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Small Tech
The Culture of Digital Tools
Byron Hawk
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

The essays in Small Tech investigate the cultural impact of digital tools and provide fresh perspectives on mobile technologies such as iPods, digital cameras, and PDAs and software functions like cut, copy, and paste and WYSIWYG. Together they advance new thinking about digital environments. 

Contributors: Wendy Warren Austin, Edinboro U; Jim Bizzocchi, Simon Fraser U; Collin Gifford Brooke, Syracuse U; Paul Cesarini, Bowling Green State U; Veronique Chance, U of London; Johanna Drucker, U of Virginia; Jenny Edbauer, Penn State U; Robert A. Emmons Jr., Rutgers U; Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Clarkson U; Richard Kahn, UCLA; Douglas Kellner, UCLA; Karla Saari Kitalong, U of Central Florida; Steve Mann, U of Toronto; Lev Manovich, U of California, San Diego; Adrian Miles, RMIT U; Jason Nolan, Ryerson U; Julian Oliver; Mark Paterson, U of the West of England, Bristol; Isabel Pedersen, Ryerson U; Michael Pennell, U of Rhode Island; Joanna Castner Post, U of Central Arkansas; Teri Rueb, Rhode Island School of Design; James J. Sosnoski; Lance State, Fordham U; Jason Swarts, North Carolina State U; Barry Wellman, U of Toronto; Sean D. Williams, Clemson U; Jeremy Yuille, RMIT U.

Byron Hawk is assistant professor of English at George Mason University.

David M. Rieder is assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University.

Ollie Oviedo is associate professor of English at Eastern New Mexico University.

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Snow on the Cane Fields
Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity
Judith Raiskin
University of Minnesota Press, 1995

Snow on the Cane Fields 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.

In a probing analysis of creole women's writing over the past century, Judith Raiskin explores the workings and influence of cultural and linguistic colonialism. Tracing the transnational and racial meanings of creole identity, Raiskin looks at four English-speaking writers from South Africa and the Caribbean: Olive Schreiner, Jean Rhys, Michelle Cliff, and Zoë Wicomb. She examines their work in light of the discourses of their times: nineteenth-century "race science" and imperialistic rhetoric, turn-of-the-century anti-Semitic sentiment and feminist pacifism, postcolonial theory, and apartheid legislation.

In their writing and in their multiple identities, these women highlight the gendered nature of race, citizenship, culture, and the language of literature. Raiskin shows how each writer expresses her particular ambivalences and divided loyalties, both enforcing and challenging the proprietary British perspective on colonial history, culture, and language. A new perspective on four writers and their uneasy places in colonial culture, Snow on the Cane Fields reveals the value of pursuing a feminist approach to questions of national, political, and racial identity.

Judith Raiskin is assistant professor of women's studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Social Figures
George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation
Daniel Cottom
University of Minnesota Press, 1987

Centers on the discourse of the liberal intellectual as exemplified in the novels of George Eliot, whose awareness of her aesthetic and social task was keener than that of most Victorian writers.

 

“…Daniel Cottom has produced a readable, well-researched, and thoroughly referenced work that speaks to a broad scholarly audience composed of philosophers, psychologists, sociolinguists, literary critics, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, to name but a few.” Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly

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Social Forces in Southeast Asia
Cora DuBois
University of Minnesota Press, 1949

Social Forces in Southeast Asia 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.

"Forces are at work in Southeast Asia which deserve the most judicious attention of diplomats, the best analysis by social scientists, and a highly serious interest on the part of all responsible people in the Western World."

The application of cultural anthropology to problems of world politics and economics presented here has been made by a ranking authority in the field. Dr. Du Bois is the author of The People of Alor and before World War Two she was anthropologist at Sarah Lawrence College. During the war she was associated with the Office of Strategic Services in charge of Indonesian and South Asian research, with headquarters at Kandy, Ceylon. Since October 1945 she has been chief of the Southern Areas Branch, Office of Intelligence Research, Department of State.

Siam, Burma, French Indochina, Malaya, and Indonesian Archipelago, and the Philippines offer a geographic unit rich in material for the social scientist, including, as it does, more diverse cultural strains than any other area of the world. The author considers the impact of European colonization on the region, analyzes the tensions created by value difference between East and West, and offers predictions on the course Southeast Asia will take in the future.

Dr. Du Bois has risen above statistical science and narrow specialization to wide interpretation and application. The book is full of exciting theses and suggestive ideas which should open new areas for both factual investigation and creative speculation.

Dr. Du Bois sees a growing consciousness of nationality in these states of Southeast Asia—and eagerness to work out their common problems and a desire to participate in the United Nations, but she does not minimize the grave economic difficulties of the area or the chance that it will become another powder keg if the states become pawns of the big powers.

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Social Origins Of Islam
Mind, Economy, Discourse
Mohammed Bamyeh
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

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Social Origins Of Religion
Roger Bastide
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

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The Social Programs of Sweden
A Search for Security in a Free Society
Albert H. RosenthalForeword by Marquis Childs
University of Minnesota Press, 1967

The Social Programs of Sweden 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.

In his forward to this book, Marquis Childs, author of the classic work Sweden: The Middle Way,comments: "There has been a great deal of emotional writing about the effort of the labor government in Stockholm to regulate capitalism and provide a decent standard of living for every citizen. Much of this emotional writing has come from those who for one reason or another have sought to discredit the Swedish experiment ... The net result of much of this highly colored writing has been to ignore the real contribution that Sweden has made in a half dozen fields and particularly in the fields of social security and health. But now comes an author ideally equipped to appraise this contribution by reason of his background. This is the great virtue of this book. It is a careful and thorough examination of Sweden's achievement by a specialist familiar with our own social security, public health and welfare systems ... No subsequent appraisal of what Sweden has done can be made henceforth without this basic work."

The author traces the development of the Swedish programs and provides detailed descriptions of the social security, health insurance, public health, and welfare programs, with case examples. He evaluates and compares the programs with their American counterparts, and, in conclusion, considers the effects of the Swedish system on personal freedom. The work is based on extensive research done in Sweden.

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Socialism and Modernity
Peter Beilharz
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

This first collection of Peter Beilharz's highly influential thought traces the themes and problems, manifestations, and trajectories of socialism and modernity as they connect and shift over a twenty-year period. Woven throughout Beilharz's analysis is the urgent question of modern utopia: how do we imagine freedom and equality in modernity?

The essays in this volume explore the relationship between socialism and modernity across the United States, Europe, and Australia from the mid-1980s to the turn of the twenty-first century, a time that witnessed the global triumph of capitalism and the dramatic turn away from Marxism and socialism to modernity as the dominant perspective. According to Beilharz, we have seen the expansion of a kind of Weberian Marxism, with the concept of revolution giving way to the idea of pluralized forms of power and the idea of rupture giving way to the postmodern sense of difference. These changes come together with the discourse of modernism, both aesthetic and technological.

Socialism and modernity, Beilharz argues, are fundamentally interrelated. In correcting the conflation of Marxism, Bolshevism, and socialism that occludes contemporary political thinking, he reopens a space for discussion of what socialist politics might look like now-in the postcommunist-postcolonial-postmodern moment.

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The Sociology of Work
Theodore Caplow
University of Minnesota Press, 1954

The Sociology of Work was first published in 1954. 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 are the effects of working conditions, rewards, and habits upon the institution of the family? What are the typical forms of occupational segregation, and what are the effects of such segregation upon the general society? How are the social roles appropriate to each occupation created and sustained? What social processes determine the evolution of occupational groupings and the distribution of population among them?

This work, a basic study in occupational sociology, throws light on such questions as these. Professor Caplow describes the occupational system with reference to specialization, occupational status, the formation of professions, mobility, the patterning of individual careers, the occupations of women, and the prospects for continued improvement of working conditions. He draws upon hundreds of empirical studies for his discussions.

The book has been warmly received by reviewers and readers. Robert Dublin commented in the American Journal of Sociology: "This volume will long stand as a sourcebook of hypotheses and thesis topics for students of industrial sociology." Writing in the American Sociological Review, George Caspar Homans called it "a wide-ranging and hard-headed study of American jobs, their place and nature." Robert C. Stone said in Social Forces: "The work is a major contribution to the study of social structure."

The many specialist workers who are concerned with occupational problems—industrial and applied psychologists, personnel and guidance workers, wage economists, labor relations experts, and others—will find this a valuable reference work. It is, of course, pertinent to the interests of general sociologists and anthropologists, and is used as a text in a number of courses in occupational sociology.

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Socrates and Legal Obligation
R.E. Allen
University of Minnesota Press, 1981

Socrates and Legal Obligation 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.

Charged with "impiety" and sentenced to death under the law of Athens, Socrates did not try to disprove the charges or to escape death, but rather held to a different kind of rhetoric, aiming not at persuasion but at truth. In Socrates and Legal Obligation, R.E. Allen contends that Plato's works on Socrates' acceptance of death—the Apology and the Crito — should be considered together and as such constitute a profound treatment of law and of obligation to law. Allen's study of Socrates' thought on these vital issues is accompanied by his own translations of the Apology and the Crito.

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Solar Adobe
Energy, Ecology, and Earthen Architecture
Albert Narath
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

How a centuries-old architectural tradition reemerged as a potential solution to the political and environmental crises of the 1970s

Against the backdrop of a global energy crisis, a widespread movement embracing the use of raw earth materials for building construction emerged in the 1970s. Solar Adobe examines this new wave of architectural experimentation taking place in the United States, detailing how an ancient tradition became a point of convergence for issues of environmentalism, architecture, technology, and Indigenous resistance. 

 

Utilized for centuries by the Pueblo people of the American Southwest and by Spanish colonialists, adobe construction found renewed interest as various groups contended with the troubled legacies of modern architecture and an increasingly urgent need for sustainable design practices. In this period of critical experimentation, design networks that included architects, historians, counterculture communities, government weapons labs, and Indigenous activists all looked to adobe as a means to address pressing environmental and political issues.

 

Albert Narath charts the unique capacities of adobe construction across a wide range of contexts, consistently troubling simple distinctions between traditional and modern technologies, high design and vernacular architecture. Drawing insightful parallels between architecture, environmentalism, and movements for Indigenous sovereignty, Solar Adobe stresses the importance of considering the history of the built environment in conjunction with architecture’s larger impact on the natural world.

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Solarities
Seeking Energy Justice
Ayesha After Oil Collective
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

A collective engages and mirrors the critical need for energy justice and transformation
 

Solarities considers the possibilities of organizing societies and economies around solar energy, and the challenges of a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels. Far from presenting solarity as a utopian solution to the climate crisis, it critically examines the ambiguous potentials of solarities: plural, situated, and often contradictory. 

Here, a diverse collective of activists, scholars, and practitioners critically engage a wide range of relationships and orientations to the sun. They consider the material and infrastructural dimensions of solar power, the decolonial and feminist promises of decentralized energy, solarian relations with more-than-human kin, and the problem of oppressive and weaponized solarities. Solarities imagines—and demands— possibilities for energy justice in this transition.

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Solidarity And Contention
Networks Of Polish Opposition
Maryjane Osa
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
Offers an innovative model for understanding how social movements occur in repressive societies. After a series of failed attempts at mobilizing society, Poland's opposition sprang to surprising-and newly effective-life with the formation of the Solidarity trade union in 1980. If not for those past failures, this book suggests, Solidarity might never have succeeded. Solidarity and Contention deftly reconstructs the networks of protest in Communist Poland to show how waves of dissent during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s left an organizational residue that both instructed and enabled Solidarity and, ultimately, the Polish revolution. Using newly available documentary sources, Maryjane Osa establishes links between activists during three waves of protest: 1954 to 1959, 1966 to 1970, and 1976 to 1980. She shows how political challengers, applying lessons drawn from past failures, developed an ideological formula to de-emphasize divisive issues and promote symbolic concerns, thus facilitating coalition building. Solidarity was therefore able to take advantage of a large opposition network already well in place before the founding of the union. An important case study in itself, the book also answers one of the most intriguing questions in social movement research: how can movements emerge in authoritarian states-where media are state controlled, the rights of assembly and speech are restricted, and the risks of collective action are high? Maryjane Osa is visiting assistant professor of sociology at Northwestern University
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The Solidarity Economy
Jean-Louis Laville
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Questioning the boundaries between politics and economics

 

Jean-Louis Laville’s large body of work has focused on an intellectual history of the concept of solidarity since the Industrial Revolution. In The Solidarity Economy, his most famous distillation of this work, Laville establishes how the formations of economic solidarities (unions, activism, and other forms of associationalism) reveal that the boundaries between politics and economics are porous and structured such that politics, ideally a pure expression of ethics and values, is instead integrated with economic concerns. 

 

Exploring the possibilities and long histories of association, The Solidarity Economy identifies the power of contemporary social and solidarity movements and examines the history of postcapitalist practices in which democratic demands invade the heart of the economy. The Solidarity Economy ranges in focus from workers associations in France dating back to the nineteenth century, to associations of African Americans and feminists in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to a Brazilian landless-worker coalition in the twentieth century. 

 

Studying solidarity associations over time allows us to examine how we can recombine the economic and political spheres to address dependencies and inequalities. Ultimately, The Solidarity Economy has global scope and inspiring examples of associations that deepen democracy.

