forth a stimulating correlation between the popularity of such theories and the social and political values of our society. This is a comprehensive and intriguing analysis of our often obsessive interest in conspiracy theories." --Gerald Posner, author of Killing the Dream : James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Case Closed : Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK "I find the issue of conspiracy theory compelling and appreciate Fenster's fruitful approach to what has been mysteriously ignored by the academy." --Barbie Zelizer, author of Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory "Fenster shines a powerful light on the fantasies of secrecy that pervade American culture, illuminating both the way they originate and how they work. His analysis is theoretically acute, his criticism of previous scholarly studies is compelling, and he offers razor-sharp readings of an impressive array of movements, events, and cultural practices. He stands out, above all, for his ability to capture the power and appeal of conspiratorial understandings of politics even as he explains their fundamental political limitations. The only thing that can keep this book from having the impact it deserves is a vast, academic conspiracy." --Mark T. Reinhardt, Williams College Mark Fenster received his Ph.D. in communication from the University of Illinois and his law degree from Yale University. He currently lives in Denver.
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Constructing Medieval Sexuality
Karma Lochrie
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

A groundbreaking examination of sexuality in the Middle Ages.

This collection is the first to be devoted entirely to medieval sexuality informed by current theories of sexuality and gender. It brings together essays from various disciplinary perspectives-literary, theological, philosophical, medical, historical, and art historical-to consider how the Middle Ages defined, regulated, and represented sexual practices and desires.

Always considering sexuality in relation to gender, the body, and identity, the essays explore medieval sexuality as a historical construction produced by and embedded in the cultures and institutions of that period. Examining a range of medieval texts and images, the contributors explore the medieval understanding of sodomy, the historical construction of heterosexuality, the polymorphous erotics of female mysticism, and the intersections of sexuality with race, gender, and religion. This work not only offers new perspectives on the ways in which queer theory might inform our views of sexuality in medieval Europe, but also suggests that medieval constructions of sexuality may offer important contributions to both queer theory and the history of sexuality.These essays, situated in the context of current debates, linger over various definitions of medieval sexuality; they speak to each other in their differences and their similarities to further productive thinking about the sometimes conflicting and always fascinating ways in which the Middle Ages regarded sex and sexuality. Contributors: E. Jane Burns, U of North Carolina; Joan Cadden, U of California, Davis; Michael Camille, U of Chicago; Dyan Elliott, Indiana U; Louise O. Fradenburg, U of California, Santa Barbara; Mark D. Jordan, U of Notre Dame; Steven F. Kruger, CUNY.
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Constructing National Interests
The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis
Jutta Weldes
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

Not simply an “event” or merely an “incident,” the 1962 standoff between the U. S. and the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba was a crisis, which subsequently has achieved almost mythic significance in the annals of United States foreign policy. Jutta Weldes asks why this occurrence in particular should be cast as a crisis, and how this so significantly affected  “the national interest.” Here, Weldes analyzes the so-called Cuban missile crisis as a means to rethink the idea of national interest, a notion central to both the study and practice of international relations.

Why did the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba constitute a crisis for U.S. state officials and thus a dire threat to U.S. national interests? It was, Weldes suggests, more a matter of discursive construction than of objective facts or circumstances. Drawing on social theory and on concepts from cultural studies, she exposes the “realities” of the crisis as social creations in the service of a particular and precarious U.S. state identity defined within the Cold War U.S. “security imaginary.”

Constructing National Interests shows how this process allowed for a redefining of the identities, interests, and likely actions of various states, so that it seemed to logically serve the U.S. national interest in removing the missiles from Cuba.

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Constructions of Race, Place, and Nation
Peter Jackson
University of Minnesota Press, 1993

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Consumers And Citizens
Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts
Nestor Garcia Canclini
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

An essential analysis of the ways consumerism and globalization intersect with political power.

Social Theory/Latin American Studies

An essential analysis of the ways consumerism and globalization intersect with political power. In Consumers and Citizens, Néstor García Canclini, the best-known and most innovative cultural studies scholar in Latin America, maps the critical effects of urban sprawl and global media and commodity markets on citizens-and shows at the same time that the complex results mean not only a shrinkage of certain traditional rights (particularly those of the welfare or client state) but also new openings for expanding citizenship. García Canclini focuses on the diverse ways in which democratic societies recognize markets of citizen opinions, however heterogeneous and dissonant, as in the fashion and entertainment industries. He shows how identity issues, brought to the fore by the aligning of citizenship and consumption, can no longer be understood strictly within the purview of territory or nation. Rather, the postmodern citizen-consumer inhabits a transterritorial and multilingual space, structured more along the lines of markets than states. Defining this space, García Canclini seeks to formulate a participatory and critical approach to consumption in which national culture, far from being extinguished, is reconstituted in transnational, cultural interactions. ISBN 0-8166-2986-2 Cloth £34.50 $49.95xxISBN 0-8166-2987-0 Paper £14.00 $19.95x256 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 AprilCultural Studies of the Americas Series, volume 6Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
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Consumers’ Cooperatives in the North Central States
Leonard Kercher
University of Minnesota Press, 1941
Consumers’ Cooperatives in the North Central States was first published in 1941. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.“Comprehensive, up-to-date analysis of the region having the longest history of successful consumer cooperation.”“Detailed case histories to 1940 of typical retail units and leading wholesale organizations.”“Practical recommendations and thoughtful criticism, useful to cooperatives and cooperators everywhere.”No other book on this subject is so rich in reliable facts, objective reporting, and comprehensive treatment as this study. It is based on extensive first-hand investigation by trained research men, with figures brought down to 1940.Case histories of the 3 leading wholesales and 15 local societies typical of some 800 in the region are included. Each discusses the origin, growth, membership, trends of operation, buying methods, price levels, advertising, financial organization, personnel, patronage returns, ratio of annual earnings to total assets and net worth, relations with other cooperatives in districts and regional federations for education, recreation, insurance, credit, etc. Every phase of operation of these carefully selected cases is expertly analyzed and described. Many are summarized with recommendations for future action.Of special value are the discussions of types of cooperatives, the analyses of basic community factors involved in successful cooperation, the suggested solutions for problems of organization and management, and the long-range view of possibilities for price regulation and customer satisfaction.
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Consuming Modernity
Public Culture in a South Asian World
Carol A. Breckenridge
University of Minnesota Press, 1995

