An exploration of the winter wonders and entangled histories of Scandinavia’s northernmost landscapes—now back in print with a new afterword by the author
After many years of travel in the Nordic countries—usually preferring to visit during the warmer months—Barbara Sjoholm found herself drawn to Lapland and Sápmi one winter just as mørketid, the dark time, set in. What ensued was a wide-ranging journey that eventually spanned three winters, captivatingly recounted in The Palace of the Snow Queen.
From observing the annual construction of the Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, to crossing the storied Finnmark Plateau in Norway, to attending a Sámi film festival in Finland, Sjoholm dives deep into the rich traditions and vibrant creative communities of the North. She writes of past travelers to Lapland and contemporary tourists in Sápmi, as well as of her encounters with Indigenous reindeer herders, activists, and change-makers. Her new afterword bears witness to the perseverance of the Sámi in the face of tourism, development, and climate change.
Written with keen insight and humor, The Palace of the Snow Queen is a vivid account of Sjoholm’s adventures and a timely investigation of how ice and snow shape our imaginations and create a vision that continues to draw visitors to the North.
Palestine and Jewish History 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.
This provocative and personal series of meditations on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict argues that it represents a struggle not as much about land and history as about space, time, and memory. Juxtaposing entries from Jonathan Boyarin's field diary with critical and theoretical articulations, Palestine and Jewish History shows not only the unfinished nature of anthropological endeavor, but also the author's personal stake in the ethical predicament of being a Jew at this point in history.
Boyarin comes to Israel as a specialist in modern Jewish studies, an individual who has kin, friends, and colleagues there, a scholar with a long history of peace activism. He interweaves fascinating descriptions of ordinary life-parties, walks, classes, visits to homes-with a selection of his related writings on cultural studies and anthropology. Some sections are polemical; others are witty analyses of bumper stickers, slogans, the ambiguities in conversations. Boyarin foregrounds the messiness and lack of closure inherent in this process, presenting "raw materials" (field notes) in some sections of the book that reappear in other sections as various kinds of "finished" products (conference papers, published articles).
In the process, we learn a good deal about the Middle East and its debates and connections to other places. Boyarin addresses two fundamental issues: the difficulty of linking different sorts of memories and memorializations, and the importance of moving beyond objectivity and multiculturalism into a situated, engaged, and nontotalizing framework for fieldwork and ethnography.
Palestine and Jewish History enacts rather than reports on Boyarin's process of error, pain, impatience, uncertainty, discovery, embarrassment, self-criticism, intellectual struggle, and dawning awareness, challenging and engaging us in the process of discovery. Ultimately, it gives the lie, as the Palestinian presence does in Israel, to any concept of a "finishedness" that successfully conceals its unruly and painful multiple processes.
Jonathan Boyarin is the Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Thought in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Storm from Paradise, co-author of Powers of Diaspora, and the co-editor of Remapping Memory and Jews and Other Differences, all available from Minnesota.
The Paradox of Progressive Thought 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 book describes and analyzes an important aspect of American intellectual history, the climate of opinion in which nine leaders of progressive thought in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were important creators and spokesmen. By closely examining the central ideas of these men, Professor Noble presents an illuminating view of a significant phase of the liberal tradition in America. At the same time, he questions many of the generally accepted views about the philosophical basis of traditional liberalism and demonstrates the paradox of progressive thought.
The social philosophers whose writings and teachings he scrutinizes are Herbert Croly, long-time editor of the New Republic; James Mark Baldwin, psychologist and philosopher; Charles H. Cooley, author of Social Organization; F. H. Johnson, theologian whose name was linked with Darwinism; Henry Demarest Lloyd, reformer and newspaperman who attacked the evils of monopoly in his book Wealth and Commonwealth; Richard T. Ely, economist and early advocate of Christian socialism; Simon N. Patten, whose work The Premises of Political Economy lifted him to fame; Thorstein Veblen, whose Theory of the Leisure Class is a household word today; and Walter Rauschenbusch, the Baptist clergyman who wrote Christianity and the Social Crisis and Christianity and the Social Order. In addition, there is extensive consideration of the thought and influence of Carl L. Becker, the noted historian and analyst of thought and philosophy in action.
Passionate Fictions was first published in 1994. 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.
"Clarice Lispector is the premiere Latin American woman prose writer of this century," Suzanne Ruta noted in the New York Times Book Review, "but because she is a woman and a Brazilian, she has remained virtually unknown in the United States." Passionate Fictions provides American readers with a critical introduction to this remarkable writer and offers those who already know Lispector's fiction a deeper understanding of its complex workings.
Paternalism was first published in 1984. 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.
Over a hundred years of controversy have established that the antipaternalistic principle so passionately argued by Mill in On Liberty is anything but simple. There are difficulties in interpreting the principle, in reconciling it with Mill's general utilitarian position, and defending it under any particular interpretation. The fourteen essays collected in Paternalism represent the shape philosophical discussions have taken in the past decade and include the classical contemporary statements as well as important new work. This book will provide philosophers, policymakers, doctors, lawyers, and students with all the major arguments that are part of the current controversy.
How do “human” prejudices reemerge in algorithmic cultures allegedly devised to be blind to them?
How do “human” prejudices reemerge in algorithmic cultures allegedly devised to be blind to them? To answer this question, this book investigates a fundamental axiom in computer science: pattern discrimination. By imposing identity on input data, in order to filter—that is, to discriminate—signals from noise, patterns become a highly political issue. Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation, such as class, race, and gender, through defaults and paradigmatic assumptions about the homophilic nature of connection.
Instead of providing a more “objective” basis of decision making, machine-learning algorithms deepen bias and further inscribe inequality into media. Yet pattern discrimination is an essential part of human—and nonhuman—cognition. Bringing together media thinkers and artists from the United States and Germany, this volume asks the urgent questions: How can we discriminate without being discriminatory? How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs? How can we queer homophilic tendencies within digital cultures?
Paul U. Kellogg and the Survey 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.
This joint biography of an editor, Paul U. Kellogg, and a journal, the Survey,provides new insights into the story of social work, social welfare policy, and political and social reform in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Under Kellogg's editorship, the Survey and Survey Graphic journals stood at the heart of the evolution of social work as a profession and the development of a public social welfare policy during those years.
Early in his career, in 1901, Kellogg joined the staff of the Charities Review,the leading social service publication at that time. In 1912 he became editor in chief of the successor to that journal, the Survey, and he held this position of leadership for forty years until the magazine ceased publication.
The journals Kellogg edited played a major role in shaping and defining areas and methods of social service in all its diverse fields — the settlement movement, casework, recreation and group work, community organization, and social action. They carried news in depth about all manner of social work practice—juvenile courts, penology, health, education, institutional care, public relief, the administration of social insurance, and other aspects. The Survey's influence was profound in promoting the elaboration of public policy in social welfare fields, such as housing reform, workmen's compensation, the rights of organized labor, old age and survivors' insurance, unemployment compensation, aid to dependent children, and health insurance. Thus this account represents an important chapter in American social history.