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Some Assembly Required
Michael Sorkin
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
The long-awaited collection by one of architecture's most exciting voices. Michael Sorkin is widely hailed as one of the best architecture critics writing today. Iconoclastic and often controversial, he is a witty, entertaining, yet ultimately serious writer. In this new collection, Sorkin reviews the state of contemporary architecture and surveys the dramatic changes in the urban environment of the past decade. From New York to New Delhi, from Shanghai to Cairo, Sorkin offers a sweeping assessment of the impact of globalization, environmental degradation, electronic media, rapid growth, and the legacies of modernist planning. Whether laying out, manifesto-like, eleven necessary tasks for urban design, providing a fresh take on the Disneyfication of Times Square, grappling with sprawl, or blasting the nostalgic prescriptions of "new urbanist" communities (which he dubs "Reaganville"), Sorkin makes a compelling argument for an architecture and urbanism firmly grounded in both artistic expression and social purpose. "Michael Sorkin has, by any measure, become known as the toughest and wittiest architecture critic in the business. He has skewered almost every phony and attacked practically every silly American design fad of the last fifteen years. . . . Yet Sorkin is much more than a dispenser of one-liners. To read him is to discover a set of guiding philosophies, a genuine love of urbanism's best offerings, and a humanistically rooted disdain for the greedy and opportunistic types who view the city as a deregulated arena for plundering." Chicago Tribune "Michael Sorkin is brave, principled, highly informed, and fiercely funny. Read him and laugh; read him and weep; but read him." Robert Hughes "A thorn in the flesh of America's more complacent architects-especially the postmodernists-Sorkin proves that it's possible to write with wit, passion, and insight about architecture." The Guardian "Michael Sorkin is the Lenny Bruce of American architecture: satirist, moralist, agent provocateur. . . . His courageous, outrageous, and often hilarious insights into the architectural culture of our times are expressed with antic brilliance and deep conviction." HG Michael Sorkin is principal of the Michael Sorkin Studio and professor of architecture and director of the graduate urban design program at New York's City College. He is the author of Giving Ground (with Joan Copjec, 1999), Wiggle (1998), Exquisite Corpse (1994), and Variations on a Theme Park (1991), and his writing has appeared in the Village Voice, Metropolis, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications.
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Something Completely Different
British Television And American Culture
Jeffrey S. Miller
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

The first comprehensive study of the influence British programming had on American television.

The first comprehensive study of the influence British programming had on American television.

Between Emma Peel and the Ministry of Silly Walks, British television had a significant impact on American popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s. In Something Completely Different, Jeffrey Miller offers the first comprehensive study of British programming on American television, discussing why the American networks imported such series as The Avengers and Monty Python’s Flying Circus; how American audiences received these uniquely British shows; and how the shows’ success reshaped American television.Miller’s lively analysis covers three genres: spy shows, costume dramas, and sketch comedies. In addition to providing his close readings of the series themselves, Miller considers the networks’ packaging of the programs for American viewers and the influences that led to their acceptance, including the American television industry’s search for new advertising revenue and the creation of PBS.Something Completely Different concludes with a discussion of the American programs and genres that owed their existence to British progenitors. Miller convincingly argues that much of what came to define American television by 1980 was in fact British in origin, a contention that casts a new light on traditional discussions of American cultural imperialism.ISBN 0-8166-3240-5 Cloth £31.00 $44.95xxISBN 0-8166-3241-3 Paper £12.50 $17.95x208 Pages 17 black-and-white photos 5 7/8 x 9 JanuaryTranslation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
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A Song over Miskwaa Rapids
A Novel
Linda LeGarde Grover
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A fifty-year-old mystery converges with a present-day struggle over family, land, and history
 

When a rock is dislodged from its slope by mischievous ancestors, the past rises to meet the present, and Half-Dime Hill gives up a gruesome secret it has kept for half a century. Some people of Mozhay Point have theories about what happened; others know—and the discovery stirs memories long buried, reviving a terrible story yet to be told.

 

Returning to the fictional Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota she has so deftly mapped in her award-winning books, Linda LeGarde Grover reveals traumas old and new as Margie Robineau, in the midst of a fight to keep her family’s long-held allotment land, uncovers events connected to a long-ago escape plan across the Canadian border, and the burial—at once figurative and painfully real—of not one crime but two. While Margie is piecing the facts together, Dale Ann is confronted by her own long-held secrets and the truth that the long ago and the now, the vital and the departed are all indelibly linked, no matter how much we try to forget. 

 

As the past returns to haunt those involved, Margie prepares her statement for the tribal government, defending her family’s land from a casino development and sorting the truths of Half-Dime Hill from the facts that remain there. Throughout the narrative, a chorus of spirit women gather in lawn chairs with coffee and cookies to reminisce, reflect, and speculate, spinning the threads of family, myth, history, and humor—much as Grover spins another tale of Mozhay Point, weaving together an intimate and complex novel of a place and its people.

 

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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The Souls of Cyberfolk
Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory
Thomas Foster
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
In The Souls of Cyberfolk, Thomas Foster traces the transformation of cyberpunk from a literary movement into a multimedia cultural phenomenon. He examines how cyberpunk defined a framework for thinking about the cultural implications of new technologies - a framework flexible enough to incorporate issues of gender, queer sexualities, and ethnic and racial differences as well as developments in nationalist models of citizenship and global economic flows. Beginning with William Gibson's paradigmatic text Neuromancer, and continuing through the works of Maureen McHugh, Melissa Scott, Neal Stephenson, Greg Egan, and Ken MacLeod, Foster measures cyberpunk's reach into social and philosophical movements (the Extropy Institute), commercial art (Hajime Sorayama's gynoids or sexy robot illustrations), comic books (Deathlok), film (Robocop), and music video (from Billy Idol's Cyberpunk album). The central challenge that cyberpunk poses for cultural critics, Foster argues, is to understand what happens when the technological denaturalization of physical embodiment becomes the norm. This question acquires urgency as the focus of his book moves beyond the typical technocultural concerns with gender and sexuality to consider race and models of citizenship - a shift that constitutes one of the book's most original contributions to scholarship on the topic.
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Sound Ideas
Music, Machines, and Experience
Aden Evens
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
As people from record collectors to file swappers know, the experience of music - making it, marketing it, listening to it - relies heavily on technology. From the viola that amplifies the vibrations of a string to the CD player that turns digital bits into varying voltage, music and technology are deeply intertwined. What was gained - or lost - when compact discs replaced vinyl as the mass-market medium? What unique creative input does the musician bring to the music, and what contribution is made by the instrument? Do digital synthesizers offer unlimited range of sonic potential, or do their push-button interfaces and acoustical models lead to cookie-cutter productions? Through this interrogation of sound and technology, Aden Evens provides an acute consideration of how music becomes sensible, advancing original variations on the themes of creativity and habit, analog and digital technologies, and improvisation and repetition. Evens elegantly and forcefully dissects the paradoxes of digital culture and reveals how technology has profound implications for the phenomenology of art. Sound Ideas reinvents the philosophy of music in a way that encompasses traditional aspects of musicology, avant-garde explorations of music's relation to noise and silence, and the consequences of digitization.
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The Sound of Things to Come
An Audible History of the Science Fiction Film
Trace Reddell
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

A groundbreaking approach to sound in sci-fi films offers new ways of construing both sonic innovation and science fiction cinema
 

Including original readings of classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and Blade Runner, The Sound of Things to Come delivers a comprehensive history of sound in science fiction cinema. Approaching movies as sound objects that combine cinematic apparatus and consciousness, Trace Reddell presents a new theory of sonic innovation in the science fiction film.

Reddell assembles a staggering array of movies from sixty years of film history—including classics, blockbusters, B-movies, and documentaries from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union—all in service to his powerful conception of sound making as a speculative activity in its own right. Reddell recasts debates about noise and music, while arguing that sound in the science fiction film provides a medium for alien, unknown, and posthuman sound objects that transform what and how we hear.

Avoiding genre criticism’s tendency to obsess over utopias, The Sound of Things to Come draws on film theory, sound studies, and philosophies of technology to advance conversations about the avant-garde, while also opening up opportunities to examine cinematic sounds beyond the screen.

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Sounds from the Other Side
Afro–South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music
Elliott H. Powell
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A sixty-year history of Afro–South Asian musical collaborations

From Beyoncé’s South Asian music–inspired Super Bowl Halftime performance, to jazz artists like John and Alice Coltrane’s use of Indian song structures and spirituality in their work, to Jay-Z and Missy Elliott’s high-profile collaborations with diasporic South Asian artists such as the Panjabi MC and MIA, African American musicians have frequently engaged South Asian cultural productions in the development of Black music culture. Sounds from the Other Side traces such engagements through an interdisciplinary analysis of the political implications of African American musicians’ South Asian influence since the 1960s.

Elliott H. Powell asks, what happens when we consider Black musicians’ South Asian sonic explorations as distinct from those of their white counterparts? He looks to Black musical genres of jazz, funk, and hip hop and examines the work of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Rick James, OutKast, Timbaland, Beyoncé, and others, showing how Afro–South Asian music in the United States is a dynamic, complex, and contradictory cultural site where comparative racialization, transformative gender and queer politics, and coalition politics intertwine. Powell situates this cultural history within larger global and domestic sociohistorical junctures that link African American and South Asian diasporic communities in the United States.

The long historical arc of Afro–South Asian music in Sounds from the Other Side interprets such music-making activities as highly political endeavors, offering an essential conversation about cross-cultural musical exchanges between racially marginalized musicians.

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South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come
Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom
Brenna M. Munro
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

After apartheid, South Africa established a celebrated new political order that imagined the postcolonial nation as belonging equally to the descendants of indigenous people, colonizing settlers, transported slaves, indentured laborers, and immigrants. Its constitution, adopted in 1996, was the first in the world to include gays and lesbians as full citizens. Brenna M. Munro examines the stories that were told about sexuality, race, and nation throughout the struggle against apartheid in order to uncover how these narratives ultimately enabled gay people to become imaginable as fellow citizens. She also traces how the gay, lesbian, or bisexual person appeared as a stock character in the pageant of nationhood during the transition to democracy. In the process, she offers an alternative cultural history of South Africa.

Munro asserts that the inclusion of gay people made South Africans feel “modern”—at least for a while. Being gay or being lesbian was reimagined in the 1990s as distinctly South African, but the “newness” that made these sexualities apt symbols for a transformed nation can also be understood as foreign and un-African. Indeed, a Western-style gay identity is often interpreted through the formula “gay equals modernity equals capitalism.” As South Africa’s reentrance into the global economy has failed to bring prosperity to the majority of its citizens, homophobic violence has been on the rise.

Employing a wide array of texts—including prison memoirs, poetry, plays, television shows, photography, political speeches, and the postapartheid writings of Nobel Laureates Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee—Munro reports on how contemporary queer activists and artists are declining to remain ambassadors for the “rainbow nation” and refusing to become scapegoats for the perceived failures of liberation and liberalism.

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Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans
Race and Self-Determination in International Law
Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans 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.

In this trenchant critique, Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui demonstrates the failure of international law to address adequately the issues surrounding African self-determination during decolonization. Challenging the view that the only requirement for decolonization is the elimination of the legal instruments that provided for direct foreign rule, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans probes the universal claims of international law.

Grovogui begins by documenting the creation of the "image of Africa" in European popular culture, examining its construction by conquerors and explorers, scientists and social scientists, and the Catholic Church. Using the case of Namibia to illuminate the general context of Africa, he demonstrates that the principles and rules recognized in international law today are not universal, but instead reflect relations of power and the historical dominance of specific European states.

Grovogui argues that two important factors have undermined the universal applicability of international law: its dependence on Western culture and the way that international law has been structured to preserve Western hegemony in the international order. This dependence on Europeandominated models and legal apparatus has resulted in the paradox that only rights sanctioned by the former colonial powers have been accorded to the colonized, regardless of the latter's needs. In the case of Namibia, Grovogui focuses on the discursive strategies used by the West and their southern African allies to control the legal debate, as well as the tactics used by the colonized to recast the terms of the discussion.

Grovogui blends critical legal theory, historical research, political economy, and cultural studies with profound knowledge of contemporary Africa in general and Namibia in particular. Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans represents the very best of the new scholarship, moving beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries to illuminate issues of decolonization in Africa.

Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui is assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. He previously practiced law in his native Guinea.