Consuming Modernity illustrates that what is distinctive of any particular society is not the fact of its modernity, but rather its own unique debates about modernity. Behind the embattled arena of culture in India, for example, lie particular social and political interests such as the growing middle class; the entrepreneurs and commercial institutions; and the state.

The contributors address the roles of these various intertwined interests in the making of India's public culture, each examining different sites of consumption. The sites they explore include cinema, radio, cricket, restaurants, and tourism. Consuming Modernity also makes clear the differences among public, mass, and popular culture.Contributors include Arjun Appadurai, University of Chicago; Frank F. Conlon, University of Washington; Sara Dickey, Bowdoin College; Paul Greenough, University of Iowa; David Lelyveld, Columbia University; Barbara N. Ramusack, University of Cincinnati; Rosie Thomas, University of Westminster; and Phillip B. Zarrilli, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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Contemplation Of The World
Figures of Community Style
Michel Maffesoli
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

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Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language
Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1979

Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language was first published in 1983. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This volume, an expanded edition of the philosophy of language issue of the journal Midwest Studies in Philosophy (1977), includes essays by some of the foremost exponents of the most influential current approaches to the philosophy of language. There are new contributions to this edition by Keith S. Donnellan, Jerrold J. Katz, Barbara Partee, John Searle, Richmond Thomason and Zeno Vendler. Essays drawn from the original edition are by W. V. Quine, Keith S Donnellan, Stephen Schiffer, Donnis W. Stampe, Baruch A Brody, Panayot Butchvarov, Fred I. Dretske, Jaegwon Kim, David Shwayder, J. O. Urmson, Michael Levin, David E. Cooper, John Wallace, Hector-Neri Castaneda, Howard K Wettstein, Herbert Hochberg, Nelson Goodman, Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Root, Bruce Aune, Donald Davidson, and Saul Kripke.

Of special interest in the original edition was Kripke's paper "Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference, Descriptions, and Anaphora," Presents a rebuttal to Kripke's essay and attempts to establish referential attributive distinction as semantically significant.

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Contemporary Perspectives on the History of Philosophy
Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1983

Contemporary Perspectives on the History of Philosophy was first published in 1983. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The authors of the 27 appears in Volume 8, Midwest Studies in Philosophy,have established reputations as historians of philosophy, but their vantage point, here, is from "contemporary perspectives" - they use contemporary analytic skills to examine problems and issues considered by past philosophers. The papers, arranged in historical order, fall into six groups: ancient philosophy (the Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle); the seventeenth-century rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza); the empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, and Hume); Kant; the nineteenth century (Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Mill); and, in conclusion, an essay on Wittgenstein's Tractatus and two broad, retrospective papers entitled "Old Analyses of the Physical World and new Philosophies of Language" and "Moral Crisis and the History of Ethics."

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A Contest without Winners
How Students Experience Competitive School Choice
Kate Phillippo
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Seeing the consequences of competitive school choice policy through students’ eyes

While policymakers often justify school choice as a means to alleviate opportunity and achievement gaps, an unanticipated effect is increased competition over access to coveted, high-performing schools. In A Contest without Winners, Kate Phillippo follows a diverse group of Chicago students through the processes of researching, applying to, and enrolling in public high school. Throughout this journey, students prove themselves powerful policy actors who carry out and redefine competitive choice.

Phillippo’s work amplifies the voices of students—rather than the parents, educators, public intellectuals, and policymakers who so often inform school choice research—and investigates how students interact with and emerge from competitive choice academically, developmentally, and civically. Through students’ experiences, she shows how competitive choice legitimates and exacerbates existing social inequalities; collides with students’ developmental vulnerability to messages about their ability, merit, and potential; and encourages young people’s individualistic actions as they come to feel that they must earn their educational rights. From urban infrastructure to income inequality to racial segregation, Phillippo examines the factors that shape students’ policy enactment and interpretation, as policymakers and educators ask students to compete for access to public resources.

With competitive choice, even the winners—the lucky few admitted to their dream schools—don’t outright win. A Contest without Winners challenges meritocratic and market-driven notions of opportunity creation for young people and raises critical questions about the goals we have for public schooling.