A Peculiar Imbalance is the little-known history of the black experience in Minnesota in the mid-1800s, a time of dramatic change in the region. William D. Green explains how, as white progressive politicians pushed for statehood, black men who had been integrated members of the community, owning businesses and maintaining good relationships with their neighbors, found themselves denied the right to vote or to run for office in those same communities.
As Minnesota was transformed from a wilderness territory to a state, the concepts of race and ethnicity and the distinctions among them made by Anglo-Americans grew more rigid and arbitrary. A black man might enjoy economic success and a middle-class lifestyle but was not considered a citizen under the law. In contrast, an Irish Catholic man was able to vote—as could a mixed-blood Indian—but might find himself struggling to build a business because of the ethnic and religious prejudices of the Anglo-American community. A Peculiar Imbalance examines these disparities, reflecting on the political, social, and legal experiences of black men from 1837 to 1869, the year of black suffrage.
During the past thirty years, Native American dance has emerged as a visible force on concert stages throughout North America. In this first major study of contemporary Native American dance, Jacqueline Shea Murphy shows how these performances are at once diverse and connected by common influences.
Demonstrating the complex relationship between Native and modern dance choreography, Shea Murphy delves first into U.S. and Canadian federal policies toward Native performance from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, revealing the ways in which government sought to curtail authentic ceremonial dancing while actually encouraging staged spectacles, such as those in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows. She then engages the innovative work of Ted Shawn, Lester Horton, and Martha Graham, highlighting the influence of Native American dance on modern dance in the twentieth century. Shea Murphy moves on to discuss contemporary concert dance initiatives, including Canada’s Aboriginal Dance Program and the American Indian Dance Theatre.
Illustrating how Native dance enacts, rather than represents, cultural connections to land, ancestors, and animals, as well as spiritual and political concerns, Shea Murphy challenges stereotypes about American Indian dance and offers new ways of recognizing the agency of bodies on stage.
Jacqueline Shea Murphy is associate professor of dance studies at the University of California, Riverside, and coeditor of Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance.
An illuminating volume of critical essays charting the diverse territory of digital humanities scholarship
The digital humanities have traditionally been considered to be the domain of only a small number of prominent and well-funded institutions. However, through a diverse range of critical essays, this volume serves to challenge and enlarge existing notions of how digital humanities research is being undertaken while also serving as a kind of alternative guide for how it can thrive within a wide variety of institutional spaces.
Focusing on the complex infrastructure that undergirds the field of digital humanities, People, Practice, Power examines the various economic, social, and political factors that shape such academic endeavors. The multitude of perspectives comprising this collection offers both a much-needed critique of the existing structures for digital scholarship and the means to generate broader representation within the field.
This collection provides a vital contribution to the realm of digital scholarly research and pedagogy in acknowledging the role that small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, historically black colleges and universities, and other underresourced institutions play in its advancement. Gathering together a range of voices both established and emergent, People, Practice, Power offers practitioners a self-reflexive examination of the current conditions under which the digital humanities are evolving, while helping to open up new sustainable pathways for its future.
Contributors: Matthew Applegate, Molloy College; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; Eduard Arriaga, U of Indianapolis; Lydia Bello, Seattle U; Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State U; Christina Boyles, Michigan State U; Laura R. Braunstein, Dartmouth College; Abby R. Broughton; Maria Sachiko Cecire, Bard College; Brennan Collins, Georgia State U; Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, U of Maryland; Brittany de Gail, U of Maryland; Madelynn Dickerson, UC Irvine Libraries; Nathan H. Dize, Vanderbilt U; Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U; Ashley Sanders Garcia, UCLA; Laura Gerlitz; Erin Rose Glass; Kaitlyn Grant; Margaret Hogarth, Claremont Colleges; Maryse Ndilu Kiese, U of Alberta; Pamella R. Lach, San Diego State U; James Malazita, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Susan Merriam, Bard College; Chelsea Miya, U of Alberta; Jamila Moore Pewu, California State U, Fullerton; Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, Aalto U, Finland; Jessica Pressman, San Diego State U; Jana Remy, Chapman U; Roopika Risam, Salem State U; Elizabeth Rodrigues, Grinnell College; Dylan Ruediger, American Historical Association; Rachel Schnepper, Wesleyan U; Anelise Hanson Shrout, Bates College; Margaret Simon, North Carolina State U; Mengchi Sun, U of Alberta; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond; Michelle R. Warren, Dartmouth College.
Perceptual Acquaintance was first published in 1984. 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.
Philosophers, wrote Thomas Reid in 1785, "all suppose that we perceive not external objects immediately, and that the immediate objects of perception are only certain shadows of the external objects." To Reid, a founding father of the common-sense school of philosophy, John Locke's "way of ideas" threatened to supplant, in human knowledge, the world of physical objects and events—and to point down the dreaded path to scepticism.
John Yolton finds Reid at least partly responsible for this standard (and by now stereotypic) account of Locke and his eighteenth-century British successors on the subject of perception. By carefully examining the writings of Descartes and the Cartesians, and Locke and his successors, Yolton is able to suggest an alternative to this interpretation of their views. He goes back to a wide range of original texts—those of the period's major philosophers, to Descartes' scholastic precursors, to obscure pamphleteers, and to writers on religion, natural philosophy, medicine, and optics—all in an effort to help us understand the issues without the interference of modern labels and categories. The subtle changes over time reveal an important transformation in the understanding of perception, yet one that is prefigured in earlier work, contrary to Reid's view of the past. Included in Yolton's reevaluation is a full account of the role of Berkeley and Hume in the study of perceptual acquaintance, and of the connection between their work.
Perilous Balance was first published in 1945. 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.
A new exploration of how digital media assert the relevance of dance in a wired world
How has the Internet changed dance? Dance performances can now be seen anywhere, can be looped endlessly at user whim, and can integrate crowds in unprecedented ways. Dance practices are evolving to explore these new possibilities. In Perpetual Motion, Harmony Bench argues that dance is a vital part of civil society and a means for building participation and community. She looks at how, after 9/11, it became a crucial way of recuperating the common character of public spaces. She explores how crowdsourcing dance contributes to the project of performing a common world, as well as the social relationships forged when we look at dance as a gift in the era of globalization. Throughout, she asks how dance brings people together in digital spaces and what dance’s digital travels might mean for how we experience and express community.
From original research on dance today to political economies of digital media to the philosophy of dance, Perpetual Motion provides an ambitious, invigorating look at a commonly shared practice.
Peter Nielsen's Story was first published in 1949. 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.
How social media has become a critical tool for advancing the interests of the Canadian oil industry
Petroturfing presents an incisive look into how Canada’s pro-oil movement has leveraged social media to rebrand the extractive economy as a positive force. Adapting its title from the concept of astroturfing, which refers to the practice of disguising political and corporate media campaigns as grassroots movements, the book exposes the consequences of this mutually informed relationship between social media and environmental politics.