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Sowing Empire
Landscape And Colonization
Jill H. Casid
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Planting and transplanting, seeding and reshaping—landscaping practices that emerged in the eighteenth century—are inextricable from the contested terrain of empire within which they operated. From the plantations of the “nabobs” to the island gardens of narrative fiction, from William Beckford’s estate at Fonthill to Marie Antoinette’s ornamented farm, Sowing Empire considers imperial relandscaping—its patriarchal organization, heterosexual reproduction, and slavery—and how it contributed to the construction of imperial power. At the same time, the book shows how these picturesque landscapes and sugar plantations contained within them the seeds of resistance—how, for instance, slave gardens and the Afro-Caribbean practice of Vodou threatened authority and created new possibilities for once again transforming the landscape.In an ambitious work of wide-ranging literary, visual, and historical allusion, Jill H. Casid examines how landscaping functioned in an imperial mode that defined and remade the “heartlands” of nations as well as the contact zones and colonial peripheries in the West and East Indies. Revealing the colonial landscape as far more than an agricultural system—as a means of regulating national, sexual, and gender identities—Casid also traces how the circulation of plants and hybridity influenced agriculture and landscaping on European soil and how colonial contacts materially shaped what we take as “European.”Utilizing a wide range of both visual and written sources—maps, literature, and travel writing—this book is interdisciplinary in its methodology and in its scope. Sowing Empire explores how postcolonial and queer studies can alter art history and visual studies and, in turn, what close attention to the visual may offer to both postcolonial theorizing and historically and materially based colonial cultural studies.Jill H. Casid is assistant professor of art history and part of the developing transdisciplinary program in visual culture studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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Space And Place
The Perspective of Experience
Yi-Fu Tuan
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
A study of the ways in which people feel and think about space, how they form attachments to home, neighborhood, and nation, and how feelings about space and place are affected by the sense of time.“Since it is the breadth and universality of his argument that concerns Yi-Fu Tuan, experience is defined as ‘all the modes by which a person knows and constructs reality,’ and examples are taken with equal ease from non-literate cultures, from ancient and modern oriental and western civilizations, from novels, poetry, anthropology, psychology, and theology. The result is a remarkable synthesis, which reflects well the subtleties of experience and yet avoids the pitfalls of arbitrary classification and facile generalization. For these reasons, and for its general tone and erudition and humanism, this book will surely be one that will endure when the current flurry of academic interest in environmental experience abates.” Canadian Geographer
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Space, Place, and Gender
Doreen Massey
University of Minnesota Press, 1994
A leading feminist geographer puts forth new ways of thinking about space and place. In these days of global acceleration on the one hand and intensifying local nationalisms on the other, how should we be thinking about space and place? This new book brings together Doreen Massey's key writings on this debate. In it she argues that we have seen some problematical readings of both terms in recent years, and she proposes an alternative approach more adequate to the issues facing the social sciences today. Massey has organized these debates around the three themes of space, place, and gender. She traces the development of ideas about the social structure of space and place, and the relation of both to issues of gender and certain debates within feminism. Beginning with the economy and social structures of production, Massey develops a wider notion of spatiality as the product of intersecting social relations. On this basis she proposes an approach to "places" that is essentially open and hybrid while always provisional and contested. The themes intersect with much current thinking about identity within feminism and cultural studies. The chapters range from studies of the concepts of place employed in debates on uneven regional development and inner-city problems to arguments about the relationship between the conceptualization of space/place and the social construction of gender relations. "This book presents a collection of Massey's writings that have appeared over the last two decades. The volume is, however, more than a sum of its parts, in that Massey uses commentaries throughout the book to delineate an intellectual trajectory in Anglo geography that connects the concerns of economic geography with critiques and extensions by feminist and postcolonial writers. Massey builds a multifaceted argument of the richness of geographical analysis and its centrality for contemporary social theory debates." Professional Geographer "In a compilation of essays spanning over fifteen years, Space, Place and Gender, Doreen Massey explores the intricate and profound connection of space and place with gender and the construction of gender relations. Spaces and places are gendered, she argues, at once reflecting and affecting how gender is understood." Harvard Design Magazine Doreen Massey is professor of geography at the Open University in the United Kingdom. She is the author of five books, including Spatial Divisions of Labour (1984) and, with David Weild and Paul Quintas, High-Tech Fantasies (1991).
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Space, Site, Intervention
Situating Installation Art
Erika Suderburg
University of Minnesota Press, 2000
Originally published in 1970, The Urban Revolution marked Henri Lefebvre’s first sustained critique of urban society, a work in which he pioneered the use of semiotic, structuralist, and poststructuralist methodologies in analyzing the development of the urban environment. Although it is widely considered a foundational book in contemporary thinking about the city, The Urban Revolution has never been translated into English—until now. This first English edition, deftly translated by Robert Bononno, makes available to a broad audience Lefebvre’s sophisticated insights into the urban dimensions of modern life.Lefebvre begins with the premise that the total urbanization of society is an inevitable process that demands of its critics new interpretive and perceptual approaches that recognize the urban as a complex field of inquiry. Dismissive of cold, modernist visions of the city, particularly those embodied by rationalist architects and urban planners like Le Corbusier, Lefebvre instead articulates the lived experiences of individual inhabitants of the city. In contrast to the ideology of urbanism and its reliance on commodification and bureaucratization—the capitalist logic of market and state—Lefebvre conceives of an urban utopia characterized by self-determination, individual creativity, and authentic social relationships.A brilliantly conceived and theoretically rigorous investigation into the realities and possibilities of urban space, The Urban Revolution remains an essential analysis of and guide to the nature of the city.Henri Lefebvre (d. 1991) was one of the most significant European thinkers of the twentieth century. His many books include The Production of Space (1991), Everyday Life in the Modern World (1994), Introduction to Modernity (1995), and Writings on Cities (1995).Robert Bononno is a full-time translator who lives in New York. His recent translations include The Singular Objects of Architecture by Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel (Minnesota, 2002) and Cyberculture by Pierre Lévy (Minnesota, 2001).
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Spaces between Us
Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization
Scott Lauria Morgensen
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

We are all caught up in one another, Scott Lauria Morgensen asserts, we who live in settler societies, and our interrelationships inform all that these societies touch. Native people live in relation to all non-Natives amid the ongoing power relations of settler colonialism, despite never losing inherent claims to sovereignty as indigenous peoples. Explaining how relational distinctions of “Native” and “settler” define the status of being “queer,” Spaces between Us argues that modern queer subjects emerged among Natives and non-Natives by engaging the meaningful difference indigeneity makes within a settler society.

Morgensen’s analysis exposes white settler colonialism as a primary condition for the development of modern queer politics in the United States. Bringing together historical and ethnographic cases, he shows how U.S. queer projects became non-Native and normatively white by comparatively examining the historical activism and critical theory of Native queer and Two-Spirit people.

Presenting a “biopolitics of settler colonialism”—in which the imagined disappearance of indigeneity and sustained subjugation of all racialized peoples ensures a progressive future for white settlers—Spaces between Us newly demonstrates the interdependence of nation, race, gender, and sexuality and offers opportunities for resistance in the United States.

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Spaces Of Their Own
Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China
Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

An exploration of women’s public expression--in China and beyond.

How are the public and political lives of Chinese women constrained by states and economies? And how have pockets of women’s consciousness come to be produced in and disseminated from this traditionally masculine milieu? The essays in this volume examine the possibilities for a public sphere for Chinese women, one that would emerge from concrete historical situations and local contexts and also cut across the political boundaries separating the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the West.

The challenges of this project are taken up in essays on the legacy of state feminism on the Mainland as contrasted with a grassroots women’s movement in Taiwan; on the role of the capitalist consumer economy in the emerging lesbian movement in Taiwan; and on the increased trafficking of women as brides, prostitutes, and mistresses between the Mainland and wealthy male patrons in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The writers’ examples of masculine domination in the media include the reformulation of Chinese women in Fifth Generation films for a transnational Western male film audience and the portrayal of Mainland women in Taiwanese and Hong Kong media. The contributors also consider male nationalism as it is revealed through both international sports coverage on television and in a Chinese television drama. Other works examine a women’s museum, a telephone hotline in Beijing, the films of Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui, the transnational contacts of a Taiwanese feminist organization, the diaspora of Mainland women writers, and the differences between Chinese and Western feminist themes.Contributors: Susan Brownell, U of Missouri; Virginia Cornue; Dai Jinhua, Beijing U; Kathleen Erwin; Elaine Yee Lin Ho, Hong Kong U; Lee Yuan-chen, Tamkang U; Li Xiaojiang, Zhengzhou U and Henan U; Lisa Rofel, U of California, Santa Cruz; Tze-lan Deborah Sang, U of Oregon; Shu-mei Shih, UCLA; Zhang Zhen. ISBN 0-8166-3145-X Cloth $49.95xxISBN 0-8166-3146-8 Paper $19.95x336 pages 9 black-and-white photos 5 7/8 x 9 FebruaryPublic Worlds Series, volume 4Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
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Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492-1700
Lyle N. McAlister
University of Minnesota Press, 1984

Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492-1700 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.

Spanish and Portuguese expansion substantially altered the social, political, and economic contours of the modern world. In his book, Lyle McAlister provides a narrative and interpretive history of the exploration and settlement of the Americas by Spain and Portugal.

McAlister divides this period (and the book) into three parts. First, he describes the formation of Old World societies with particular attention to those features that influenced the directions and forms of overseas expansion. Second, he traces the dynamic processes of conquest and colonization that between 1492 and about 1570 firmly established Spanish and Portuguese dominion in the New World. The third part deals with colonial growth and consolidation down to about 1700. McAlister's main themes are: the post-conquest territorial expansion that established the limits of what later came to be called Latin America, the emergence of distinctively Spanish and Portuguese American societies and economies, the formation of systems of imperial control and exploitation, and the ways in which conflicts between imperial and American interests were reconciled.

This comprehensive history, with its extensive bibliographic essay and attention to historiographic issues, will be a standard reference for students and scholars of the period.

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Spain's Long Shadow
The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire
Maria DeGuzman
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
England and the Netherlands, Spain's imperial rivals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, imagined Spain as cruel and degenerate barbarians of la leyenda negra (the Black Legend), in league with the powers of "blackest darkness" and driven by "dark motives." In Spain's Long Shadow, Maria DeGuzman explores how this convenient demonization made its way into American culture - and proved essential to the construction of whiteness. DeGuzman's work reaches from the late eighteenth century - in the wake of the American Revolution - to the present. Surveying a broad range of texts and images from Poe's "William Wilson" and John Singer Sargent's "El Jaleo" to Richard Wright's "Pagan Spain" and Kathy Acker's Don Quixote, Spain's Long Shadow shows how the creation of Anglo-American ethnicity as specifically American has depended on the casting of Spain as a colonial alter ego. The symbolic power of Spain in the American imagination, DeGuzman argues, is not just a legacy of that nation's colonial presence in the Americas; it lives on as well in the "blackness" of Spain and Spainards - in the assigning of people of Spanish origin to an "off-white" racial category that reserves the designation of white for Anglo-Americans.By demonstrating how the Anglo-American imagination needs Spain and Spainards as figures of attraction and repulsion, DeGuzman makes a compelling and illuminating case for treating Spain as the imperial alter ego of the United States. Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, ambitious in its chronological sweep, and elegant in its interpretation of literary and visual works, DeGuzman's book leads us to a powerful new understanding of the nature - and history - American ethnicity.
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Speaking of Indigenous Politics
Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders
J. Kehaulani Kauanui
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

“A lesson in how to practice recognizing the fundamental truth that every inch of the Americas is Indigenous territory” —Robert Warrior, from the Foreword

Many people learn about Indigenous politics only through the most controversial and confrontational news: the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s efforts to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, for instance, or the battle to protect Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, a site sacred to Native peoples. But most Indigenous activism remains unseen in the mainstream—and so, of course, does its significance. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui set out to change that with her radio program Indigenous Politics. Issue by issue, she interviewed people who talked candidly and in an engaging way about how settler colonialism depends on erasing Native peoples and about how Native peoples can and do resist. Collected here, these conversations speak with clear and compelling voices about a range of Indigenous politics that shape everyday life.

Land desecration, treaty rights, political status, cultural revitalization: these are among the themes taken up by a broad cross-section of interviewees from across the United States and from Canada, Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Australia, and New Zealand. Some speak from the thick of political action, some from a historical perspective, others from the reaches of Indigenous culture near and far. Writers, like Comanche Paul Chaat Smith, author of Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, expand on their work—about gaming and sovereignty, for example, or protecting Native graves, the reclamation of land, or the erasure of Indian identity. These conversations both inform and engage at a moment when their messages could not be more urgent.

Contributors: Jessie Little Doe Baird (Mashpee Wampanoag), Omar Barghouti, Lisa Brooks (Abenaki), Kathleen A. Brown-Pérez (Brothertown Indian Nation), Margaret “Marge” Bruchac (Abenaki), Jessica Cattelino, David Cornsilk (Cherokee Nation), Sarah Deer (Muskogee Creek Nation), Philip J. Deloria (Dakota), Tonya Gonnella Frichner (Onondaga Nation), Hone Harawira (Ngapuhi Nui Tonu), Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee), Rashid Khalidi, Winona LaDuke (White Earth Ojibwe), Maria LaHood, James Luna (Luiseño), Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Quandamooka), Chief Mutáwi Mutáhash (Many Hearts) Marilynn “Lynn” Malerba (Mohegan), Steven Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape), Jean M. O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe), Jonathan Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio (Kanaka Maoli), Steven Salaita, Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), Circe Sturm (Mississippi Choctaw descendant), Margo Taméz (Lipan Apache), Chief Richard Velky (Schaghticoke), Patrick Wolfe. 

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Spectacles Of Realism
Gender, Body, Genre
Margaret Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 1995

A rethinking of realism that reveals its relevance to sexual and cultural politics.

Despite rumors of its demise in literary theory and practice, realism persists. Why this is, and how realism is relevant to current interdisciplinary debates in gender studies and cultural studies, are the questions underlying Spectacles of Realism. With particular reference to nineteenth-century French culture, the contributors explore the role realism has played in the social construction of gender and sexuality. Among their subjects are nineteenth-century physiologies, photographs, caricatures, and Balzac’s Comédie humaine; the ethnographic claims of Goncourt’s naturalism and the historical claims of Zola’s; and the allure of exotica displayed at new museums and international expositions.

Contributors: April Alliston, Princeton U; Emily Apter, UCLA; Charles Bernheimer, U of Pennsylvania; Rhonda Garelick; Judith Goldstein, Vassar; Anne Higonnet, Wellesley; Roger Huss, Queen Mary and Westfield College; Dorothy Kelly, Boston U; Diana Knight, U of Nottingham; Jann Matlock, Harvard U; Linda Nochlin, NYU; Patrick O’Donovan, King’s College; Vanessa Schwartz, American U; Naomi Segal, U of Reading; Barbara Vinken, NYU.
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The Spectral Jew
Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe
Steven F. Kruger
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Medieval European culture encompassed Judaic, Christian, Muslim, and pagan societies, forming a complex matrix of religious belief, identity, and imagination. Through incisive readings of a broad range of medieval texts and informed by poststructuralist, queer, and feminist theories, The Spectral Jew traces the Jewish presence in Western Europe to show how the body, gender, and sexuality were at the root of the construction of medieval religious anxieties, inconsistencies, and instabilities. 