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Contested Citizenship
Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe
Ruud Koopmans
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
From international press coverage of the French government’s attempt to prevent Muslims from wearing headscarves to terrorist attacks in Madrid and the United States, questions of cultural identity and pluralism are at the center of the world’s most urgent events and debates. Presenting an unprecedented wealth of empirical research garnered during ten years of a cross-cultural project, Contested Citizenship addresses these fundamental issues by comparing collective actions by migrants, xenophobes, and antiracists in Germany, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. 

Revealing striking cross-national differences in how immigration and diversity are contended by different national governments, these authors find that how citizenship is constructed is the key variable defining the experience of Europe’s immigrant populations. Contested Citizenship provides nuanced policy recommendations and challenges the truism that multiculturalism is always good for immigrants. Even in an age of European integration and globalization, the state remains a critical actor in determining what points of view are sensible and realistic—and legitimate—in society. 

Ruud Koopmans is professor of sociology at Free University, Amsterdam. Paul Statham is reader in political communications at the University of Leeds. Marco Giugni is a researcher and teacher of political science at the University of Geneva. Florence Passy is assistant professor of political science at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
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The Continental Model
Selected French Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century in English Translation
Scott Elledge and Donald Schier, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1960

The Continental Model was first published in 1960. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The pervasive influence of seventeenth-century French criticism upon eighteenth-century English criticism makes it important for students of English and comparative literature to be familiar with the most important of the French works. Professors Elledge and Schier bring together here, in translation, some of the best examples of the French essays. They have chosen particularly works that are not otherwise available in translation.

Some of the translations are by contemporaries of the period. These are of works by d'Aubignac, Saint-Evremond, Huet, Rapin, Le Bossu, Bouhours, La Bruyere, and Fontenelle. Other selections have been translated by Professor Schier, and these include works of Chapelain, Sarasin, Scudery, Corneille, Bouhours, and Fontenelle.

The editors provide brief and pertinent comment on each writer and his place in literary history. They have also annotated the essays in order to save time for the reader who encounters references to other literatures not immediately clear to him. The volume as a whole provides a comprehensive and balanced selection of critical texts which were known to, used by, and significant in their influence upon writers such as Dryden, Dennis, Addison, Swift, Pope, and others.

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Contingent Figure
Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment
Michael D. Snediker
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

A masterful synthesis of literary readings and poetic reflections, making profound contributions to our understanding of chronic pain

At the intersection of queer theory and disability studies, acclaimed theorist Michael D. Snediker locates something unexpected: chronic pain. Starting from this paradigm-shifting insight, Snediker elaborates a bracing examination of the phenomenological peculiarity of disability, articulating a complex idiom of figuration as the lived substance of pain’s quotidian. This lexicon helps us differently inhabit both the theoretical and phenomenal dimensions of chronic pain and suffering by illuminating where these modes are least distinguishable. 

Suffused with fastidious close readings, and girded by a remarkably complex understanding of phenomenal experience, Contingent Figure resides in the overlap between literary theory and lyric experiment. Snediker grounds his exploration of disability and chronic pain in dazzling close readings of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and many others. Its juxtaposition of these readings with candid autobiographical accounts makes Contingent Figure an exemplary instance of literary theory as a practice of lyric attention.

Thoroughly rigorous and anything but predictable, this stirring inquiry leaves the reader with a rich critical vocabulary indebted to the likes of Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, D. O. Winnicott, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A master class in close reading’s inseparability from the urgency of lived experience, this book is essential for students and scholars of disability studies, queer theory, formalism, aesthetics, and the radical challenge of Emersonian poetics across the long American nineteenth century.

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Contingent States
Greater China And Transnational Relations
William A. Callahan
University of Minnesota Press, 2004
In the 1990s, Greater China became the subject of debate as the site of either the danger of the “China threat” or the promise of Confucian capitalism. William A. Callahan argues that Greater China presents challenges not only to economic and political order but also to international relations theory. In fact, Greater China, though absent from geopolitical maps and international law, is very much present in economic and cultural exchange and exemplifies the contingent state of international politics. Callahan deconstructs the mainstream geopolitical and political-economic understandings of Greater China, tracing its emergence through an ethnographic analysis of four political “problems” in East Asia: the South China Sea disputes, Sino-Korean relations, the return of Hong Kong, and cross-straits relations. Callahan shows how bureaucrats, outlaws, tycoons, academics, workers, politicians, and hooligans alike produce Greater China through networks of relations in local, national, regional, global, and transnational space. Finally, Contingent States reveals how each of the “problems” provoked theoretical innovations that depart from standard conceptions of sovereignty, democracy, and the nation-state.William A. Callahan is senior lecturer of international politics and deputy director of the Center for Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Durham, England, and the author of Imagining Democracy: Reading “The Events of May” in Thailand and Pollwatching, Elections, and Civil Society in Southeast Asia.
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The Contours of America’s Cold War
Matthew Farish
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
In The Contours of America's Cold War, Matthew Farish explores new ways of conceptualizing space as part of post-World War II American militarism. He demonstrates how the social sciences were militarized in the early Cold War period, producing spatial knowledge that was of immediate use to the state as it sought to expand its reach across the globe.