Since the early 2010s, an increasingly influential network of pro-oil groups, organizations, and campaigns has harnessed social media strategies originally developed by independent environmental organizations in order to undermine resistance to the fossil fuel industry. Situating these actions within the broader oil culture wars that have developed as an outgrowth of contemporary right-wing media, Petroturfing details how this coalition of groups is working to reform the public view of oil extraction as something socially, economically, and ecologically beneficial.
By uncovering these concerted efforts to influence the “energy consciousness,” Jordan B. Kinder reveals the deep divide between Canada’s environmentally progressive reputation and the economic interests of its layers of government and private companies operating within its borders. Drawing attention to the structures underlying online political expression, Petroturfing highlights the limitations of social media networks in the work of promoting environmental justice and contributing to a more equitable future.
Philosophical Fragments 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.
At a time when the function of criticism is again coming under close skeptical scrutiny, Schlegel's unorthodox, highly original mind, as revealed in these foundational "fragments," provides the critical framework for reflecting on contemporary experimental texts.
Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor was first published in 1981. 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.
"We are," says Mark Johnson, "in the midst of metaphormania." The past few years have seen an explosion of interest in metaphor as a vehicle for exploring the relations between language and thought. While a number of recent books have dealt with metaphor from the standpoints of several disciplines, there is no collection that shows the best of the work that has been done in the field of philosophy. Mark Johnson has brought together essays that define the central issues of the discussion in this field.
His introductory essay offers a critical survey of historically influential treatments of figurative language (including those of Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Nietzsche) and sets forth the nature of various issues that have been of interest to philosophers. Thus, it provides a context in which to understand the motivations, influences, and significance of the collected essays. An annotated bibliography serves as a catalog of all relevant literature.
Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor provides an entry point into the philosophical exploration of metaphor for students, philosophers, linguists, psychologists, artists, critics, or anyone interested in language and its relation to understanding and experience.
Philosophy Beside Itself was first published in 1986. 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 writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida have been the single most powerful influence on critical theory and practice in the United States over the past decade. But with few exceptions American philosophers have taken little or no interest in Derrida's work, and the task of reception, translation, and commentary has been left to literary critics. As a result, Derrida has appeared as a figure already defined by essentially literary critical activities and interests.
Stephen Melville's aim in Philosophy Beside Itself is to insist upon and clarify the distinctions between philosophy and criticism. He argues that until we grasp Derrida's philosophical project as such, we remain fundamentally unable to see his significance for criticism. In terms derived from Stanley Cavell's writings on modernism, Melville develops a case for Derrida as a modernist philosopher, working at once within and against that tradition and discipline.
Melville first places Derrida in a Hegelian context, the structure of which he explores by examining the work of Heidegger, Lacan, and Bataille. With this foundation, he is able to reappraise the project of deconstructive criticism as developed in Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight and further articulated by other Yale critics. Central to this critique is the ambivalent relationship between deconstructive criticism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Criticism—radical self-criticism—is a central means through which the difficult facts of human community come to recognition, and Melville argues for criticism as an activity intimately bound to the ways in which we do and do not belong in time and in community. Derrida's achievement has been to find a new and necessary way to assert that the task of philosophy is criticism; the task of literary criticism is to assume the burden of that achievement.
Stephen Melville is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University, and Donald Marshall is a professor of English at the University of Iowa.
Phonetics and Diction in Singing was first published in 1967. 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 book provides rules and illustrative examples for the study of songs and operas in the leading foreign languages of musical literature. The author is conductor and chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera. He has drawn the material from his larger book, The Art of Accompanying and Coaching,to provide a handbook or textbook especially suitable for use by voice teachers, singers, students in high schools, colleges, and schools of music, and members of choruses, church choirs, and opera workshops and their directors. Following a general discussion of phonetics and diction in singing there are separate chapters on Italian, French, Spanish, and German phonetics and diction. The text is illustrated with drawings and diagrams of vocal techniques and musical examples.
What does it mean to be Black? If Blackness is not biological in origin but socially and discursively constructed, does the meaning of Blackness change over time and space? In Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, Michelle M. Wright argues that although we often explicitly define Blackness as a “what,” it in fact always operates as a “when” and a “where.”
By putting lay discourses on spacetime from physics into conversation with works on identity from the African Diaspora, Physics of Blackness explores how Middle Passage epistemology subverts racist assumptions about Blackness, yet its linear structure inhibits the kind of inclusive epistemology of Blackness needed in the twenty-first century. Wright then engages with bodies frequently excluded from contemporary mainstream consideration: Black feminists, Black queers, recent Black African immigrants to the West, and Blacks whose histories may weave in and out of the Middle Passage epistemology but do not cohere to it.
Physics of Blackness takes the reader on a journey both known and unfamiliar—from Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravity to the contemporary politics of diasporic Blackness in the academy, from James Baldwin’s postwar trope of the Eiffel Tower as the site for diasporic encounters to theoretical particle physics’ theory of multiverses and superpositioning, to the almost erased lives of Black African women during World War II. Accessible in its style, global in its perspective, and rigorous in its logic, Physics of Blackness will change the way you look at Blackness.
The Physiology and Pathology of the Cerebellum 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.
The development of electrical methods of recording activity in the nervous system has greatly augmented our knowledge of cerebellar physiology. Now, for the first time in a single volume, this new information has been related to facts derived from older methods of investigation. Previously unpublished reports of experiments conducted at the Institute of Physiology, University of Pisa, Italy, also are included.
The authors, an American clinical neurologist and an Italian neuro-physiologist, have collaborated to provide a comprehensive review of cerebellar physiology and a survey of the clinical symptomatology of cerebellar disorders and the pathology of the cerebellum.
In Part I, devoted to the physiology, the authors review the literature completely and place it in proper relation to the latest developments in this field. There are chapters on this history of cerebellar physiology, ablation experiments, stimulation experiments, electro-physiological experiments, the relations between the cerebellum and other central nervous structures, developmental physiology, and the functions of the cerebellum, considered generally.Part II is devoted to the human cerebellum as studied in the clinic. Where anatomical and physiological observation may shed light upon obscure clinical findings, the laboratory data are related to the clinical investigations. The disorders and diseases affecting the cerebellum are systemically reviewed. The book is illustrated with 61 halftones and 124 line drawings.
The first full-length study of a once revolutionary visual and linguistic medium
Literature has “died” many times—this book tells the story of its death by postcard. Picturing the Postcard looks to this unlikely source to shed light on our collective, modern-day obsession with new media. The postcard, almost unimaginably now, produced at the end of the nineteenth century the same anxieties and hopes that many people think are unique to twenty-first-century social media such as Facebook or Twitter. It promised a newly connected social world accessible to all and threatened the breakdown of authentic social relations and even of language.
Arguing that “new media” is as much a discursive object as a material one, and that it is always in dialogue with the media that came before it, Monica Cure reconstructs the postcard’s history through journals, legal documents, and sources from popular culture, analyzing the postcard’s representation in fiction by well-known writers such as E. M. Forster and Edith Wharton and by more obscure writers like Anne Sedgwick and Herbert Flowerdew. Writers deployed uproar over the new medium of the postcard by Anglo-American cultural critics to mirror anxieties about the changing nature of the literary marketplace, which included the new role of women in public life, the appeal of celebrity and the loss of privacy, an increasing dependence on new technologies, and the rise of mass media. Literature kept open the postcard’s possibilities and in the process reimagined what literature could be.