Looking closely at how medieval Jewish and Christian identities are distinguished from each other, yet intimately intertwined, Kruger demonstrates how Jews were often corporealized in ways that posited them as inferior to Christians—archaic and incapable of change—even as the two mutually shaped each other. But such attempts to differentiate Jews and Christians were inevitably haunted by the knowledge that Christianity had emerged out of Judaism and was, in its own self-understanding, a community of converts. 

Examining the points of contact between Christian and Jewish communities, Kruger discloses the profound paradox of the Jew as different in all ways, yet capable of converting to fully Christian status. He draws from central medieval authors and texts such as Peter Damian, Guibert of Nogent, the Barcelona Disputation, and the Hebrew chronicles of the First Crusade, as well as lesser known writings such as the disputations of Ceuta, Majorca, and Tortosa and the immensely popular Dialogues of Peter Alfonsi. 

By putting the conversion narrative at the center of this analysis, Kruger exposes it as a disruption of categories rather than a smooth passage and reveals the prominent role Judaism played in the medieval Christian imagination. 

Steven F. Kruger is professor of English and medieval studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is author of several books and editor with Glenn Burger of Queering the Middle Ages (Minnesota, 2001).
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Speculative Blackness
The Future of Race in Science Fiction
André M. Carrington
University of Minnesota Press, 2016

In Speculative Blackness, André M. Carrington analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction—including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan cultures—to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination.

Carrington’s argument about authorship, fandom, and race in a genre that has been both marginalized and celebrated offers a black perspective on iconic works of science fiction. He examines the career of actor Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed the character Uhura in the original Star Trek television series and later became a recruiter for NASA, and the spin-off series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, set on a space station commanded by a black captain. He recovers a pivotal but overlooked moment in 1950s science fiction fandom in which readers and writers of fanzines confronted issues of race by dealing with a fictitious black fan writer and questioning the relevance of race to his ostensible contributions to the 'zines. Carrington mines the productions of Marvel comics and the black-owned comics publisher Milestone Media, particularly the representations of black sexuality in its flagship title, Icon. He also interrogates online fan fiction about black British women in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Harry Potter series.

Throughout this nuanced analysis, Carrington theorizes the relationship between race and genre in cultural production, revealing new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture.


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Speculative Security
The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies
Marieke de Goede
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Since the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, finance and security have become joined in new ways to produce particular targets of state surveillance. In Speculative Security, Marieke de Goede describes how previously unscrutinized practices such as donations and remittances, especially across national borders, have been affected by security measures that include datamining, asset freezing, and transnational regulation. These “precrime” measures focus on transactions that are perfectly legal but are thought to hold a specific potential to support terrorism. The pursuit of suspect monies is not simply an issue of financial regulation, she shows, but a broad political, social, and even cultural phenomenon with profound effects on everyday life.

Speculative Security offers a range of examples that illustrate the types of security interventions employed today, including the extralegal targeting and breaking up of the al-Barakaat financial network that was accompanied by raids in the United States, asset freezes in Sweden, and the incarceration of a money remitter at Guantánamo Bay. De Goede develops the paradigm of “speculative security” as a way to understand the new fusing of finance and security, denoting the speculative nature of both the means and the ends of the war on terrorist financing.

Ultimately, de Goede reveals how the idea of creating “security” appeals to multiple imaginable—and unimaginable—futures in order to enable action in the present.

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Spent behind the Wheel
Drivers' Labor in the Uber Economy
Julietta Hua
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

Exploring professional passenger driving and the gig economy through feminist theories of labor

Are taxi drivers in today’s era of the ride-hail app performing care work akin to domestic and household labor? So argue the authors of Spent behind the Wheel. Bringing together sociological and legal perspectives with feminist theoretical insights, Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray examine the case study of contemporary professional passenger driving in the United States. On the one hand, they show, the rise of the gig economy has brought new attention to the industry of professional passenger driving. On the other hand, the vulnerabilities that professional drivers experience remain hidden. 

Drawing on interviews with drivers, labor organizers, and members of licensing commissions, as well as case law and other published resources, Hua and Ray argue that working for ride-hail companies like Uber and Lyft shares similarities with driving for taxi companies in the impact on driver lives. Lyft and Uber sell the idea of industry disruption, but in fact they entrench long-standing modes of extracting the reproductive labor of their drivers for the benefit of consumer lives. Reproductive labor—conventionally understood as feminized labor—is extracted, but masked, behind the masculinized, racialized bodies of drivers. Professional driving is thus best understood alongside domestic and other gendered service work as reproductive labors devalued and often demonetized to benefit the national economy. 

Spent behind the Wheel is a must for readers interested in critical studies of technological change and the gig economy, showing how drivers’ capacities are drained for the benefit of riders, corporations, and the maintenance of the racial state. 

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Spinoza Now
Dimitris Vardoulakis
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
What does it mean to think about, and with, Spinoza today? This collection, the first broadly interdisciplinary volume dealing with Spinozan thought, asserts the importance of Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence for contemporary cultural and philosophical debates.

Engaging with Spinoza’s insistence on the centrality of the passions as the site of the creative and productive forces shaping society, this collection critiques the impulse to transcendence and regimes of mastery, exposing universal values as illusory. Spinoza Now pursues Spinoza’s challenge to abandon the temptation to think through the prism of death in order to arrive at a truly liberatory notion of freedom. In this bold endeavor, the essays gathered here extend the Spinozan project beyond the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy to encompass all forms of life-affirming activity, including the arts and literature. The essays, taken together, suggest that “Spinoza now” is not so much a statement about a “truth” that Spinoza’s writings can reveal to us in our present situation. It is, rather, the injunction to adhere to the attitude that affirms both necessity and impossibility.

Contributors: Alain Badou, École Normale Supérieure; Mieke Bal, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis; Cesare Casarino, U of Minnesota; Justin Clemens, U of Melbourne; Simon Duffy, U of Sydney; Sebastian Egenhofer, U of Basel; Alexander García Düttmann, Goldsmiths, U of London; Arthur Jacobson, Yeshiva U; A. Kiarina Kordela, Macalester College; Michael Mack, U of Nottingham; Warren Montag, Occidental College; Antonio Negri; Christopher Norris, U of Cardiff, Wales; Anthony Uhlmann, U of Western Sydney.
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Spoiler Alert
A Critical Guide
Aaron Jaffe
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

All of this information at our fingertips—and we might not need any of it

Concurrent with the compulsory connectivity of the digital age is the rise of the spoiler. The inevitability of information has changed the critical quality of modernity, leaving us with acute vertigo—a feeling that nothing new is left out there. Encompassing memes and trigger warnings, Vilem Flusser and Thomas Pynchon, Spoiler Alert wrangles with the state of surprise in post-historical times. Aaron Jaffe delivers a timely corrective to post-critical modes of reading that demonstrates the dangers of forfeiting critical suspicion.

Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

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Sprawl and Suburbia
A Harvard Design Magazine Reader
William Saunders
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Sprawl is the single most significant and urgent issue in American land use at the turn of the twenty-first century. Efforts to limit and reform sprawl through legislative “Smart Growth” initiatives have been enacted around the country while the neotraditionalist New Urbanism has been embraced by many architects and urban planners. Yet most Americans persist in their desire to live farther and farther away from urban centers, moving to exurbs made up almost entirely of single-family residential houses and stand-alone shopping areas. 

Sprawl and Suburbia brings together some of the foremost thinkers in the field to present in-depth diagnosis and critical analysis of the physical and social realities of exurban sprawl. Along with an introduction by Robert Fishman, these essays call for architects, urban planners, and landscape designers to work at mitigating the impact of sprawl on land and resources and improving the residential and commercial built environment as a whole. In place of vast residential exurbs, these writers offer visions of a fresh urbanism—appealing and persuasive models of life at greater density, with greater diversity, and within genuine communities. 

With sprawl losing the support of suburban citizens themselves as economic, environmental, and social costs are being paid, Sprawl and Suburbia appears at a moment when design might achieve some critical influence over development—if architects and planners accept the challenge. 

Contributors: Mike Davis, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Peter Hall, David Harvey, Jerold S. Kayden, Matthew J. Kiefer, Alex Krieger, Andrew Ross, James S. Russell, Mitchell Schwarzer. 

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

Robert Fishman is professor of architecture and urban planning at the Taubman College of Architecture, University of Michigan. He is author of Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia and editor of The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy.
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Springs of Scientific Creativity
Essays on Founders of Modern Science
claire Aris
University of Minnesota Press, 1983
Springs of Scientific Creativity was first published in 1983.Mathematician Henri Poincaré was boarding a bus when he realized that the transformations of non-Euclidian geometry were just those he needed in his research on the theory of functions. He did not have to interrupt his conversation, still less to verify the equation in detail; his insight was complete at that point. Poincaré’s insight into his own creativity -- his awareness that preliminary cogitation and the working of the subconscious had prepared his mind for an intuitive flash of recognition -- is just one of many possible analyses of scientific creativity, a subject as fascinating as it is elusive.The authors of this book have chosen to search for the springs of scientific creativity by examining the lives and work of a dozen innovative thinkers in the fields of mathematics, physics, and chemistry from the seventeenth down to the mid-twentieth century. First prepared for delivery in a lecture series held at the University of Minnesota, these essays delve into the social, psychological, and intellectual factors that fostered creativity in the lives of Galilei Galileo, Isaac Newton, J. P. Joule, James Cler Maxwell, Josiah Willard Gibbs, Lord Rayleigh, Elmer Sperry and Adrian Leverkühn, Walter Nernst, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Michael Polyani, and John von Neumann.The contributors are Thomas B. Settle, Richard S. Westfall, Donald S. L. Cardwell, C. W. F. Everitt, Martin J. Klein, John N. Howard, Thomas P. Hughes, Erwin N. Hiebert, Stanley Goldberg, Linda Wessels, William T. Scott, and Herman H. Goldstine.
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St. Paul and Epicurus
Norman Wentworth DeWitt
University of Minnesota Press, 1954

St. Paul and Epicurus was first published in 1954. 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.

Everyone who is interesting in the meaning of the Bible will find this a revealing study, for it opens up a new window on the New Testament, a window that was walled up centuries ago by prejudice. Professor DeWitt throws new light on the writings of the Apostle Paul by showing how they were influenced by the teachings of the Greek philosopher Epicurus.

The Epicureanism could have a place in Christian religion may come as a surprise to those familiar with the conventional concept of the philosophy of Epicurus. As demonstrated in the meaning of the English word epicure,derived from the name of the ancient philosopher, the modern world has long associated Epicurus with the indulgence of sensual pleasure in food and drink.

But, as Professor DeWitt makes clear both in this volume and in its predecessor, Epicurus and His Philosophy, the pleasures which the ancient Greek espoused as constituting the chief good of life were not the pleasures of the flesh. The merit and the lure, however, of the Epicurean ethic, which allied happiness with pleasure, were so appealing and so widely acknowledged that Paul had no choice but to adopt it and bless it for his followers with the sanction of religion. He could not, though, admit indebtedness to a philosopher who had long been accused of sensualism and atheism, and there was no choice, therefore, but to consign Epicurus to anonymity.

Through his scholarly investigation into the Epicurean source of certain portions of the Epistles, Professor DeWitt provides new explanations or translations for seventy-six biblical verses. The close scrutiny of biblical passages is carried out, not in a spirit of vandalism, but in a quest for accuracy, and the result is a challenging, readable, and absorbing book.

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Stanzas
Word and Phantasm in Western Culture
Georgio Agamben
University of Minnesota Press, 1992
Stanzas is a fascinating blend of philology, medieval physics and psychology, the psychoanalysis of toys, and contemporary linguistics and philosophy. In this unique work, Giorgio Agamben attempts to reconfigure the epistemological foundation of Western culture. He rereads Freud and Saussure to discover the impossibility of metalanguage and of synthesis that could be reflected in the transparency of signs. There is no "superior language" that can read the obscure scenes of the unconscious, and the "symbol" is always the return of the repressed in an improper signifier. This impossibility leads Agamben to the problem of representation. He argues that because language is the locus of the production and storage of phantasms, all real objects are fractured by phantasmic itineraries that in turn divide poetry and philosophy, joy and knowledge. Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is the author of Language and Death (1991), The Coming Community (1993), and Means without End (2000).
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Stardust
Cinematic Archives at the End of the World
Hannah Goodwin
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

An exploration of the fundamental bond between cinema and the cosmos
 

The advent of cinema occurred alongside pivotal developments in astronomy and astrophysics, including Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, all of which dramatically altered our conception of time and provided new means of envisioning the limits of our world. Tracing the many aesthetic, philosophical, and technological parallels between these fields, Stardust explores how cinema has routinely looked toward the cosmos to reflect our collective anxiety about a universe without us.

 

Employing a “cosmocinematic gaze,” Hannah Goodwin uses the metaphorical frameworks from astronomy to posit new understandings of cinematic time and underscore the role of light in generating archives for an uncertain future. Surveying a broad range of works, including silent-era educational films, avant-garde experimental works, and contemporary blockbusters, she carves out a distinctive area of film analysis that extends its reach far beyond mainstream science fiction to explore films that reckon with a future in which humans are absent.