Geographic knowledge generated for the Cold War was a form of power, Farish argues, and it was given an urgency in the panels, advisory boards, and study groups established to address the challenges of an atomic world. He investigates how the scales of the city, the continent, the region, the globe, and, by extension, outer space, were brought together as strategic spaces, categories that provided a cartographic orientation for the Cold War and influenced military deployments, diplomacy, espionage, and finance.

Farish analyzes the surprising range of knowledge production involved in the project of claiming and classifying American space. Backed by military and intelligence funding, physicists and policy makers, soldiers and social scientists came together to study and shape the United States and its place in a divided world.
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Contract With The Skin
Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s
Kathy O'Dell
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

Places masochistic performance within a social and historical context.

Having yourself shot. Putting out fires with your bare hands and feet. Biting your own body and photographing the marks. Sewing your own mouth shut. These seemingly aberrant acts were committed by performance artists during the 1970s. Why would anyone do these things? What do these kinds of masochistic performances tell us about the social and historical context in which they occurred? Fascinating and accessibly written, Contract with the Skin addresses such questions through a reconsideration of these acts in relation to psychoanalytic and legal concepts of masochism.

O’Dell argues that the growth of masochistic performance during the 1970s must be seen in the context of society’s response to the Vietnam War and contemporaneous changes in theories of contract. She contends that the dynamic that exists between audience and performer during these masochistic acts relates to tensions resulting from ruptures in the social contract. Indeed, as the war in Vietnam waned, so did masochistic performance, only to reemerge in the 1980s in relation to the “war on AIDS” and the censorious “culture wars.”Focusing on 1970s performance artists Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Gina Pane, and collaborators Marina Abramovi´c/Ulay as well as those with similar sensibilities from the late 1980s onward (Bob Flanagan, David Wojnarowicz, Simon Leung, Catherine Opie, Ron Athey, Lutz Bacher, and Robby Garfinkel), O’Dell provides photographic documentation of performances and quotations from interviews with many of the artists. Throughout, O’Dell asks what we can do about the institutionalized forms of masochism for which these performances are metaphors. Contract with the Skin is a provocative guide to this little-studied area, and offers new ways of thinking about performance art and artistic production.
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Control of the Imaginary
Reason and Imagination in Modern Times
Luiz Costa LimaTranslated by Ronald W. SousaIntroduction by Ronald W. SousaAfterword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse
University of Minnesota Press, 1989

Control of the Imaginary was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In Control of the Imaginary Luiz Costa Lima explains how the distinction between truth and fiction emerged at the beginning of modern times and why, upon its emergence, fiction fell under suspicion. Costa Lima not only describes the continuous relationship between Western notions of reason and subjectivity over a broad time-frame—the Renaissance to the first decade of the twentieth century—but he uses this occasion to reexamine the literary traditions of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, and Germany. The book reconstructs the dominant frames in the European tradition between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century from the perspective of a Latin American who sees the culture of his native Brazil haunted by unresolved questions from the Northern Hemisphere. Costa Lima manages to synthesize positions from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, and history without separating the theoretical discussion from his historical reconstructions.

The first chapter situates the problem and grounds the emergent distinction between truth and fiction in a very close analysis of one of the first European historians, Fernao Lopes, who sets the tone for the condemnation of fiction in the name of the truth of history and the potential for individual interpretation. Costa Lima pursues these notions through the aesthetic debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the writings of the French historian Michelet. He also devotes an illuminating chapter to the invention of the strictures imposed on fiction.

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The Cookie Jar and Other Plays
John Clark DonahueLinda Walsh Jenkins, Editor
University of Minnesota Press, 1975

The Cookie Jar and Other Plays was first published in 1975. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The scripts of three plays by John Clark Donahue, artistic director of the Children's Theatre Company of the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, are published in this volume along with background material and illustrations which, together, provide a look behind the scenes at the company, its personnel, methods, and productions. The company, which has achieved notable success, is regarded as a leading exponent of children's theater in this country.

The plays included in this volume are The Cookie Jar, How Could You Tell?,and Old King of Malfi.All by been presented by the Children's Theatre Company.

Linda Walsh Jenkins provides an introduction and commentary on the plays. There are also a profile of John Donahue and material based on interviews with him and with other theater personnel — directors, composers, designers, and others. This and other information, including a sketch of the history and background of the Children's Theatre Company, will be illuminating and helpful to other theater groups and individuals interested in the development of children's theater. There are sixteen pages of photographs, including four pages in color, showing scenes from Children's Theatre Company productions of the plays. Examples from the musical scores composed for the productions are also reproduced.

Under Mr. Donahue's direction the company has evolved an ensemble approach to production, in which script, music, and acting develop simultaneously throughout the rehearsal period. The dominant theme in his work with the company has been an educational one, based on his belief that the theater should be an educational environment which helps young persons to develop their creative abilities.

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Copying Machines
Taking Notes for the Automaton
Catherine Liu
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

Explores literary theory’s fear of and fascination with the mechanical.

Anxieties about fixing the absolute difference between the human being and the mechanical replica, the automaton, are as old as the first appearance of the machine itself. Exploring these anxieties and the efforts they prompted, this book opens a window on one of the most significant, if subtle, ideological battles waged on behalf of the human against the machine since the Enlightenment—one that continues in the wake of technological and conceptual progress today.