How contemporary environmental struggles and resistance to pipeline development became populist struggles
Stunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial populist movements that have also played a vital role in pipeline resistance. Kai Bosworth explores the influence of populism on environmentalist politics, which sought to bring together Indigenous water protectors and environmental activists along with farmers and ranchers in opposition to pipeline construction.
Here Bosworth argues that populism is shaped by the “affective infrastructures” emerging from shifts in regional economies, democratic public-review processes, and scientific controversies. With this lens, he investigates how these movements wax and wane, moving toward or away from other forms of environmental and political ideologies in the Upper Midwest. This lens also lets Bosworth place populist social movements in the critical geographical contexts of racial inequality, nationalist sentiments, ongoing settler colonialism, and global empire—crucial topics when grappling with the tensions embedded in our era’s immense environmental struggles.
Pipeline Populism reveals the complex role populism has played in shifting interpretations of environmental movements, democratic ideals, scientific expertise, and international geopolitics. Its rich data about these grassroots resistance struggles include intimate portraits of the emotional spaces where opposition is first formed. Probing the very limits of populism, Pipeline Populism presents essential work for an era defined by a wave of people-powered movements around the world.
Place Names of Southwest Peloponnesus was first published in 1969. 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 work contains listings, in Greek, of nearly 10,000 place names collected in approximately 300 settlements of regions in Peloponnesus, the southern peninsula of Greece. In their introduction the authors point out that the present-day toponyms reflect historical and linguistic developments through the ages and thus provide important source material for scholarly studies. Inhabitants of the region whose language was ancient Greek, Koine Greek, Byzantine Greek, South Slavic, Frankish, Venetian, Albanian, Turkish, or Neo-Greek have all left discernible traces in the local place names. The book will be useful not only to specialists in onomastics and linguistics but also to historians, archaeologists, geographers, and other researchers in Greek and comparative studies.
Author Phyllis Root and illustrator Betsy Bowen last explored the vast, boggy peatlands of northern Minnesota in their book Big Belching Bog. Now, in Plant a Pocket of Prairie, Root and Bowen take young readers on a trip to another of Minnesota’s important ecosystems: the prairie.
Once covering almost 40 percent of the United States, native prairie is today one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world. Plant a Pocket of Prairie teaches children how changes in one part of the system affect every other part: when prairie plants are destroyed, the animals who eat those plants and live on or around them are harmed as well. Root shows what happens when we work to restore the prairies, encouraging readers to “plant a pocket of prairie” in their own backyards.
By growing native prairie plants, children can help re-create food and habitat for the many birds, butterflies, and other animals that depend on them. “Plant cup plants,” Root suggests. “A thirsty chickadee might come to drink from a tiny leaf pool. Plant goldenrod. A Great Plains toad might flick its tongue at goldenrod soldier beetles.” An easy explanation of the history of the prairie, its endangered status, and how to go about growing prairie plants follows, as well as brief descriptions of all the plants and animals mentioned in the story.
With Betsy Bowen’s beautiful, airy illustrations capturing the feel of an open prairie and all its inhabitants, readers of all ages will be inspired to start planting seeds and watching for the many fascinating animals their plants attract. What a marvelous transformation could take place if we all planted a pocket of prairie!
Offering a deeper understanding of today’s internet media and the management theory behind it
Platforms are everywhere. From social media to chat, streaming, credit cards, and even bookstores, it seems like almost everything can be described as a platform. In The Platform Economy, Marc Steinberg argues that the “platformization” of capitalism has transformed everything, and it is imperative that we have a historically precise, robust understanding of this widespread concept.
Taking Japan as the key site for global platformization, Steinberg delves into that nation’s unique technological and managerial trajectory, in the process systematically examining every facet of the elusive word platform. Among the untold stories revealed here is that of the 1999 iPhone precursor, the i-mode: the world’s first widespread mobile internet platform, which became a blueprint for Apple and Google’s later dominance of the mobile market. Steinberg also charts the rise of social gaming giants GREE and Mobage, chat tools KakaoTalk, WeChat, and LINE, and video streaming site Niconico Video, as well as the development of platform theory in Japan, as part of a wider transformation of managerial theory to account for platforms as mediators of cultural life.
Analyzing platforms’ immense impact on contemporary media such as video streaming, music, and gaming, The Platform Economy fills in neglected parts of the platform story. In narrating the rise and fall of Japanese platforms, and the enduring legacy of Japanese platform theory, this book sheds light on contemporary tech titans like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Netflix, and their platform-mediated transformation of contemporary life—it is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand what capitalism is today and where it is headed.
A potent new book examines the overlap between our ecological crisis and video games
Video games may be fun and immersive diversions from daily life, but can they go beyond the realm of entertainment to do something serious—like help us save the planet? As one of the signature issues of the twenty-first century, ecological deterioration is seemingly everywhere, but it is rarely considered via the realm of interactive digital play. In Playing Nature, Alenda Y. Chang offers groundbreaking methods for exploring this vital overlap.
Arguing that games need to be understood as part of a cultural response to the growing ecological crisis, Playing Nature seeds conversations around key environmental science concepts and terms. Chang suggests several ways to rethink existing game taxonomies and theories of agency while revealing surprising fundamental similarities between game play and scientific work.
Gracefully reconciling new media theory with environmental criticism, Playing Nature examines an exciting range of games and related art forms, including historical and contemporary analog and digital games, alternate- and augmented-reality games, museum exhibitions, film, and science fiction. Chang puts her surprising ideas into conversation with leading media studies and environmental humanities scholars like Alexander Galloway, Donna Haraway, and Ursula Heise, ultimately exploring manifold ecological futures—not all of them dystopian.
How gaming intersects with systems like history, bodies, and code
Why do we so compulsively play video games? Might it have something to do with how gaming affects our emotions? In Playing with Feelings, scholar Aubrey Anable applies affect theory to game studies, arguing that video games let us “rehearse” feelings, states, and emotions that give new tones and textures to our everyday lives and interactions with digital devices. Rather than thinking about video games as an escape from reality, Anable demonstrates how video games—their narratives, aesthetics, and histories—have been intimately tied to our emotional landscape since the emergence of digital computers.
Looking at a wide variety of video games—including mobile games, indie games, art games, and games that have been traditionally neglected by academia—Anable expands our understanding of the ways in which these games and game studies can participate in feminist and queer interventions in digital media culture. She gives a new account of the touchscreen and intimacy with our mobile devices, asking what it means to touch and be touched by a game. She also examines how games played casually throughout the day create meaningful interludes that give us new ways of relating to work in our lives. And Anable reflects on how games allow us to feel differently about what it means to fail.
Playing with Feelings offers provocative arguments for why video games should be seen as the most significant art form of the twenty-first century and gives the humanities passionate, incisive, and daring arguments for why games matter.