 

This expansive study details the shared affinities between cinema and the stars in order to demonstrate how filmmakers have used cosmic imagery and themes to respond to the twentieth century’s moments of existential dread, from World War I to the atomic age to our current moment of environmental collapse. As our outlook on the future continues to change, Stardust illuminates the promise of cinema to bear witness to humanity’s fragile existence within the vast expanse of the universe.

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Stare in the Darkness
The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics
Lester K. Spence
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Rap’s critique of police brutality in the 1980s. The Hip Hop Political Convention. The rise (and fall) of Kwame Kilpatrick, the “hip-hop mayor” of Detroit. Barack Obama echoing the body language of Jay-Z on the campaign trail.

A growing number of black activists and artists claim that rap and hip-hop are the basis of an influential new urban social movement. Simultaneously, black citizens evince concern with the effect that rap and hip-hop culture exerts on African American communities. According to a recent Pew survey conducted on the opinions of Black Americans, 71 percent of blacks think that rap is a bad influence. To what extent are African American hopes and fears about hip-hop’s potential political power justified? In Stare in the Darkness, Lester K. Spence answers this question using a blend of neoliberal analysis, survey data, experiments, and case studies.

Spence finds that rap does in fact influence black political attitudes. However, rap also reproduces rather than critiques neoliberal ideology. Furthermore, black activists seeking to create an innovative model of hip-hop politics are hamstrung by their reliance on outmoded forms of organizing. By considering the possibilities inherent in the most prolific and prominent activities of hip-hop politics, Stare in the Darkness reveals, in a clear and practical manner, the political consequences of rap culture for black publics.
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The Stars
Edgar Morin
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Worshipped as heroes, treated as gods, movie stars are more than objects of admiration. A star's influence touches on every aspect of ordinary life, dictating taste in fashion, lifestyle, and desire. Edgar Morin's remarkable investigation into the cultural and social significance of the star system traces its evolution from the earliest days of the cinema - when stars like Chaplin, Garbo, and Valentino lived at a distance from their fans, far beyond all mortals, to the postwar era in which stars like Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe became familiar and familial, less unapproachable but more moving, and concludes with an analysis of the furious religious adulation surrounding the life and death of James Dean. Ultimately, Morin finds, stars are more than just creations of the movie studios; they serve as intermediaries between the real and the imaginary. Today, with the cult of fame more pervasive and influential than ever, The Stars remains a vibrant, vital, and surprising work.
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Starting and Running a Nonprofit Organization
Joan M. Hummel
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Starting and Running a Nonprofit Organization is a book for people who are forming new small nonprofits; thinking about converting an informal, grassroots group into tax-exempt status; reorganizing an existing agency; or currently managing a nonprofit. It provides practical and basic how-to information on legal, tax, organizational, and other issues particular to nonprofits. 

This one-of-a-kind resource has been a valuable guide to nonprofit management for decades. While much of the information originated in an earlier era of nonprofit formation, it remains highly useful for gaining an overview and creating an action plan for people entering this realm of organizational management. Its compact format provides information in an easy-to-understand style. The book describes, step-by-step, the typical phases of creating and operating a new nonprofit, including incorporation, establishing a board of directors, writing bylaws, obtaining tax-exempt status, creating a strategic plan, budgeting and grant seeking, understanding accounting principles, managing human resources, and creating a community relations plan. 

The Center for Nonprofit Management is a department of the Graduate School of Business at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis and St. Paul. It provides training and guidance in all aspects of the nonprofit sector to existing organizations as well as individuals or groups who are seeking help in starting a nonprofit. 

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Starting and running a nonprofit organization
Joan M. Hummel
University of Minnesota Press, 1980
A best-selling resource on nonprofit management. Starting and Running a Nonprofit Organization is a book for people who are forming new nonprofits; thinking about converting an informal, grassroots group into tax-exempt status; reorganizing an existing agency; or currently managing a nonprofit. It provides practical and basic how-to information on legal, tax, organizational, and other issues particular to nonprofits. This one-of-a-kind resource has been an invaluable guide to nonprofit management for more than fifteen years. Its unique, compact format provides all of the necessary information in an easy-to-understand style. The long-awaited revised edition retains all of the useful features of the original, adding important new insights and strategies for the challenges of today's nonprofit operating climate. The book describes, step-by-step, all of the phases of creating and operating a new nonprofit, including incorporation, establishing a board of directors, writing bylaws, obtaining tax-exempt status, creating a strategic plan, budgeting and grant seeking, understanding accounting principles, managing human resources, and creating a community relations plan. The information provided is specific enough to be immediately useful, yet can be generalized to any nonprofit practitioner in any state. Handy checklists and worksheets, as well as a list of sources for assistance and management development and a bibliography on nonprofit management, make Starting and Running a Nonprofit Organization a valuable and unique resource. "The book emphasizes small non-profit groups, and it covers bylaws, registration requirements, accounting procedures, strategic planning, fund raising, public relations, and assembling a board of directors. Ms. Hummel includes rudimentary work sheets on budgeting, shoring up mission objectives. and taking advantage of news-media opportunities." --The Chronicle of Philanthropy "A valuable and unique resource." --Nonprofit Management News Joan M. Hummel has served as both staff and board member for a number of nonprofit organizations, as well as working with foundations and other supporters of nonprofits. The Center for Nonprofit Management is a department of the Graduate School of Business at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis and St. Paul. It provides training and guidance in all aspects of the nonprofit sector to existing organizations as well as individuals or groups who are seeking help in starting a nonprofit.
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State Repression and the Labors of Memory
Elizabeth Jelin
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
A timely exploration of the nature of memory and its political uses. Hearing the news from South America at the turn of the millennium can be like traveling in time: here are the trials of Pinochet, the searches for "the disappeared" in Argentina, the investigation of the death of former president Goulart in Brazil, the Peace Commission in Uruguay, the Archive of Terror in Paraguay, a Truth Commission in Peru. As societies struggle to come to terms with the past and with the vexing questions posed by ineradicable memories, this wise book offers guidance. Combining a concrete sense of present urgency and a theoretical understanding of social, political, and historical realities, State Repression and the Labors of Memory fashions tools for thinking about and analyzing the presences, silences, and meanings of the past. With unflappable good judgment and fairness, Elizabeth Jelin clarifies the often muddled debates about the nature of memory, the politics of struggles over memories of historical injustice, the relation of historiography to memory, the issue of truth in testimony and traumatic remembrance, the role of women in Latin American attempts to cope with the legacies of military dictatorships, and problems of second-generation memory and its transmission and appropriation. Jelin's work engages European and North American theory in its exploration of the various ways in which conflicts over memory shape individual and collective identities, as well as social and political cleavages. In doing so, her book exposes the enduring consequences of repression for social processes in Latin America, and at the same time enriches our general understanding of the fundamentally conflicted and contingent nature of memory. Elizabeth Jelin is professor at the University of Buenos Aires and research director at the Institute of Social and Economic Development. $17.95 paper ISBN 0-8166-4284-2
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State, Space, World
Selected Essays
Henri Lefebvre
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

Leading intellectual Henri Lefebvre on political and state theory

One of the most influential Marxist theorists of the twentieth century, Henri Lefebvre pioneered the study of the modern state in an age of accelerating global economic integration and fragmentation. Shortly after the 1974 publication of his landmark book The Production of Space, Lefebvre embarked on one of the most ambitious projects of his career: a consideration of the history and geographies of the modern state through a monumental study that linked several disciplines, including political science, sociology, geography, and history.

State, Space, World collects a series of Lefebvre’s key writings on the state from this period. Making available in English for the first time the as-yet-unexplored political aspect of Lefebvre’s work, it contains essays on philosophy, political theory, state formation, spatial planning, and globalization, as well as provocative reflections on the possibilities and limits of grassroots democracy under advanced capitalism.State, Space, World is an essential complement to The Production of Space, The Urban Revolution, and The Critique of Everyday Life. Lefebvre’s original and prescient analyses that emerge in this volume are urgently relevant to contemporary debates on globalization and neoliberal capitalism.
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Statelessness
On Almost Not Existing
Tony C. Brown
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

A pathbreaking new genealogy of statelessness

Just as the modern state and the citizenship associated with it are commonly thought of as a European invention, so too is citizenship’s negation in the form of twentieth-century diaspora and statelessness. Statelessness sets forth a new genealogy, suggesting that Europe first encountered mass statelessness neither inside its own borders nor during the twentieth century, as Hannah Arendt so influentially claimed, but outside of itself—in the New World, several hundred years earlier.

Through close readings of political philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau to Kant, Tony C. Brown argues that statelessness became a central problem for political thought early on, with far-reaching implications for thinking both on the state and on being human. What Europeans thought they saw among the “savages” of the Americas was life without political order, life less than human. Lacking almost everything those deemed clearly human had achieved, the stateless existed in a radically precarious, almost inhuman privation.

And yet this existence also raised the unsettling possibility that state-based existence may not be inevitable, necessary, or even ideal.  This possibility, as Brown shows, prompts the response—as defensive as it was aggressive—that we call Enlightenment political philosophy, which arguably still orders much thinking on being stateless today, including our discourses concerning migrants and Indigenous peoples.

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States And Strangers
Refugees And Displacements Of Statecraft
Nevzat Soguk
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

Looks at the role of refugees in international relations.

Refugees may flee their country, but can they escape the confining, defining logic of all the voices that speak for them? As refugees multiply in our troubled world, more and more scholars, studies, and pundits focus on their plight. Most of these analyses, says Nevzat Soguk, start from a model that shares the assumptions manifested in traditional definitions of citizen, nation, and state. Within this hierarchy, he argues, a refugee has no place to go. States and Strangers questions this paradigm, particularly its vision of the territoriality of life.

A radical retheorization of the refugee from a Foucauldian perspective, the book views the international refugee regime not as a simple tertiary response, arising from the practice of states regarding refugee problems, but as itself an aspect of the regimentation of statecraft. The attendant discourse negates the multiplicity of refugee events and experience; by assigning the refugee an identity-someone without the citizen’s grounding within a territorial space-the state renders him voiceless and deprives him of representation and protection. States and Strangers asks how this happens and how it can be avoided.Using historical, archival research and interpretive strategies drawn from a genealogical approach, Soguk considers the role of the refugee in the emergence and maintenance of the sovereign territorial state from the late seventeenth century to contemporary times. ISBN 0-8166-3166-2 Cloth/jacket £00.00 $62.95x340 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 MarchBorderlines Series, volume 11Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
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States Of Exception
Everyday Life and Postcolonial Identity
Keya Ganguly
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

Explores the conflict between capitalism and tradition in an immigrant community

A philosophical anthropology of everyday experience, this book is also a deeply informed and thought-provoking reflection on the work of cultural critique. States of Exception looks into a community of immigrants from India living in southern New Jersey—a group to whom the author, as a daughter of two of its members, enjoyed unprecedented access.

Her position allows Keya Ganguly to approach the culture of a middle-class group (albeit one that is marginalized by racial prejudice), while the group’s relatively comfortable and protected style of life offers unusual insight into the concept of the everyday and the sense in which a seemingly commonplace existence can be understood as in crisis: a state of exception. Thus, Ganguly draws on the work of the Frankfurt School, particularly Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, to explore the possibilities of a dialectical critique of the everyday—a state of exception informing ordinary yet crisis-ridden narratives of the self under late capitalism.

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States of Grace
Senegalese in Italy and the New European Immigration
Donald Martin Carter
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

States of Grace was first published in 1997. 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.

Leaving their depleted fields for better prospects, Senegalese immigrants have made their way to Italy in significant numbers. What this migration means, in the context of both the migratory traditions and conditions of Africa and the history and future of the European nation-state, is the subject of this timely and ambitious book.

Focusing on Turin, the northern Italian point of entry for so many Senegalese, States of Grace chronicles the arrival and formation of a transnational African Islamic community in a largely Catholic Western European country, one that did not have immigrant legislation until 1991. With no colonial relation to Italy, the Senegalese represent the vanguard of population movements expanding outside of the arch of former colonial powers.

Donald Martin Carter locates the Senegalese migration in the context of past African internal and international migration and of present crises in West African agriculture. He also shows how the Senegalese migration, constituting a "phenomenon" and catalyzing new immigration restrictions among European states, calls into question the European interstate system, the future of the nation-state, and the nature of its relationship with non-European states.

Throughout Europe, protectionist immigration policies are often crafted in chauvinist and racist tones in which "migrants" is a euphemism for blacks, Arabs, and Asians. States of Grace uses Senegalese migration to demonstrate that racial conceptions are crucial to understanding the classifications of non-national "outside" and internal "other." The book is a bracing encounter with the ever-increasing cultural and ethnic heterogeneity that is the new and pressing reality of European society.

Donald Martin Carter is visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

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Staying The Course
A Runner’s Toughest Race
Dick Beardsley
University of Minnesota Press, 2004
For a moment Dick Beardsley became the most famous runner in the world by losing a race. In the 1982 Boston Marathon, Beardsley, foiled by a motorcycle that cut him off, finished two seconds behind Alberto Salazar in one of the most memorable contests in marathon history. Staying the Course recounts that race and the difficult years that followed, including his recovery from a near-fatal farm accident, his subsequent addiction to painkillers, and a public arrest for forging prescriptions. His story of overcoming obstacles speaks to anyone who loves competition, who has survived catastrophe, or who has pursued a seemingly impossible goal.
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The Steger Homestead Kitchen
Simple Recipes for an Abundant Life
Will Steger
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

Personal and simple, earthy and warm—recipes and stories from the Steger Wilderness Center in Minnesota’s north woods
 

The Steger Homestead Kitchen is an inspiring and down-to-earth collection of meals and memories gathered at the Homestead, the home of the Arctic explorer and environmental activist Will Steger, located in the north woods near Ely, Minnesota. Founded in 1988, the Steger Wilderness Center was established to model viable carbon-neutral solutions, teach ecological stewardship, and address climate change. In her role as the Homestead’s chef, Will’s niece Rita Mae creates delicious and hearty meals that become a cornerstone experience for visitors from all over the world, nourishing them as they learn and share their visions for a healthy and abundant future. 