A sustained examination of the automaton as early modern machine and as a curious ancestor of the twentieth-century robot, Copying Machines offers extended readings of mechanistic images in the eighteenth century through the prism of twentieth-century commentary. In readings of texts by Lafayette, Molière, Laclos, and La Bruyère—and in a chapter on the eighteenth-century inventor of automatons, Jacques Vaucanson—Catherine Liu provides a fascinating account of ways in which the automaton and the preindustrial machine haunt the imagination of ancien régime France and structure key moments of the canonical literature and criticism of the period.
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Corporate Sovereignty
Law and Government under Capitalism
Joshua Barkan
University of Minnesota Press, 2013

Refinery explosions. Accounting scandals. Bank meltdowns. All of these catastrophes—and many more—might rightfully be blamed on corporations. In response, advocates have suggested reforms ranging from increased government regulation to corporate codes of conduct to stop corporate abuses. Joshua Barkan writes that these reactions, which view law as a limit on corporations, misunderstand the role of law in fostering corporate power.

In Corporate Sovereignty, Barkan argues that corporate power should be rethought as a mode of political sovereignty. Rather than treating the economic power of corporations as a threat to the political sovereignty of states, Barkan shows that the two are ontologically linked. Situating analysis of U.S., British, and international corporate law alongside careful readings in political and social theory, he demonstrates that the Anglo-American corporation and modern political sovereignty are founded in and bound together through a principle of legally sanctioned immunity from law. The problems that corporate-led globalization present for governments result not from regulatory failures as much as from corporate immunity that is being exported across the globe.

For Barkan, there is a paradox in that corporations, which are legal creations, are given such power that they undermine the sovereignty of states. He notes that while the relationship between states and corporations may appear adversarial, it is in fact a kind of doubling in which state sovereignty and corporate power are both conjoined and in conflict. Our refusal to grapple with the peculiar nature of this doubling means that some of our best efforts to control corporations unwittingly reinvest the sovereign powers they oppose.

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Cosmopolitics I
Isabelle Stengers
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
From Einstein’s quest for a unified field theory to Stephen Hawking’s belief that we “would know the mind of God” through such a theory, contemporary science—and physics in particular—has claimed that it alone possesses absolute knowledge of the universe. In a sweeping work of philosophical inquiry, originally published in French in seven volumes, Isabelle Stengers builds on her previous intellectual accomplishments to explore the role and authority of science in modern societies and to challenge its pretensions to objectivity, rationality, and truth.
 
For Stengers, science is a constructive enterprise, a diverse, interdependent, and highly contingent system that does not simply discover preexisting truths but, through specific practices and processes, helps shape them. She addresses conceptual themes crucial for modern science, such as the formation of physical-mathematical intelligibility, from Galilean mechanics and the origin of dynamics to quantum theory, the question of biological reductionism, and the power relations at work in the social and behavioral sciences. Focusing on the polemical and creative aspects of such themes, she argues for an ecology of practices that takes into account how scientific knowledge evolves, the constraints and obligations such practices impose, and the impact they have on the sciences and beyond.
 
This perspective, which demands that competing practices and interests be taken seriously rather than merely (and often condescendingly) tolerated, poses a profound political and ethical challenge. In place of both absolutism and tolerance, she proposes a cosmopolitics—modeled on the ideal scientific method that considers all assumptions and facts as being open to question—that reintegrates the natural and the social, the modern and the archaic, the scientific and the irrational.
 
Cosmopolitics I includes the first three volumes of the original work. Cosmopolitics II will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in Spring 2011.
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Cosmopolitics II
Isabelle Stengers
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Originally published in French in seven volumes, Cosmopolitics investigates the role and authority of the sciences in modern societies and challenges their claims to objectivity, rationality, and truth. Cosmopolitics II includes the first English-language translations of the last four books: Quantum Mechanics: The End of the Dream, In the Name of the Arrow of Time: Prigogine’s Challenge, Life and Artifice: The Faces of Emergence, and The Curse of Tolerance.

Arguing for an “ecology of practices” in the sciences, Isabelle Stengers explores the discordant landscape of knowledge derived from modern science, seeking intellectual consistency among contradictory, confrontational, and mutually exclusive philosophical ambitions and approaches. For Stengers, science is a constructive enterprise, a diverse, interdependent, and highly contingent system that does not simply discover preexisting truths but, through specific practices and processes, helps shape them.

Stengers concludes this philosophical inquiry with a forceful critique of tolerance; it is a fundamentally condescending attitude, she contends, that prevents those worldviews that challenge dominant explanatory systems from being taken seriously. Instead of tolerance, she proposes a “cosmopolitics” that rejects politics as a universal category and allows modern scientific practices to peacefully coexist with other forms of knowledge.

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Cosmopolitics
Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation
Pheng Cheah
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

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Cosmos And Hearth
A Cosmopolite’s Viewpoint
Yi-Fu Tuan
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

In a volume that represents the culmination of his life’s work in considering the relationship between culture and landscape, eminent scholar Yi-Fu Tuan argues that “cosmos” and “hearth” are two scales that anchor what it means to be fully and happily human. Illustrating this contention with examples from both his native China and his home of the past forty years, the United States, Tuan proposes a revised conception of culture, one thoroughly grounded in one’s own society but also embracing curiosity about the world. Optimistic and deeply human, this important volume lays out a path to being “at home in the cosmos.”