Playwrights for Tomorrow was first published in 1973. 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 presents four plays by writers who have worked under the program of the Office for Advanced Drama Research (O.A.D.R.) at the University of Minnesota, an experimental project which provides promising playwrights with the opportunity of working with cooperating theatres in the production of their plays. Arthur H. Ballet, the editor, is director of the
O.A.D.R.
The plays in this volume and the theatres which cooperated in their production are Boxes by Susan Yankowitz, Magic Theatre, Berkeley, California; Canvas by David Roszkowski, Scorpio Rising Theatre, Los Angeles; Bierce Takes on the Railroad! by Philip A. Bosakowski, Theatre III, College of Marin, Kentfield, California; and Chamber Piece by John O'Keefe, Magic Theatre, Berkeley, California.
In an introduction Professor Ballet discussed the program and accomplishments of the O. A.D.R., which was established with the aid of a Rockefeller Foundation grant. He writes: "It seemed obvious that no artist worked in more lonely isolation and needed more direct contact with the theatre than the playwright. Despite loud pronouncements . . . that theatres outside of New York were searching for new plays and writers, the evidence indicates that very few theatres really wanted to work with unknown but living playwrights. The O.A.D.R., in its small way, has tried to open a highway . . . between new, often untried writers and willing, even brave theatres.
As Speech and Drama (England) pointed out in a review of earlier volumes of the Playwrights for Tomorrow series: "Schemes like this one at Minnesota deserve the highest praise. On the evidence of these volumes, the executive committee which operates this venture is not attempting to impose any single imprint on its authors—a further example of the generosity of the patronage."
Playwrights for Tomorrow was first published in 1967. 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 fourth in a series of volumes which offer collections of plays by dramatists who have participated in an experimental program conducted at the University of Minnesota under the auspices of the Office of Advanced Drama Research (O.A.D.R.). Dr. Arthur H. Ballet, editor of the series, is the director of the O.A.D.R.
This volume contains three full-length plays and one short play. They are The World Tipped Over, and Laying on Its Side (one act) by Mary Feldhaus-Weber, Visions of Sugar Plums by Barry Pritchard, The Strangler by Arnold Powell, and The Long War by Kevin O' Morrison. Mary Feldhaus-Weber is a St. Paul poet who has chosen to work in the theatre. Mr. Pritchard, a former playwright in residence at Theatre St. Paul, now writes for television and films in Hollywood. Mr. Powell is a teacher and theatre director at Birmingham-Southern College in Atlanta, and Mr. O'Morrison pursues an acting career in the Broadway theatre.
As Dr. Ballet explains in his introduction, the program of the O.A.D.R. is designed to give promising playwrights a testing ground for their ideas, skills, and talents by providing them with a chance to have their plays actually produced and, whenever possible, the opportunity of working with the producing groups. He points out that a number of the writers associated with the O.A.D.R. have subsequently moved into the mainstream of contemporary American theatre. Publication of the plays will, it is hoped, bring them to the attention of larger audiences and stimulate further critical appraisal.
An enlightening examination of the relationship between poetry and the information technologies increasingly used to read and write it
Many poets and their readers believe poetry helps us escape straightforward, logical ways of thinking. But what happens when poems confront the extraordinarily rational information technologies that are everywhere in the academy, not to mention everyday life?
Examining a broad array of electronics—including the radio, telephone, tape recorder, Cold War–era computers, and modern-day web browsers—Seth Perlow considers how these technologies transform poems that we don’t normally consider “digital.” From fetishistic attachments to digital images of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts to Jackson Mac Low’s appropriation of a huge book of random numbers originally used to design thermonuclear weapons, these investigations take Perlow through a revealingly eclectic array of work, offering both exciting new voices and reevaluations of poets we thought we knew.
With close readings of Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, and many others, The Poem Electric constructs a distinctive lineage of experimental writers, from the 1860s to today. Ultimately, Perlow mounts an important investigation into how electronic media allows us to distinguish poetic thought from rationalism. Posing a necessary challenge to the privilege of information in the digital humanities, The Poem Electric develops new ways of reading poetry, alongside and against the electronic equipment that is now ubiquitous in our world.
Poetic Creation 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.
Myths of creativity have changed throughout Western literary history. The Romantic era cherished the idea of creativity as a spontaneous, unpremeditated act, closely related to improvisation. In the twentieth century the myth of the writer as a worker among workers has competed with the Surrealist myth of the spontaneous author who writes in a sort of trance. Yet there can be no doubt that the creative process as such crosses historical boundaries. Carl Fehrman devotes this book to the process of artistic creativity, focusing on the dichotomy between inspiration and effort and using texts and manuscripts from the period of early Romanticism to present.
Fehrman is primarily concerned with the creativity of poets and draws on authorial accounts of the process, the analysis of manuscripts in successive drafts, psychological and linguistic experiments in creativity, and accounts of creativity in other fields. At the heart of the book are case studies: on Coleridge's writings of "Kubla Khan," Poe's composition of "The Raven," And Valery's account of his prolonged work on "Le Cimetiere Marin." Fehrman also deals with literary works that have undergone genre transformation, Ibsen's Brand and Selma Lagerlof;s Gosta Berlings Saga. In closing chapters he draws upon his case studies and other materials to provide fascinating insights into both productivity and its converse, blocked creativity, and in this context discusses the general problem of periodicity in a creative life.
Fehrman works within a Swedish aesthetic tradition which has attracted philosophers, art historians, and literary scholars since the turn of the century, all of them intent on discovering the origins of the work of art. This translation brings his work to Englishspeaking literary scholars and will be of special interest to those concerned with comparative aesthetics and the creative process.
The Poetics of Cruising explores the relationship between cruising, photography, and the visual in the work of leading poets, from Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century to Eileen Myles in the twenty-first. What is it that happens, asks Jack Parlett, and what is it that is sought, in this often transient moment of perception we call cruising, this perceptual arena where acts of looking between strangers are intensified and eroticized? Parlett believes that this moment is not only optical in nature but visual: a mode of looking that warrants comparison with the ways in which we behold still and moving images.
Whether it’s Whitman’s fixation with daguerreotypes, Langston Hughes’s hybrid photographic works, or Frank O’Hara’s love of Hollywood movie stars, argues Parlett, the history of poets cruising abounds with this intermingling between the verbal and the visual, the passing and the fixed. To look at someone in the act of cruising, this history suggests, is to capture, consider, and aestheticize, amid the flux and instantaneity of urban time. But it is also to reveal the ambivalence at the heart of this erotic search, where power may be unevenly distributed across glances, and gendered and racialized bodies are marked. Thus, in identifying for the first time this confluence of cruising, poetry, and visual culture, Parlett concludes that the visual erotic economy associated with gay cruising today, exemplified by the photographic grid of an app like Grindr, is not a uniquely contemporary phenomenon.
Innovative, astute, and highly readable, and drawing on compelling archival material, The Poetics of Cruising is a must for scholars of queer and LGBTQ literature and culture, modern and contemporary poetry, visual studies, and the history of sexuality.