Now, with this new book, home chefs can make Rita Mae’s simple, hearty meals to share around their own homestead tables. Interwoven with dozens of mouth-watering recipes—for generous breakfasts (Almond Berry Griddlecakes), warming lunches (Northwoods Mushroom Wild Rice Soup), elegant dinners (Spatchcock Chicken with Blueberry Maple Glaze), desserts (Very Carrot Cake), and snacks (Steger Wilderness Bars)—are Will Steger’s exhilarating stories of epic adventures exploring the Earth’s most remote and endangered regions.

The Steger Homestead Kitchen opens up the Wilderness Center’s hospitality, its heart and hearth, providing the practical advice and inspiration to cook up a good life in harmony with nature.

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Step by Step
Everyday Walks in a French Urban Housing Project
Jean-Francois Augoyard
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

The street riots that swept through France in the fall of 2005 focused worldwide attention on the plight of the country’s immigrants and their living conditions in the suburbs many of them call home. These high-density neighborhoods were constructed according to the principles of functionalist urbanism that were ascendant in the 1960s. Then, as now, the disparities between the planners’ utopian visions and the experiences of the inhabitants raised concerns, generating a number of sociological studies of the “new towns.” One of the most sophisticated and significant of these critiques is Jean-François Augoyard’s Step by Step, which was originally published in France in 1979 and famously influenced Michel de Certeau’s analysis of everyday life. Its examination of social life in the rationally planned suburb remains as cogent and timely as ever.

Step by Step is based on in-depth interviews Augoyard conducted with the inhabitants of l’Arlequin, a new town on the outskirts of Grenoble. A resident of l’Arlequin himself, Augoyard sought to understand how his neighbors used its passages, streets, and parks. He begins with a detailed investigation of the inhabitants’ daily walks before going on to consider how the built environment is personalized through place-names and shared memories, the ways in which sensory impressions define the atmosphere of a place and how, through individual and collective imagination, residents transformed l’Arlequin from a concept into a lived space.

In closely scrutinizing everyday life in l’Arlequin, Step by Step draws a fascinating portrait of the richness of social life in the new towns and sheds light on the current living conditions of France’s immigrants.

Jean-François Augoyard is professor of philosophy and musicology and doctor of urban studies at the Center for Research on Sonorous Space and the Urban Environment at the School of Architecture of Grenoble.

David Ames Curtis is a translator, editor, writer, and citizen activist.

Françoise Choay is professor emeritus in the history and theory of architecture at the University of Paris VIII and Cornell University and the author of numerous books and essays.

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Stephen Crane - American Writers 76
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Jean Cazemajou
University of Minnesota Press, 1969

Stephen Crane - American Writers 76 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.

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Stirrings In The Jug
Black Politics In The Post-Segregation Era
Adolph Reed, Jr.
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

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Stone
An Ecology of the Inhuman
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 2015

Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined metaphor for the “really real”: blunt factuality, nature’s curt rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with fire from the sky, emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of the elements, tumble along riverbeds from Eden, partner with the masons who build worlds with them. Such motion suggests an ecological enmeshment and an almost creaturely mineral life.

Although geological time can leave us reeling, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that stone’s endurance is also an invitation to apprehend the world in other than human terms. Never truly inert, stone poses a profound challenge to modernity’s disenchantments. Its agency undermines the human desire to be separate from the environment, a bifurcation that renders nature “out there,” a mere resource for recreation, consumption, and exploitation.

Written with great verve and elegance, this pioneering work is notable not only for interweaving the medieval and the modern but also as a major contribution to ecotheory. Comprising chapters organized by concept —“Geophilia,” “Time,” “Force,” and “Soul”—Cohen seamlessly brings together a wide range of topics including stone’s potential to transport humans into nonanthropocentric scales of place and time, the “petrification” of certain cultures, the messages fossils bear, the architecture of Bordeaux and Montparnasse, Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste disposal, the ability of stone to communicate across millennia in structures like Stonehenge, and debates over whether stones reproduce and have souls.

Showing that what is often assumed to be the most lifeless of substances is, in its own time, restless and forever in motion, Stone fittingly concludes by taking us to Iceland⎯a land that, writes the author, “reminds us that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient.”

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Stories from Jonestown
Leigh Fondakowski
University of Minnesota Press, 2010

The saga of Jonestown didn’t end on the day in November 1978 when more than nine hundred Americans died in a mass murder-suicide in the Guyanese jungle. While only a handful of people present at the agricultural project survived that day in Jonestown, more than eighty members of Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, were elsewhere in Guyana on that day, and thousands more members of the movement still lived in California. Emmy-nominated writer Leigh Fondakowski, who is best known for her work on the play and HBO film The Laramie Project, spent three years traveling the United States to interview these survivors, many of whom have never talked publicly about the tragedy. Using more than two hundred hours of interview material, Fondakowski creates intimate portraits of these survivors as they tell their unforgettable stories.

Collectively this is a record of ordinary people, stigmatized as cultists, who after the Jonestown massacre were left to deal with their grief, reassemble their lives, and try to make sense of how a movement born in a gospel of racial and social justice could have gone so horrifically wrong—taking with it the lives of their sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters. As these survivors look back, we learn what led them to join the Peoples Temple movement, what life in the church was like, and how the trauma of Jonestown’s end still affects their lives decades later.

What emerges are portrayals both haunting and hopeful—of unimaginable sadness, guilt, and shame but also resilience and redemption. Weaving her own artistic journey of discovery throughout the book in a compelling historical context, Fondakowski delivers, with both empathy and clarity, one of the most gripping, moving, and humanizing accounts of Jonestown ever written.

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The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself
Racial Myths and Our American Narratives
David Mura
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

Uncovering the pernicious narratives white people create to justify white supremacy and sustain racist oppression

The police murders of two Black men, Philando Castile and George Floyd, frame this searing exploration of the historical and fictional narratives that white America tells itself to justify and maintain white supremacy. From the country’s founding through the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020, David Mura unmasks how white stories about race attempt to erase the brutality of the past and underpin systemic racism in the present.

Intertwining history, literature, ethics, and the deeply personal, Mura looks back to foundational narratives of white supremacy (Jefferson’s defense of slavery, Lincoln’s frequently minimized racism, and the establishment of Jim Crow) to show how white identity is based on shared belief in the pernicious myths, false histories, and racially segregated fictions that allow whites to deny their culpability in past atrocities and current inequities. White supremacy always insists white knowledge is superior to Black knowledge, Mura argues, and this belief dismisses the truths embodied in Black narratives.

Mura turns to literature, comparing the white savior portrayal of the film Amistad to the novelization of its script by the Black novelist Alexs Pate, which focuses on its African protagonists; depictions of slavery in Faulkner and Morrison; and race’s absence in the fiction of Jonathan Franzen and its inescapable presence in works by ZZ Packer, tracing the construction of Whiteness to willfully distorted portraits of race in America. In James Baldwin’s essays, Mura finds a response to this racial distortion and a way for Blacks and other BIPOC people to heal from the wounds of racism.

Taking readers beyond apology, contrition, or sadness, Mura attends to the persistent trauma racism has exacted and lays bare how deeply we need to change our racial narratives—what white people must do—to dissolve the myth of Whiteness and fully acknowledge the stories and experiences of Black Americans.

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Storm from Paradise
The Politics of Jewish Memory
Jonathan Boyarin
University of Minnesota Press, 1992

Storm from Paradise 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.

"Usefully complicating common sense understandings of history, catastrophe, loss, otherness, and possibility through reflections on contemporary Jewishness, Boyarin draws on Benjamins's famous image of the Angel of History blown into the future by a "storm from paradise" to constantly interrogate and recuperate the past, "without pretending for long that we can recoup its plentitude". The book's seven thoughtful essays are at times deliberately intangible but always worth reading. An important book for the rethinking of the relevance of Jewishness to anthropology and cultural studies." –Religious Studies Review

"An essay in the richest sense of that term, inspired by and modeled on Walter Benjamin's essays. Based on varied, diverse, and abundantly cross-disciplinary readings, it moves and builds, questions and interrogates, and ultimately convinces us that the Jewish experience with being the 'other' and, conversely and recently, with 'othering' is indeed relevant to theorists of contemporary culture." –Marianne Hirsch

Jonathan Boyarin is the author of Palestine and Jewish History, and co-editor, with Daniel Boyarin, of Jews and Other Differences and Powers of Diaspora.

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Story and Situation
Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction
Ross Chambers
University of Minnesota Press, 1984

Ross Chambers shifs the emphasis to precisely the play of authority and mastery by focusing on the narrative situation or the “point” of telling a story in given context.  He studies the relation between teller and listener in a set of French, English, and American short stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and detects in that relationship the key to the power of fiction.  In each of these stories, the author identifies the narrative situation by recourse to the metaphor of seduction, a phenomenon Chambers finds characteristic of literary production in the modern period.

“Story and Situation is a powerful work of criticism, the best work in short narrative I know, and will redirect critics’ attention to a form which has always engaged readers but has recently been neglected by literary theorists. . . . It is clear, assured, and intelligently paced.”-Jonathan Culler, Cornell University

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The Straight Line
How the Fringe Science of Ex-Gay Therapy Reoriented Sexuality
Tom Waidzunas
University of Minnesota Press, 2015

To be taken seriously, therapies that claim to “cure” homosexuality wrap themselves in lab coats. Even though the fit is bad, and such therapies and their theorists now inhabit the scientific fringe, the science of sexuality has made some adjustments, too, Tom Waidzunas tells us in this provocative work.

Intervening in the politics of sexuality and science, The Straight Line argues that scientific definitions of sexual orientation do not merely reflect the results of investigations into human nature, but rather emerge through a process of social negotiation between opposing groups. The demedicalization of homosexuality and the discrediting of reparative therapies, ex-gay ministries, and reorientation research have, Waidzunas contends, required scientists to enforce key boundaries around scientific expertise and research methods. Drawing on extensive participant observation at conferences for ex-gays, reorientation therapists, mainstream psychologists, and survivors of ex-gay therapy, as well as interviews with experts and activists, The Straight Line traces reorientation debates in the United States from the 1950s to the present, following homosexuality therapies from the mainstream to the margins. As the ex-gay movement has become increasingly transnational in recent years, Waidzunas turns to Uganda, where ideas about the scientific nature of homosexuality influenced the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014.

While most studies treat the ex-gay movement as a religious phenomenon, this book looks at how the movement, in its attempts to establish legitimacy, has engaged with scientific institutions, shaping virulent anti-gay public policy.

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The Stranger in Medieval Society
Frank. R. P. Akehurst and Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

The Stranger in Medieval Society 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.

The Stranger in Medieval Society examines the presence of outsiders in medieval Europe. Whether welcome or unwelcome, voluntary or involuntary, strangers appear in every society; they leave their own communities, venture into new environments, confront differences, and often spark changes. The first collection in medieval studies to concentrate on the notion of the stranger, these essays show how outsiders influenced the culture of Europe in the Middle Ages.

Among the topics explored are Edward III and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as historical and literary instances of chivalric skill and courage; political conflict in the late French epic Renaut de Montauban; and a group of people who were doubly strangers-some thirty thousand Jews, who after being expelled from France in 1306 returned under an experimental agreement a few years later.

Contributors: William Calin, U of Florida; Susan Crane, Rutgers; Maria Dobozy, U of Utah; Edward R. Haymes, Cleveland State U; William Chester Jordan, Princeton U; Derek Pearsall, Harvard U; William D. Phillips Jr., U of Minnesota; Kathryn L. Reyerson, U of Minnesota; and Janet L. Solberg, Kalamazoo College.

F. R. P. Akehurst is professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota. Stephanie Cain Van D'Elden is director of graduate studies for the program in Germanic philology at the University of Minnesota.

This is volume 12 in the Medieval Cultures Series

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Strategic Alliances
Coalition Building and Social Movements
Nella Van Dyke
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Social researchers in the past have paid surprisingly little theoretical or empirical attention to movement alliances. Strategic Alliances provides a pioneering set of in-depth analyses of the circumstances leading to these organizational alliances. Contributors investigate coalition dynamics among social movements, including antiwar, environmental, and labor movements, as well as ethnic organizations and women's groups. While many of the essays examine coalition formation in the United States, others consider coalitions in Britain, the former East Germany, East Asia, and Latin America.

Contributors: Paul Almeida, Texas A&M U; Elizabeth Borland, College of New Jersey; Daniel B. Cornfield, Vanderbilt U; Catherine Corrigall-Brown, U of British Columbia; Mario Diani, U of Trento; Katja M. Guenther, UC Riverside; Larry Isaac, Vanderbilt U; Isobel Lindsay, Biggar, Scotland; David S. Meyer, UC Irvine; Brian Obach, SUNY New Paltz; Dina G. Okamoto, UC Davis; Christine Petit, UC Riverside; Derrick Purdue, U of the West of England; Ellen Reese, UC Riverside; Benita Roth, SUNY Binghamton; Suzanne Staggenborg, U of Pittsburgh; Dawn Wiest, U of Memphis.
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Strategies for Social Change
Gregory M. Maney
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

The theory and practice of social movements come together in strategy—whether, why, and how people can realize their visions of another world by acting together. Strategies for Social Change offers a concise definition of strategy and a framework for differentiating between strategies. Specific chapters address microlevel decision-making processes and creativity, coalition building in Northern Ireland, nonviolent strategies for challenging repressive regimes, identity politics, GLBT rights, the Christian right in Canada and the United States, land struggles in Brazil and India, movement-media publicity, and corporate social movement organizations.