Hardcover:In this moving meditation on the difficult choices facing humanity in the next millennium, celebrated scholar Yi-Fu Tuan reaffirms his faith in the value of a cosmopolitan worldview. In a volume that represents the culmination of his life's work in considering the relationship between culture and landscape, Tuan argues that “cosmos” and “hearth” are two scales that anchor what it means to be fully and happily human. Hearth is our house and neighborhood, family and kinfolk, habit and custom. Cosmos, by contrast, is the larger reality-world, civilization, and humankind. Tuan addresses the extraordinary revival of interest in the hearth in recent decades, examining both the positive and negative effects of this renewed concern. Among the beneficent outcomes has been a revival of ethnic culture and sense of place. Negative repercussions abound, however, manifested as an upsurge in superstition, excessive pride in ancestry and custom, and a constricted worldview that when taken together can inflame local passions, leading at times to violent conflict-from riots in American cities to wars in the Balkans. In Cosmos and Hearth, Tuan takes the position that we need to embrace both the sublime and the humble, drawing what is valuable from each. Illustrating the importance of both cosmos and hearth with examples from his country of birth, China, and from his home of the past forty years, the United States, Tuan proposes a revised conception of culture, the “cosmopolitan hearth,” that has the coziness but not the narrowness and bigotry of the traditional hearth. Tuan encourages not only being thoroughly grounded in one’s own culture but also the embracing of curiosity about the world. Optimistic and deeply human, Cosmos and Hearth lays out a path to being “at home in the cosmos.” Born in China and educated in Australia, the Philippines, England, and the United States, Yi-Fu Tuan is professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minnesota, 1977), Landscapes of Fear (Minnesota, 1982), The Good Life (1986), and Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture (1993). Excerpt: “Thinking yields a twofold gain: although it isolates us from our immediate group it can link us both seriously and playfully to the cosmos-to strangers in other places and times; and it enables us to accept a human condition that we have always been tempted by fear and anxiety to deny, namely, the impermanence of our state wherever we are, our ultimate homelessness. A cosmopolite is one who considers the gain greater than the loss. Having seen something of the splendid spaces, he or she will not want to return, permanently, to the ambiguous safeness of the hearth.”
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Cosplay
The Fictional Mode of Existence
Frenchy Lunning
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

An exploration of cosplay and its relationship with the realms of its global fandom, performance, and the modes of fictional existence 

 

Flourishing far beyond its Japanese roots, cosplay has become an international phenomenon with fervid fans who gather at enormous, worldwide conventions annually. Here, author Frenchy Lunning offers an intimate, sensational tour through cosplay’s past and present, as well as its global lure.

Through a culmination of years of personal research on cosplay, and growing out of Lunning’s wealth of scholarship, conference presentations, and cosplayer interviews, Cosplay is a unique and necessary examination of identity, performance, play, and otaku fandom and culture in relation to contemporary theories. With discussions covering construction, masquerades, and community through performance, Lunning presents cosplay as a dynamic and ever-evolving global practice. She combines the fascinating viewpoints of cosplayers with observational, in-depth research on cosplay history and practice, and a deep dive into critical theory involving the modes of fictional existence, in order to understand its global expansion. 

Augmented with beautiful photographs, this is an engrossing, lively read that explores a complicated and often misunderstood history and meditates on how cosplay allows its participants to create and construct meaning and identity.

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Counseling and the College Program
Papers from the Third Annual Conference of Administrators of College and University Counseling Programs, held at Michigan State College in November 1952
Ralph Berdie
University of Minnesota Press, 1954

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Couture and Consensus
Fashion and Politics in Postcolonial Argentina
Regina A. Root
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Following Argentina’s revolution in 1810, the dress of young patriots inspired a nation and distanced its politics from the relics of Spanish colonialism. Fashion writing often escaped the notice of authorities, allowing authors to masquerade political ideas under the guise of frivolity and entertainment. In Couture and Consensus, Regina A. Root maps this pivotal and overlooked facet of Argentine cultural history, showing how politics emerged from dress to disrupt authoritarian practices and stimulate creativity in a newly independent nation.
 
Drawing from genres as diverse as fiction, poetry, songs, and fashion magazines, Root offers a sartorial history that produces an original understanding of how Argentina forged its identity during the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829–1852), a critical historical time. Couture and Consensus closely analyzes military uniforms, women’s dress, and the novels of the era to reveal fashion’s role in advancing an agenda and disseminating political goals, notions Root connects to the contemporary moment.
 
An insightful presentation of the discourse of fashion, Couture and Consensus also paints a riveting portrait of Argentine society in the nineteenth century—its politics, people, and creative forces.
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Covert Gestures
Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain
Vincent Barletta
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Forcibly expelled from Spain in the early seventeenth century, the substantial Muslim community known as the moriscos left behind them a hidden yet extremely rich corpus of manuscripts. Copied out in Arabic script and concealed in walls, false floors, and remote caves, these little-known texts now offer modern readers an absorbing look into the cultural life of the moriscos during the hundred years between their forced conversion to Christianity and their eventual expulsion. Covert Gestures reveals how the traditional Islamic narratives of the moriscos both shaped and encoded a wide range of covert social activity characterized by a profound and persistent concern with time and temporality. Using a unique blend of literary analysis, linguistic anthropology, and phenomenological philosophy, Barletta explores the narratives as testimonials of past human experiences and discovers in them evidence of community resistance. In its interdisciplinary approach, Vincent Barletta's work is nothing less than a rewriting of the cultural history of Muslim Spain, as well as a replotting of the future course of medieval and early modern literary studies.
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Cranial and Postcranial Skeletal Remains from Easter Island
Rupert Ivan Murrill
University of Minnesota Press, 1968