How has DNA come to be seen as a cosmic truth, representative of all life, potential for all cures, repository for all identity, and end to all stories? In The Poetics of DNA, Judith Roof examines the rise of this powerful symbol and the implications of its ascendancy for the ways we think—about ourselves, about one another, and about the universe.
Descriptions of DNA, Roof argues, have distorted ideas and transformed nucleic acid into the answer to all questions of life. This hyperbolized notion of DNA, inevitably confused or conflated with the “gene,” has become a vector through which older ways of thinking can merge with the new, advancing long-discredited and insidious ideas about such things as eugenics and racial selection and influencing contemporary debates, particularly the popular press obsession with the “gay gene.” Through metaphors of DNA, she contends, racist and homophobic ideology is masked as progressive science.
Grappling with twentieth-century intellectual movements as well as contemporary societal anxieties, The Poetics of DNA reveals how descriptions of DNA and genes typify a larger set of epistemological battles that play out not only through the assumptions associated with DNA but also through less evident methods of magical thinking, reductionism, and pseudoscience.
For the first time, Roof exposes the ideology and cultural consequences of DNA and gene metaphors to uncover how, ultimately, they are paradigms used to recreate prejudices.
Judith Roof is professor of English and film studies at Michigan State University. She is the author of several books, including All about Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels.
The Poetry of the Possible challenges the conventional image of modernism as a socially phobic formation, arguing that modernism’s abstractions and difficulties are ways of imagining unrealized powers of collective self-organization. Establishing a conceptual continuum between modernism and contemporary theorists such as Paulo Virno, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou, Joel Nickels rediscovers modernism’s attempts to document the creative potenza of the multitude.
By examining scenes of collective life in works by William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Laura Riding, and Wallace Stevens, Nickels resurrects modernism’s obsession with constituent power: the raw, indeterminate capacity for reciprocal counsel that continually constitutes and reconstitutes established political regimes. In doing so, he reminds us that our own attempts to imagine leaderless networks of collective initiative are not so much breaks with modernist forms of knowledge as restagings of some of modernism’s most radical moments of political speculation.
Setting modernism’s individual and collective models of spontaneity in dialogue with theorists of political spontaneity such as Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno, Nickels retells the story of modernism as the struggle to represent powers of collective self-organization that lie outside established regimes of political representation.
Based on the lives and crimes of no less than twenty real women, dokufu (poison women) narratives emerged as a powerful presence in Japan during the 1870s. During this tumultuous time, as the nation moved from feudalism to oligarchic government, such accounts articulated the politics and position of underclass women, sexual morality, and female suffrage. Over the next century, the figure of the oversexed female criminal, usually guilty of robbery or murder, became ubiquitous in modern Japanese culture.
In Poison Woman, Christine L. Marran investigates this powerful icon, its shifting meanings, and its influence on defining women’s sexuality and place in Japan. She begins by considering Meiji gesaku literature, in which female criminality was often medically defined and marginalized as abnormal. She describes the small newspapers (koshinbun) that originally reported on poison women, establishing journalistic and legal conventions for future fiction about them. She examines zange, or confessional narratives, of female and male ex-convicts from the turn of the century, then reveals how medical and psychoanalytical literature of the 1920s and 1930s offered contradictory explanations of the female criminal as an everywoman or a historical victim of social circumstances and the press. She concludes by exploring postwar pulp fiction (kasutori), film and underground theater of the 1970s, and the feminist writer Tomioka Taeko’s take on the transgressive woman.
Persistent stories about poison women illustrate how a few violent acts by women were transformed into myriad ideological, social, and moral tales that deployed notions of female sexual desire and womanhood. Bringing together literary criticism, the history of science, media theory, and gender and sexuality studies, Poison Woman delves into genre and gender in ways that implicate both in projects of nation-building.
Christine L. Marran is associate professor of Japanese literature and cultural studies at the University of Minnesota.
As zero-tolerance discipline policies have been instituted at high schools across the country, police officers are employed with increasing frequency to enforce behavior codes and maintain order, primarily at poorly performing, racially segregated urban schools. Actions that may once have sent students to the detention hall or resulted in their suspension may now introduce them to the criminal justice system. In Police in the Hallways, Kathleen Nolan explores the impact of policing and punitive disciplinary policies on the students and their educational experience.
Through in-depth interviews with and observations of students, teachers, administrators, and police officers, Nolan offers a rich and nuanced account of daily life at a Bronx high school where police patrol the hallways and security and discipline fall under the jurisdiction of the NYPD. She documents how, as law enforcement officials initiate confrontations with students, small infractions often escalate into “police matters” that can lead to summonses to criminal court, arrest, and confinement in juvenile detention centers.
Nolan follows students from the classroom and the cafeteria to the detention hall, the dean’s office, and the criminal court system, clarifying the increasingly intimate relations between the school and the criminal justice system. Placing this trend within the context of recent social and economic changes, as well as developments within criminal justice and urban school reform, she shows how this police presence has created a culture of control in which penal management overshadows educational innovation.
Police in the Hallways also examines the prevalent forms of oppositional behavior through which students express their frustrations and their deep sense of exclusion. With compassion and clear-eyed analysis, Nolan sounds a warning about this alarming convergence of prison and school cultures and the negative impact that it has on the real lives of low-income students of color—and, in turn, on us all.
For many philosophers, the rational cognitive (Cartesian) subject defines the human, or at least defines what humans should be. Yet some recent cognitive science, as well as the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, has called into question such individuality and rationality and emphasized social and emotional subjectivity. Understanding such embodied and embedded subjectivity, John Protevi argues, demands the notion of bodies politic.
In Political Affect, Protevi investigates the relationship between the social and the somatic: how our bodies, minds, and social settings are intricately and intimately linked. Bringing together concepts from science, philosophy, and politics, he develops a perspective he calls political physiology to indicate that subjectivity is socially conditioned and sometimes bypassed in favor of a direct connection of the social and the somatic, as with the politically triggered basic emotions of rage and panic. Protevi's treatment of affective cognition in social context breaks new theoretical ground, insisting that subjectivity be studied both in its embodied expression and in terms of the distribution of affective cognitive responses in a population.
Moving beyond the theoretical, Protevi applies his concept of political affect to show how unconscious emotional valuing shaped three recent, emotionally charged events: the cold rage of the Columbine High School slayings, the racialized panic that delayed rescue efforts in Hurricane Katrina, and the twists and turns of empathy occasioned by the Terry Schiavo case. These powerful individual and collective political events require new philosophical understanding.
Political and Social Writings: Volume 1, 1946–1955 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.
A series of writings by the man who inspired the students of the Workers' Rebellion in May of 1968.
"Given the rapid pace of change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the radical nature of these transformations, the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, a consistent and radical critic of Soviet Marxism, gains renewed significance. . . . these volumes are instructive because they enable us to trace his rigorous engagement with the project of socialist construction from his break with Trotskyism to his final breach with Marxism . . . and would be read with profit by all those seeking to comprehend the historical originality of events in the USSR and Eastern Europe." –Contemporary Sociology
Political and Social Writings:Volume 2, 1955–1960 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.