Contributors: Jessica Ayo Alabi, Orange Coast College; Kenneth T. Andrews, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Anna-Liisa Aunio, U of Montreal; Linda Blozie; Tina Fetner, McMaster U; James M. Jasper, CUNY; Karen Jeffreys; David S. Meyer, U of California, Irvine; Sharon Erickson Nepstad, U of New Mexico; Francesca Polletta, U of California, Irvine; Belinda Robnett, U of California, Irvine; Charlotte Ryan, U of Massachusetts–Lowell; Carrie Sanders, Wilfrid Laurier U; Kurt Schock, Rutgers U; Jackie Smith, U of Pittsburgh; Suzanne Staggenborg, U of Pittsburgh; Stellan Vinthagen, U West, Sweden; Nancy Whittier, Smith College.

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Strategies of Deconstruction
Derrida and the Myth of the Voice
J. Claude Evans
University of Minnesota Press, 1991

Strategies of Deconstruction 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.

In the past two decades, the "movement" of deconstruction has bad tremendous impact on a number of academic, disciplines in the United States. However, its force has been rather limited in the field of philosophy, despite the fact that in Europe the practice of deconstruction emerged in the work of philosophers. Although the reasons for this can be debated, two of the more obvious explanations are the mainstream Anglo-American philosophers rarely studied the German and French philosophical traditions in great detail, and deconstruction's focus on discourse and interpretation has made it more attractive to the literary and humanistic disciplines.

With this context, Strategies of Deconstruction focuses on the early work of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher who introduced deconstruction in Speech and Phenomena,his study of Edmund Husserl, and Of Grammatology, and whose philosophical reputation stems in no small part from his work on Husserl. In examining the philosophical import of Derrida's theories of reading, text, and language, specifically as they related to Speech and Phenomena,J. Claude Evans makes careful reference to Husserl's own texts. His analysis indicates that there are many systematic irregularities in Derrida's study and that without those irregularities Derrida's conclusions cannot be substantiated.

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The Stray Bullet
William S. Burroughs in Mexico
Jorge García-Robles
University of Minnesota Press, 2013


William S. Burroughs arrived in Mexico City in 1949, having slipped out of New Orleans while awaiting trial on drug and weapons charges that would almost certainly have resulted in a lengthy prison sentence. Still uncertain about being a writer, he had left behind a series of failed business ventures—including a scheme to grow marijuana in Texas and sell it in New York—and an already long history of drug use and arrests. He would remain in Mexico for three years, a period that culminated in the defining incident of his life: Burroughs shot his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, while playing William Tell with a loaded pistol. (He would be tried and convicted of murder in absentia after fleeing Mexico.)

First published in 1995 in Mexico, where it received the Malcolm Lowry literary essay award, The Stray Bullet is an imaginative and riveting account of Burroughs’s formative experiences in Mexico, his fascination with Mexico City’s demimonde, his acquaintances and friendships there, and his contradictory attitudes toward the country and its culture. Mexico, Jorge García-Robles makes clear, was the place in which Burroughs embarked on his “fatal vocation as a writer.”

Through meticulous research and interviews with those who knew Burroughs and his circle in Mexico City, García-Robles brilliantly portrays a time in Burroughs’s life that has been overshadowed by the tragedy of Joan Vollmer’s death. He re-creates the bohemian Roma neighborhood where Burroughs resided with Joan and their children, the streets of postwar Mexico City that Burroughs explored, and such infamous figures as Lola la Chata, queen of the city’s drug trade. This compelling book also offers a contribution by Burroughs himself—an evocative sketch of his shady Mexican attorney, Bernabé Jurado.

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Street Scenes
Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924
Esther Romeyn
University of Minnesota Press, 2008
The turn of the twentieth century in New York City was characterized by radical transformation as the advent of consumer capitalism confronted established social hierarchies, culture, and conceptions of selfhood. The popular stage existed in a symbiotic relationship with the city and uniquely captured the contested terms of immigrant identity of the time.

Street Scenes focuses on the intersection of modern city life and stage performance. From street life and slumming to vaudeville and early cinema, to Yiddish theater and blackface comedy, Esther Romeyn discloses racial comedy, passing, and masquerade as gestures of cultural translation. In these performances she detects an obsession with the idea of the city as theater and the self as actor, which was fueled by the challenges that consumer capitalism presented to notions of an “authentic” self.

It was exactly this idea of “authentic” immigrant selfhood that was at stake in many performances on the popular stage, and Romeyn ultimately demonstrates how these diverse and potent immigrant works influenced the emergence of a modern metropolitan culture.
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Strike!
Twenty Days in 1970 When Minneapolis Teachers Broke the Law
William D. Green
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
The complex and dramatic history of an illegal teachers’ strike that forever altered labor relations and Minnesota politics
 

When viewed from our turbulent times, the Minneapolis of fifty years ago might seem serene, but Minneapolis schoolteachers of the day remember it quite differently. It was, author William D. Green said of their recollections, as if they’d been through war. This book recreates twenty days in April 1970 when a then-illegal strike by Minneapolis’s public school teachers marked a singular moment of cultural upheaval—and forever changed the city’s politics, labor law, educational climate, and the right to collective bargaining.

Since the inception of public education in Minnesota, teachers were expected to pursue their vocation out of civic spirit, with low wages, no benefits, and no job security. Strike! describes the history and circumstances leading to the teachers’ extraordinary action, which pitted the progressive and conservative teachers’ unions against each other—and both against the all-powerful school district, a hostile governor and state legislature, and a draconian Minnesota law. Capturing the intense emotions and heated rivalries of the strike, Green profiles the many actors involved, the personal and professional stakes, and the issues of politics, law, and the business of education. 

Informed by interviews, firsthand accounts, news reports, and written records, Strike! brings to life a pivotal moment not just for Minneapolis’s teachers but for the city itself, whose government, school system, and culture would, in a complex but inexorable way, change course for good.

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The Structural Allegory
Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought
John Fekete, EditorIntroduction by John Fekete
University of Minnesota Press, 1984

The Structural Allegory 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.

The radical questions raised by Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, and others have had an enormous impact on Anglo-American literary and cultural studies over the past twenty years. John Fekete argues that we can see this strategic development of French thought in terms of what he calls "the structural allegory." Structuralism proper has given way to the currently dominant model of post-structuralism, yet we remain uncertain of the practical orientations favored by thinkers associated with both phases of the movement.

With the aim of uncovering the legacy of the structural tradition, the essays in this volume survey key French thinkers, including some not well known in the Anglo-American context &#8212 Baudrillard and Castoriadis. The essays are reconstructive, not deconstructive, in character, scholarly in method, and ecumenical in spirit. While the structural allegory emerges from this critical analysis as an inescapable intellectual paradigm (analogous to the transformations in quantum physics and modern biology), the authors argue that it merits admiration and reservation in equal measure.

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Struggling Giants
City-Region Governance in London, New York, Paris, and Tokyo
Paul Kantor
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Throughout the past thirty years a small number of city-regions have achieved unprecedented global status in the world economy while undergoing radical changes. Struggling Giants examines the transformation of four of the most significant metropolises: London, New York, Paris, and Tokyo. This volume analyzes the thorniest issues these sprawling city-regions have faced, including ameliorating social problems through public policies, the effect of globalization on local governance, and the relationships between local, regional, and national institutions.

Three critical themes frame Struggling Giants. The first is the continuing struggle for governability in the midst of regional governmental fragmentation. The second theme is how the city-regions fight to manage powerful political biases. Policy-making is often selective, the authors find, and governments are more responsive to economic exigencies than to social or environmental needs. Finally, these city-regions are shown to be strong economic leaders in part because they are able to change—although the authors reveal that pragmatism and piecemeal policy solutions can still prevail.

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Student Activism in Asia
Between Protest and Powerlessness
Meredith L. Weiss
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Since World War II, students in East and Southeast Asia have led protest movements that toppled authoritarian regimes in countries such as Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand. Elsewhere in the region, student protests have shaken regimes until they were brutally suppressed—most famously in China’s Tiananmen Square and in Burma. But despite their significance, these movements have received only a fraction of the notice that has been given to American and European student protests of the 1960s and 1970s. The first book in decades to redress this neglect, Student Activism in Asia tells the story of student protest movements across Asia.

Taking an interdisciplinary, comparative approach, the contributors examine ten countries, focusing on those where student protests have been particularly fierce and consequential: China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. They explore similarities and differences among student movements in these countries, paying special attention to the influence of four factors: higher education systems, students’ collective identities, students’ relationships with ruling regimes, and transnational flows of activist ideas and inspirations.

The authors include leading specialists on student activism in each of the countries investigated. Together, these experts provide a rich picture of an important tradition of political protest that has ebbed and flowed but has left indelible marks on Asia’s sociopolitical landscape.

Contributors: Patricio N. Abinales, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Prajak Kongkirati, Thammasat U, Thailand; Win Min, Vahu Development Institute; Stephan Ortmann, City U of Hong Kong; Mi Park, Dalhousie U, Canada; Patricia G. Steinhoff, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Mark R. Thompson, City U of Hong Kong; Teresa Wright, California State U, Long Beach.

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Studies in American Culture
Dominant Ideas and Images
Joseph J. Kwiat and Mary C. Turpie, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1960

Studies in American Culture 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 last decade has seen a revolutionary interest at colleges and universities both in this country and abroad in the field known variously as American Studies, American Civilization, or American Culture. Now the time is ripe for a critical look at the field, to assess its intellectual and cultural problems, and to anticipate its future. This is what the contributors to this volume do, through thoughtful discussions and interesting examples of studies in American ideas and images.

There are sixteen contributors, members of the faculties of a number of colleges and universities, and representatives of various specialties such as literary history and criticism; social, intellectual, and aesthetic history; political, economic, and social theory.

In the introductory chapter, Henry Nash Smith discusses the problems of method which confront scholars in American Studies. The chapters which follow contain outstanding examples of scholarship in American Studies. The authors are Reuel Denney, John W. Ward, Mulford Q. Sibley, David R. Weimer, William Van O'Connor, Bernard Bowron, Leo Marx, Arnold Rose, Allen Tate, David W. Noble, J. C. Levenson, Joseph J. Kwiat, Theodore C. Blegen, and Charles H. Foster. In the final chapter, Robert E. Spiller looks at the past, present, and future of American Studies.

All the contributors as well as the editors are now or have been associated with the American Studies program at the University of Minnesota and with the late Tremaine McDowell, chairman of the program for thirteen years and a pioneer in the development of the discipline.

The book will be useful to anyone interested in American thought, culture, and society, to those conducting American Studies programs, and to their students.

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Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660-1800
Essays in Honor of Samuel Holt Monk
Howard Anderson and John S. Shea, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1967

Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660–1800 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.

In this volume nineteen contributors, in as many essays, discuss various aspects of critical and aesthetic development in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, from the time of Dryden to Wordsworth. This was a period in which traditional literary criticism progressed in important new directions and which saw the rise of aesthetic theory. The book is published in honor of Samuel Holt Monk, professor of English at the University of Minnesota, and distinguished American scholar in the field of eighteenth century English literature, literary criticism, and aesthetics.

The essays, all of which were written for this volume, analyze the literary theories and assumptions of some of the most important artists and critics of the time, as well as the aesthetic theories which influenced painting and literature. During the period under discussion, the progress of social and philosophical thought stimulated an intensive examination of the nature and function of art. Although neoclassical ideals dominated Restoration criticism and continued to influence Pope and later critics like Johnson and Reynolds, other tendencies were gaining ground, and throughout the eighteenth century the effort to reconcile a growing interest in "the pleasing emotions" with the tenets of classicism created criticism and aesthetic theory of extraordinary complexity. These essays illuminate that complexity without oversimplifying it.

The book is illustrated with reproductions of works of art of the period. In addition to the essays, there is a bibliography of Professor Monk's writings.

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Studies in Metaphysics
Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1979

Studies in Metaphysics was first published in 1979. 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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Studies in the Eighteenth Century Background of Hume’s Empiricism
Mary Shaw Kuypers
University of Minnesota Press, 1930

Studies in the Eighteenth Century Background of Hume's Empiricism was first published in 1930. 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 scholarly review of the influence of contemporary science and thought on the various phases of Hume's philosophy. The chapter headings are as follows: I. Introduction. II. Interpretations of Newtonian Science in the Eighteenth Century. III. Reverberations of the New Science in Philosophy. IV. Hume's Empiricism in Relation to Contemporary Science and Philosophy. V. Empiricism in Morals. VI. Empiricism in Politics. VII. Hume's Historical Writing. Bibliography.

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Studious Drift
Movements and Protocols for a Postdigital Education
Peter Hyland
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

What kind of university is possible when digital tools are not taken for granted, but hacked for a more experimental future?

The global pandemic has underscored contemporary reliance on digital environments. This is particularly true among schools and universities, which, in response, shifted much of their instruction online. Because the rise of e-learning logics, ed-tech industries, and enterprise learning-management systems all threaten to further commodify and instrumentalize higher education, these technologies and platforms have to be creatively and critically struggled over. 