Cranial and Postcranial Skeletal Remains from Easter Island was first published in 1968. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

An archaeological expedition to Easter Island and the East Pacific was organized and financed by Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian anthropologist of Kon-Tiki fame, in 1955 -1956. Although Professor Murrill was not a member of the expedition, he was asked to study and analyze, from the standpoint of physical anthropology, the human skeletal material which was found by the expedition in excavations on Easter Island. Professor Murrill conducted a detailed examination of the remains, using such methods as metrical measurements, morphological observations, and analyses of blood group gene frequencies.

In this book he presents the factual data resulting from his study, much of it in the form of comprehensive tables, and his conclusions. The findings throw significant light on the question of where the prehistoric Easter Islanders came from. Contrary to theories favored by Mr. Heyerdahl and others that these people and their culture derived from prehistoric settlements on the west coast of South America, Professor Murrill concludes that the Easter Island people were Polynesian in origin and that they may have come from the Marquesas Islands. He finds it unlikely that a Negroid migration (possibly from Melanesia) antedated a Polynesian one to Easter Island and, on the basis of his evaluation of blood group systems, he suggests that the Polynesian and the American Indian types may be derived from the same gene pool in East Asia.

The book is illustrated with photographs, drawings, and maps, and there is a substantial bibliography.

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Creating American Civilization
A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline
David Shumway
University of Minnesota Press, 1994

“Shumway has written a penetrating and provocative account of the making of American civilization as an academic field.”

Gerald GraffUniversity of ChicagoDavid R. Shumway contends that American literature is the product of study - the deliberate invention of a discipline seeking to define the character and legitimate the existence of a specifically American civilization. He traces the various reconstitutions of American literature by examining the discipline’s practices and techniques, discourses and structures, paradigms and unstated assumptions.This genealogy begins around 1890, when American literature as defined by institutions outside the academy, such as magazines and publishing houses, acquired much of the ideology it would display in later phases, including sexism, racism, and class bias. Singular in its treatment of American literary study as a discipline rather than as criticism and in its insistence on the cultural and political work carried on by this discipline, Creating American Civilization will engage literary theorists and historians as well as individuals with an interest in American literature.
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Creating Our Own Lives
College Students with Intellectual Disability
Michael Gill
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Young adults with intellectual disability tell the story of their own experience of higher education

 

How do students with intellectual disability experience higher education? Creating Our Own Lives addresses this question through the eyes of participants themselves. In relating their experiences and aspirations, these student perspectives mount a powerful challenge to assumptions that intellectual disability is best met with protection or segregation.

 

Taken together, the essays expose and contradict the inherently ableist claim that individuals with intellectual disability cannot be reliable storytellers. Instead, their deeply informative stories serve as a corrective narrative. The first of the four sections, “Laying the Foundation: Why Everyone Belongs in College,” focuses on belonging and inclusion; the second, “Opening Up Possibilities: Overcoming Doubt and Uncertainty,” conveys the optimism of this generation of advocates through stories of personal hardship, hopeful perseverance, and triumph over adversity; the third, “Inclusion as Action: Diversifying Student Experiences,” supports the understanding of diverse student experiences in inclusive higher education; and the fourth, “Supporting Growth: Peer Mentoring and Advice,” offers guidance to those reimagining and creating educational spaces.

 

Students with disabilities belong in higher education. Not only does this book serve as an important record of students enrolled in inclusive higher education programs, it is also an unprecedented resource, packed with information and inspiration both for parents seeking opportunities for their children and for individuals with intellectual disability who aspire to attend college.

 

Contributors: Makayla Adkins, Olivia Baist, Brandon Baldwin, George Barham, Marquavious Barnes, Katie Bartlett, Steven Brief, De'Onte Brown, Meghan Brozaitis, Mary Bryant, Gracie Carrol, Taylor Cathey, Maia Chamberlain, Antonio E. Contreras, Kim Dean, Elizabeth Droessler, Katie Ducett, Keiron Dyck, Rachel Gomez, Deriq Graves, Micah Gray, Maggie Guillaume, Cleo Hamilton, Nathan Heald, Joshua R. Hourigan, Hannah Lenae Humes, Courtney Jorgensen, Eilish Kelderman, Kailin Kelderman, Kenneth Kelty, Kaelan Knowles, Karlee Lambert, Kate Lisotta, Rachel Mast, Elise McDaniel, Emma Miller, Jake Miller, Lydia Newnum, Brenna Mantz Nielsen, Carly O’Connell, Nadia Osbey, Stirling Peebles, Breyan Pettaway, Amanda Pilkenton, True Rafferty, Taylor Ruppe, Lawrence Sapp, Tyler Shore, Brianna Silva, Alex Smith, Elliott Smith, Phillandra Smith, Payton Storms, Allen Thomas, Kylie Walter, Stephen Wanser, Sayid Webb, Breana Whittlesey, Luke Wilcox, Adam Wolfond.