A series of writings by the man who inspired the students of the Workers' Rebellion in May of 1968.
"Given the rapid pace of change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the radical nature of these transformations, the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, a consistent and radical critic of Soviet Marxism, gains renewed significance....these volumes are instructive because they enable us to trace his rigorous engagement with the project of socialist construction from his break with Trotskyism to his final breach with Marxism. . . and would be read with profit by all those seeking to comprehend the historical originality of events in the USSR and Eastern Europe." –Contemporary Sociology
Political and Social Writings: Volume 3, 1961–1979 was first published in 1992. 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 work offers an extraordinary wealth and variety of writings from the crucial years that followed the publication of Castoriadis's landmark text, Modern Capitalism and Revolution. The "new orientation" he proposed for the Socialisme ou Barbarie group centered on the emerging roles of women, youth, and minorities in the growing challenge to established society in the early sixties. Resistance within the group to this new orientation led Castoriadis to criticize the "neopaleo- Marxism" of Jean-François Lyotard and others who ultimately left Socialisme ou Barbarie. A heightened concern for ethnological issues culminated in what might be called, to the embarrassment of today's "poststructuralists," Castoriadis's "premature antistructuralism."
Additional texts examine the dissolution of the group itself and analyze the May 1968 rebellion of workers and students - who, according to their own testimony, were inspired by ideas developed in the group's journal. Also included were many of Castoriadis's still-relevant political writings from the seventies, which were developed in tandem with the more explicitly philosophical work now found in The Imaginary Institution of Society and Crossroads in the Labyrinth.
Political and Social Writings: Volume 3 provides key elements for a radical renewal of emancipatory thought and action while offering an irreplaceable and hitherto missing perspective on postwar French thought.Bringing fresh insight to a century of writing by Native Americans
The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History challenges conventional views of the past one hundred years of Native American writing, bringing Native American Renaissance and post-Renaissance writers into conversation with their predecessors. Addressing the political positions such writers have adopted, explored, and debated in their work, James H. Cox counters what he considers a “flattening” of the politics of American Indian literary expression and sets forth a new method of reading Native literature in a vexingly politicized context.
Examining both canonical and lesser-known writers, Cox proposes that scholars approach these texts as “political arrays”: confounding but also generative collisions of conservative, moderate, and progressive ideas that together constitute the rich political landscape of American Indian literary history. Reviewing a broad range of genres including journalism, short fiction, drama, screenplays, personal letters, and detective fiction—by Lynn Riggs, Will Rogers, Sherman Alexie, Thomas King, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Winona LaDuke, Carole laFavor, and N. Scott Momaday—he demonstrates that Native texts resist efforts to be read as advocating a particular set of politics
Meticulously researched, The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History represents a compelling case for reconceptualizing the Native American Renaissance as a literary–historical constellation. By focusing on post-1968 Native writers and texts, argues Cox, critics have often missed how earlier writers were similarly entangled, hopeful, frustrated, contradictory, and unpredictable in their political engagements.
Political Prairie Fire was first published in 1955. 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.
Political Prairie Fire was first published in 1955.
The farmers of North Dakota were ripe for revolt when the magnetic figure of A. C. Townley strode into their midst and offered them a new political formula to redress their grievances. Townley's plan was simple but revolutionary; it called for the formation of a Nonpartisan Political League dedicated to the election of candidates through the established two-party system and to a platform emphasizing public ownership of certain vital farm services and facilities, such as terminal grain elevators and hail insurance on crops.
Like the great prairie fires of the plains states, the political flames of the Nonpartisan League spread swiftly from one farm to the next across North Dakota and into the adjoining states. The League is regarded by many as the last of the great agrarian protest movements. It is historically significant because it achieved a measure of success well beyond that of most similar movements. It controlled the government of one state for some years, elected state officials and legislators in a number of midwestern and western states, and sent several congressmen to Washington. Its impact helped shape the destinies of a dozen states and the political philosophies of an important segment of the nation's voters. The League's methods of operation often serve today as a guide for political action.
This is the first detailed, unbiased history of the Nonpartisan League. Thoroughly documented for the specialist, it is nevertheless equally interesting for the general reader.
Political Theory and Praxis was first published in 1977. 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.
Nine distinguished contributors—philosophers and political scientists at universities and colleges in the United States, Europe, Canada, and Australia—write essays for this volume in political philosophy. The book is dedicated to the memory of Hannah Arendt, the writer and philosopher who died in 1975. The contributors discuss various aspects of the concepts of theory and practice and their interrelationship. All of the essays were written expressly for this volume. In an introduction, Professor Ball, the volume editor, notes that the essays reflect the diversity of conceptions of theory, of practice, and of their conceptual and practical interrelations, and that the contributors explore various ways and byways of approaching the age-old questions of theory and its relation to practice.
Part I: Origins
"On the History of 'Theory' and 'Praxis'," Nicholas Lobkowicz; "Creatures of a Day: Thought and Action in Thucydides,"J. Peter Euben; " Plato and Aristotle: The Unity Versus the Autonomy of Theory and Practice." Terence Ball.Part II: Developments
"Kant on Theory and Practice," Carl Raschke; "Theory and Practice in Hegel and Marx: An Unfinished Dialogue,"Peter Fuss; "The Unity of Theory and Practice: The Science of Marx and Nietzsche," Edward Andrew.Part II: Dilemmas and New Directions
"Hannah Arendt: The Ambiguities of Theory and Practice," Richard J. Bernstein; "Rebels, Beginners, and Buffoons: Politics as Action," Raymond L. Nichols; "How People Change Themselves: The Relationship between Critical Theory and Its Audience," Brian FayHow did a powerful concept in international justice evolve into an inequitable response to mass suffering?
For a term coined just seventy-five years ago, genocide has become a remarkably potent idea. But has it transformed from a truly novel vision for international justice into a conservative, even inaccessible term? The Politics of Annihilation traces how the concept of genocide came to acquire such significance on the global political stage. In doing so, it reveals how the concept has been politically contested and refashioned over time. It explores how these shifts implicitly impact what forms of mass violence are considered genocide and what forms are not.
Benjamin Meiches argues that the limited conception of genocide, often rigidly understood as mass killing rooted in ethno-religious identity, has created legal and political institutions that do not adequately respond to the diversity of mass violence. In his insistence on the concept’s complexity, he does not undermine the need for clear condemnations of such violence. But neither does he allow genocide to become a static or timeless notion. Meiches argues that the discourse on genocide has implicitly excluded many forms of violence from popular attention including cases ranging from contemporary Botswana and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to the legacies of colonial politics in Haiti, Canada, and elsewhere, to the effects of climate change on small island nations.
By mapping the multiplicity of forces that entangle the concept in larger assemblages of power, The Politics of Annihilation gives us a new understanding of how the language of genocide impacts contemporary political life, especially as a means of protesting the social conditions that produce mass violence.
Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been widely promoted as a digital currency that will revolutionize everything from online commerce to the nation-state. Yet supporters of Bitcoin and its blockchain technology subscribe to a form of cyberlibertarianism that depends to a surprising extent on far-right political thought. The Politics of Bitcoin exposes how much of the economic and political thought on which this cryptocurrency is based emerges from ideas that travel the gamut, from Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises to Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists.
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.
The Politics of Social Protest was first published in 1995. 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.
Bringing together celebrated scholars from diverse traditions and backgrounds, The Politics of Social Protest focuses on the reciprocal relationships among social movements, states, and political parties. The volume is organized around three key questions: Why do citizens resort to the often risky and demanding strategy of using disruptive protest when other channels of political intervention appear to be available? What is the relationship between social protest movements and systems of political representation? And what is the impact of the structure and development of the state on social movements themselves?
Contributors include Ronald Aminzade, University of Minnesota; Paul Burstein, University of Washington; Russell J. Dalton, University of California, Irvine; Donatella della Porta, University of Florence; Henry Dietz, University of Texas, Austin; Rachel L. Einwohner, University of Washington; Steven E. Finkel, University of Virginia; Jerrold D. Green, University of Arizona; Jocelyn Hollander, University of Washington; Hanspeter Kriesi, University of Geneva; Diarmuid Maguire, University of Sydney; Bronislaw Misztal, Indiana University, Fort Wayne; Edward N. Muller, University of Arizona; Michael Nollert, University of Trier; Karl-Dieter Opp, University of Hamburg; Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin; Michael Wallace, Indiana University; and Gadi Wolfsfeld, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
J. Craig Jenkins is professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. He is the author of The Politics of Insurgency: The Farm Worker Movement of the 1960's (1985).
Bert Klandermans is professor of applied social psychology at Free University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has published widely on social movements in journals such as the American Sociological Review, Sociological Forum, and the European Journal of Social Psychology. He is the editor of the Social Movements, Protest, and Contention series for the University of Minnesota Press.
Copublished with UCL Press, London.
Politics, Writing, Mutilation 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.
Five twentieth-century French writers played, and continue to play, a pivotal role in the development of literary-philosophical thinking that has come to be known in the United States as post-structuralism. The work of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Raymond Roussel, Michel Leiris, and Francis Ponge in the 1930s and 1940s amounts to a prehistory of today's theoretical debates; the writings of Foucault and Derrida in particular would have been unthinkable outside the context provided by these writers. In Politics, Writing, Mutilation,Allan Stoekl emphasizes their role as precursors, but he also makes clear that they created a distinctive body of work that must be read and evaluated on its own terms.
Stoekl's critical readings of their work—selected novels, poems, and autobiographical fragments—reveal them to be battlegrounds not only of disruptive language practices, but of conflicting political drives as well. These irreconcilable tendencies can be defined as progressive political revolution, on the one hand with its emphasis on utility, conservation, and labor; and, on the other hand, a notion of dangerous and sinister production that stresses orgiastic sexuality and delirious expenditure. Caught between these forces is the intellectual of Bataille's time (and indeed of ours), locked in impotence, self-betrayal, and automutilation.
Stoekl develops his critique through dual readings of each writer's central work—the first reading deconstructive, the second a search for the political meaning excluded by a deconstructive approach. Repeating this process on a larger scale, he shows how Derrida and Foucault are indebted to their precursors even while they have betrayed them by stripping their work of political conflict and historical specificity. And he acknowledges that one of the most painful questions faced in prewar and Occupied France—that of the unthinkable guilt and duplicity of the intellectual—may not be as remote from contemporary theoretical concerns as some would have us believe.
Popular Culture in America was first published in 1987. 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 book collects some of the best work from the journal Cultural Correspondence (1975–83), which editor Paul Buhle calls "the first political journal of culture to assume its readers (and writers) watched television." The twenty-four contributors are part of a new generation of cultural critics and historians who are self-conscious products of the mass culture of the fifties and sixties. Their work attempts to update an elementary democratic principle - that people seek understanding and solutions, real or fanciful, through the mechanisms available to them. Although these writers condemn the manipulative qualities of commercial culture, they just as vehemently reject most of what has passed for Marxist (or liberal or conservative) orthodoxy on popular culture. Americans, they argue, have had a unique opportunity as well as a unique need to make the most of popular culture; the collective cultural experience is our only shared past. The richness and vitality of that culture is the focus of this book.
The thirty-four essays work toward an understanding of American mass culture not through abstraction but by exploring the real pleasures of ordinary people's lives. Pulp literature (utopian and horror themes, sports and nurse novels, and contemporary science fiction); radio thrillers; TV horror movies: television evangelists; sitcoms; music (polka, country-western, blues, jazz, and rock 'n roll); comic strips (Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, Zippy); women's humor—these and other topics are given sensitive, detailed—sometimes humorous—attention. Paul Buhle's essay, "The 1960s Meet the 1980s," discusses popular culture scholarship, drawing on a wide range of theory—the Frankfort School, art history, literary criticism, and social science approaches. Buhle argues for the importance of this scholarship as a way of understanding "that missed connection between the cultural promise of a richly diverse, democratic society and the reality at hand."
The Population Ahead 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 volume brings together the thinking and viewpoints of specialists from various pertinent fields for a discussion of factors bearing on the quality of future populations of the world. The discussions center around three fundamental questions: Is the human population growing at a rate which threatens the standards of living to which most of tits individuals aspire? Is the genetic composition of the population tending in directions which are harmful to the common good? What can and should be done, if the answer to either of the foregoing questions is yes?
The chapters, by nine different contributors, are based on the papers given at a conference on population problems held at the University of Minnesota in 1957. In addition, discussion and comments by six other participants in the conference are included.
Populist Revolt 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.
When The Populist Revolt was originally published, the New York Times critic called it "far and away the best account of populism that we have—and one not likely to be replaced." That prophecy proved right; the book has not been replaced, and historians and critics agree that it is the definitive work on its subject. Now it is made available once more, after being out of print for some time.
This is a history of the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party, under whose banners a great crusade for farm relief was waged in the 1880's and 1890's. As important as the chronicle of the political movement itself is the detailed picture which Professor Hicks gives of the conditions which set the stage for this agrarian revolt. He describes the inequities and malpractices which beset both the new settlers of the West and the poverty-ridden whites and Negroes of the South following the Civil War.
The story of Populism itself is a lively one, people with such picturesque leaders as "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman of South Carolina, "Sockless" Jerry Simpson and Mary Elizabeth Lease—the "Patrick Henry in petticoats"—of Kansas, "Bloody Bridles" Waite of Colorado, Thomas E. Watson of Georgia, Dr. C. W. Macune of Texas, James B. Weaver of Iowa, and Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota.
In these pages, Professor Hicks has, as Frederic L. Paxson pointed out, "presented the case for Populism better than the Populists themselves could do it." Henry Steele Commanger calls the book a "thorough, scholarly, sympathetic and spirited history of the entire Populist movement."
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