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Creating the Witness
Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet
Leshu Torchin
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, more than 300,000 lives have been lost in Darfur. Players of the video game Darfur Is Dying learn this sobering fact and more as they work to ensure the survival of a virtual refugee camp. The video game not only puts players in the position of a struggling refugee, it shows them how they can take action in the real world.

Creating the Witness examines the role of film and the Internet in creating virtual witnesses to genocide over the last one hundred years. The book asks, how do visual media work to produce witnesses—audiences who are drawn into action? The argument is a detailed critique of the notion that there is a seamless trajectory from observing an atrocity to acting in order to intervene. According to Leshu Torchin, it is not enough to have a camera; images of genocide require an ideological framework to reinforce the messages the images are meant to convey. Torchin presents wide-ranging examples of witnessing and genocide, including the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust (engaging film as witness in the context of the Nuremburg trials), and the international human rights organization WITNESS and its sustained efforts to use video to publicize human rights advocacy and compel action.

From a historical and comparative approach, Torchin’s broad survey of media and the social practices around it investigates the development of popular understandings of genocide to achieve recognition and response—both political and judicial—ultimately calling on viewers to act on behalf of human rights.




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Creole Indigeneity
Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean
Shona N. Jackson
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

During the colonial period in Guyana, the country’s coastal lands were worked by enslaved Africans and indentured Indians. In Creole Indigeneity, Shona N. Jackson investigates how their descendants, collectively called Creoles, have remade themselves as Guyana’s new natives, displacing indigenous peoples in the Caribbean through an extension of colonial attitudes and policies.

Looking particularly at the nation’s politically fraught decades from the 1950s to the present, Jackson explores aboriginal and Creole identities in Guyanese society. Through government documents, interviews, and political speeches, she reveals how Creoles, though unable to usurp the place of aboriginals as First Peoples in the New World, nonetheless managed to introduce a new, more socially viable definition of belonging, through labor. The very reason for bringing enslaved and indentured workers into Caribbean labor became the organizing principle for Creoles’ new identities.

Creoles linked true belonging, and so political and material right, to having performed modern labor on the land; labor thus became the basis for their subaltern, settler modes of indigeneity—a contradiction for belonging under postcoloniality that Jackson terms “Creole indigeneity.” In doing so, her work establishes a new and productive way of understanding the relationship between national power and identity in colonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial contexts.

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Creole Medievalism
Colonial France and Joseph Bédier’s Middle Ages
Michelle R. Warren
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Joseph Bédier (1864-1938) was one of the most famous scholars of his day. He held prestigious posts and lectured throughout Europe and the United States, an activity unusual for an academic of his time. A scholar of the French Middle Ages, he translated Tristan and Isolde as well as France's national epic, The Song of Roland. Bédier was publicly committed to French hegemony, yet he hailed from a culture that belied this ideal-the island of Réunion in the southern Indian Ocean.

In Creole Medievalism, Michelle Warren demonstrates that Bédier's relationship to this multicultural and economically peripheral colony motivates his nationalism in complex ways. Simultaneously proud of his French heritage and nostalgic for the island, Bédier defends French sovereignty based on an ambivalent resistance to his creole culture. Warren shows that in the early twentieth century, influential intellectuals from Réunion helped define the new genre of the "colonial novel," adopting a pro-colonial spirit that shaped both medieval and Francophone studies. Probing the work of a once famous but little understood cultural figure, Creole Medievalism illustrates how postcolonial France and Réunion continue to grapple with histories too varied to meet expectations of national unity.
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front cover of Crimes against the State, Crimes against Persons
Crimes against the State, Crimes against Persons
Detective Fiction in Cuba and Mexico
Persephone Braham
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

An interpretation of the ideologies and kinships of detective fiction in Cuba and Mexico

The transplanted, inherently modern detective genre serves as an especially effective lens for exposing the fissures and divergences of modernity in post-1968 Mexico and revolutionary Cuba.

Combining in-depth critical analyses with the theoretical insights of current literary and cultural theory and Latin American postmodern studies, Crimes against the State, Crimes against Persons shows how the Cuban novela negra examines the Revolution through an incisive chronicle of life under a decaying regime, and how the Mexican neopoliciaco reveals the oppressive politics of modernization and globalization in Latin America.International in scope, comparative in approach, Braham’s study presents a unique inquiry into the ethical and aesthetic complexities that Latin American authors face in adapting genre detective fiction—a modern, metropolitan model—to radically diverse creative and ideological programs. Considering the work of writers such as Leonardo Padura Fuentes and Paco Ignacio Taibo II, as well as such English-language influences as G. K. Chesterton and Chester Himes, Braham also addresses Marxist critiques of the culture industry and emergent Latin American concepts of postmodernity.
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Crip Negativity
J. Logan Smilges
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Imagining anti-ableist liberation beyond the rubrics of access and inclusion

In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity, J. Logan Smilges shows us what’s gone wrong and what we can do to fix it.

Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, Smilges asks and imagines what horizons might exist for the liberation of those oppressed by ableism—beyond access and inclusion. Inspired by models of negativity in queer studies, Black studies, and crip theory, Smilges proposes that bad crip feelings might help all of us to care gently for one another, even as we demand more from the world than we currently believe to be possible.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

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