Studious Drift intervenes in this struggle by reviving the relationship between studying and the generative space of the studio in service of advancing educational experimentation for a world where digital tools have become a permanent part of education. Drawing on Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics, the “science of imaginary solutions,” this book reveals how the studio is a space-time machine capable of traveling beyond the limits of conventional online learning to redefine education as interdisciplinary, experimental, public study. 

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Stupendous, Miserable City
Pasolini’s Rome
John David Rhodes
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

John David Rhodes places the city of Rome at the center of this original and in-depth examination of the work of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini—but it’s not the classical Rome you imagine. Stupendous, Miserable City situates Pasolini within the history of twentieth-century Roman urban development. The book focuses first on the Fascist period, when populations were moved out of the urban center and into public housing on the periphery of the city, called the borgate, and then turns to the progressive social housing experiments of the 1950s. These environments were the settings of most of Pasolini’s films of the early to mid-1960s.

Discussing films such as Accattone, Mamma Roma, and The Hawks and the Sparrows, Rhodes shows how Pasolini used the borgate to critique Roman urban planning and neorealism and to draw attention to the contemptuous treatment of Rome’s poor. To Pasolini, the borgate, rich in human incident, linguistic difference, and squalor, “were life”—and now his passion can be appreciated fully for the first time.

Carefully tracing Pasolini’s surprising engagement with this part of Rome and looking beyond his films to explore the interrelatedness of all of Pasolini’s artistic output in the 1950s and 1960s—including his poetry, fiction, and journalism—Rhodes opens up completely new ways of understanding Pasolini’s work and proves how connected Pasolini was to the political and social upheavals in Italy at the time.

John David Rhodes is lecturer in literature and visual culture at the University of Sussex.

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Stuttering and What you can do About it
Wendell Johnson
University of Minnesota Press, 1961
This is a book for parents who are worried about their children’s stuttering, for teachers, doctors, friends, and relatives of those who stutter, and for stutterers themselves. It offers help, encouragement, and guidance in dealing with the problem of stuttering, which troubles more than a million persons in the United States alone.Dr. Johnson, an outstanding authority on the subject, writes in simple language so that anyone can readily understand and follow his suggestions. What he says in this book is based on many years of laboratory research and clinical observation, and his own experience as a stutterer. He tells of his early years of struggle with the handicap and his decision to devote his life to getting at the basic causes of stuttering and finding ways to prevent or alleviate it. He describes his research experiences, likening them to a detective story centered on a search for the causes of stuttering as the culprit in the case. In this account he quotes from interviews which he conducted with parents in an effort to pinpoint the exact conditions or situations in which stuttering was believed to have started. He explains how the problem develops and how it becomes a frustrating “sad-go-round.” Finally, he tells what parents and others can do for children who are threatened with the handicap of stuttering and what adult stutterers can do to help themselves.
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Stuttering in Children and Adults
Thirty Years of Research at the University of Iowa
Wendell Johnson, Editor
University of Minnesota Press, 1955

Stuttering in Children and Adults 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.

One of the largest groups of handicapped people in the world today is made up of the estimated fifteen million persons who stutter. Their predicament has been one of man's most baffling problems ever since it was first recorded by the ancients, but not until the present century has the mystery of stuttering showed any signs of lifting.

The studies collected in this volume represent a substantial step toward the solving of the mystery. The University of Iowa, a pioneer in research on the causes and treatment of stuttering, has carried on its work for many years. This book presents all previously unpublished papers and dissertations (a total of forty-three) that have resulted from this research program.

Much of the work centers on the onset of stuttering in children and underlies the theory that stuttering begins with the hearer rather than the speaker. Interrelationships between personality and stuttering have been investigated, a search has been made for a possible physical basis for stuttering, conditions affecting severity of stuttering have been studied, and research on therapy has been attempted.

This is an important book for psychologists, educators, social workers, physicians, parents, and others concerned with speech disorders. For those who devote their full effort to the problems discussed—the specialists in speech pathology and therapy—the book is essential.

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Styrbiorn the Strong
E. R. Eddison
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

E. R. Eddison’s classic saga novel now in paperback—includes for the first time Eddison’s remarkable letter of introduction and his unabridged closing note

Styrbiorn the Strong tells the grand tale of Styrbiorn Olafsson, heir to the Swedish throne and known both for his impressive size and strength and his unruly, quarrelsome nature. Denied his birthright and exiled from Sweden, Styrbiorn becomes the leader of the Jomsvikings and sets out to reclaim the Swedish throne in the epic Battle of Fýrisvellir. A rediscovered classic, Styrbiorn the Strong is a tale reminiscent of the Old Norse sagas, a historical novel from one of the twentieth century’s most influential masters of fantasy.

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Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995
Ranajit Guha
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

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The Subaltern Ulysses
Enda Duffy
University of Minnesota Press, 1994

The Subaltern Ulysses 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.

How might an IRA bomb and James Joyce's Ulysses have anything in common? Could this masterpiece of modernism, written at the violent moment of Ireland's national emergence, actually be the first postcolonial novel? Exploring the relation of Ulysses to the colony in which it is set, and to the nation being born as the book was written, Enda Duffy uncovers a postcolonial modernism and in so doing traces another unsuspected strain within the one-time critical monolith. In the years between 1914 and 1921, as Joyce was composing his text, Ireland became the first colony of the British Empire to gain its independence in this century after a violent anticolonial war. Duffy juxtaposes Ulysses with documents and photographs from the archives of both empire and insurgency, as well as with recent postcolonial literary texts, to analyze the political unconscious of subversive strategies, twists on class and gender, that render patriarchal colonialist culture unfamiliar.

Ulysses, Duffy argues, is actually a guerrilla text, and here he shows how Joyce's novel pinpoints colonial regimes of surveillance, mocks imperial stereotypes of the "native," exposes nationalism and other chauvinistic ideologies of "imagined community" as throwbacks to the colonial ethos, and proposes versions of a postcolonial subject. A significant intervention in the massive "Joyce industry" founded on the rhetoric and aesthetics of high modernism, Duffy's insights show us not only Ulysses, but also the origins of postcolonial textuality, in a startling new way.

Enda Duffy is assistant professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

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The Subject of Coexistence
Otherness in International Relations
Louiza Odysseos
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

In this pioneering book, Louiza Odysseos argues that debates about ethnic conflict, human rights, and the viability of multicultural communities all revolve around the question of coexistence. Yet, issues of coexistence have not been adequately addressed by international relations. Instead of being regarded as a question, “coexistence” is a term whose meaning is considered self-evident.

The Subject of Coexistence traces the institutional neglect of coexistence to the ontological commitments of international relations as a modern social science predicated on conceptions of modern subjectivity. This reliance leads to the assumption that coexistence means little more than the social and political copresence of individuals, a premise that occludes the roles of otherness in the constitution of the self. Countering this reliance necessitates the examination of how existence itself is coexistential from the start.

Odysseos opens up the possibility of a coexistential ontology, drawing on Martin Heidegger and his interlocutors, in which selfhood can be rethought beyond subjectivism, reinstating coexistence as a question for global politics—away from the restrictive discursive parameters of the modern subject.

Louiza Odysseos is senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Sussex.

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Subject Of Documentary
Michael Renov
University of Minnesota Press, 2004
The documentary, a genre as old as cinema itself, has traditionally aspired to objectivity. Whether making ethnographic, propagandistic, or educational films, documentarians have pointed the camera outward, drawing as little attention to themselves as possible. In recent decades, however, a new kind of documentary has emerged in which the filmmaker has become the subject of the work. Whether chronicling family history, sexual identity, or a personal or social world, this new generation of nonfiction filmmakers has defiantly embraced autobiography. In The Subject of Documentary, Michael Renov focuses on how documentary filmmaking has become an important means for both examining and constructing selfhood. By looking at key figures in documentary filmmaking as well as noncanonical video art and avant-garde artists, Renov broadens the definition of what counts as documentary, and explores the intersection of the personal and political, considering how memory can create a way into asking troubling questions about identity, oppression, and resiliency. Offering historical context for the explosion of personal nonfiction filmmaking in the 1980s and 1990s, Renov analyzes films in which the subjectivity of the filmmaker is expressly defined in relation to political struggle or historical trauma, from Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool to Jonas Mekas's Lost, Lost, Lost. And, looking beyond the traditional documentary, Renov contemplates such nontraditional modes of autobiographical practice as the essay film, the video confession, and the personal Web page.Unique in its attention to diverse expressions of personal nonfiction filmmaking, The Subject of Documentary forges a new understanding of the heightened role and function of subjectivity in contemporary documentary practice.Michael Renov is professor of critical studies at the USC School of Cinema-Television. He is the editor of Theorizing Documentary and the coeditor of Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (Minnesota, 1996) and Collecting Visible Evidence (Minnesota, 1999).
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Subject Of Philosophy
Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe
University of Minnesota Press, 1993

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Subprime Health
Debt and Race in U.S. Medicine
Nadine Ehlers
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

From race-based pharmaceutical prescriptions and marketing, to race-targeted medical “hot spotting” and the Affordable Care Act, to stem-cell trial recruitment discourse, Subprime Health is a timely examination of race-based medicine as it intersects with the concept of debt. 

The contributors to this volume propose that race-based medicine is inextricable from debt in two key senses. They first demonstrate how the financial costs related to race-based medicine disproportionately burden minorities, as well as how monetary debt and race are conditioned by broader relations of power. Second, the contributors investigate how race-based medicine is related to the concept of indebtedness and is often positioned as a way to pay back the debt that the medical establishment—and society at large—owes for the past and present neglect and abuses of many communities of color. By approaching the subject of race-based medicine from an interdisciplinary perspective—critical race studies, science and technology studies, public health, sociology, geography, and law—this volume moves the discussion beyond narrow and familiar debates over racial genomics and suggests fruitful new directions for future research. 

Contributors: Ruha Benjamin, Princeton U; Catherine Bliss, U of California, San Francisco; Khiara M. Bridges, Boston U; Shiloh Krupar, Georgetown U; Jenna M. Loyd, U of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech.

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Subsurface
Karen Pinkus
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A bold new consideration of climate change between narratives of the Earth’s layers and policy of the present

 

Long seen as a realm of mystery and possibility, the subsurface beneath our feet has taken on all-too-real import in the era of climate change. Can reading narratives of the past that take imaginative leaps under the surface better attune us to our present knowledge of a warming planet?

In Subsurface, Karen Pinkus looks below the surface of texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Sand, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Jules Verne to find the buried origins of capitalist fantasies in which humans take what they want from the earth. Putting such texts into conversation with narrative theory, critical theory, geology, and climate policy, she shows that the subsurface has been, in our past, a place of myth and stories of male voyages down to gain knowledge—but it is also now the realm of fossil fuels. How do these two modes intertwine?

A highly original take on evocative terms such as extraction, burial, fossils, deep time, and speculative futurity, Subsurface questions the certainty of comfortable narrative arcs. It asks us to read literature with and against the figure of the geological column, with and against fossil fuels and the emissions warming our planet. As we see our former selves move into the distance, what new modes of imagination might we summon?

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Sumerian Economic Texts from the Third Ur Dynasty
Tom B. Jones, , , and
University of Minnesota Press, 1961

Sumerian Economic Texts from the Third Ur Dynasty 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 a study and catalogue of some 350 hitherto unpublished Sumerian cuneiform documents, nearly all economic in nature. The authors describe the transliterate each document and present viewpoints regarding certain important classes of the texts. The findings of the study may lead to renewed interest in the third Ur Dynasty, which scholars have long regarded as relatively unimportant because its history is the swan song of Sumerian autonomy and culture.

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Superhumanity
Design of the Self
Nick Axel
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

A wide-ranging and challenging exploration of design and how it engages with the self

The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects but rather extends from carefully crafted individual styles and online identities to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes.

Superhumanity seeks to explore and challenge our understanding of “design” by engaging with and departing from the concept of the “self.” This volume brings together more than fifty essays by leading scientists, artists, architects, designers, philosophers, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, originally disseminated online via e-flux Architecture between September 2016 and February 2017 on the invitation of the Third Istanbul Design Biennial. Probing the idea that we are and always have been continuously reshaped by the artifacts we shape, this book asks: Who designed the lives we live today? What are the forms of life we inhabit, and what new forms are currently being designed? Where are the sites, and what are the techniques, to design others?

This vital and far-reaching collection of essays and images seeks to explore and reflect on the ways in which both the concept and practice of design are operative well beyond tangible objects, expanding into the depths of self and forms of life.

Contributors: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Lucia Allais, Shumon Basar, Ruha Benjamin, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Daniel Birnbaum, Ina Blom, Benjamin H. Bratton, Giuliana Bruno, Tony Chakar, Mark Cousins, Simon Denny, Keller Easterling, Hu Fang, Rubén Gallo, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Rupali Gupte, Andrew Herscher, Tom Holert, Brooke Holmes, Francesca Hughes, Andrés Jaque, Lydia Kallipoliti, Thomas Keenan, Sylvia Lavin, Yongwoo Lee, Lesley Lokko, MAP Office, Chus Martínez, Ingo Niermann, Ahmet Ögüt, Trevor Paglen, Spyros Papapetros, Raqs Media Collective, Juliane Rebentisch, Sophia Roosth, Felicity D. Scott, Jack Self, Prasad Shetty, Hito Steyerl, Kali Stull, Pelin Tan, Alexander Tarakhovsky, Paulo Tavares, Stephan Trüby, Etienne Turpin, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Eyal Weizman, Mabel O. Wilson, Brian Kuan Wood, Liam Young, and Arseny Zhilyaev.

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Surface Encounters
Thinking with Animals and Art
Ron Broglio
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

What it is like to be an animal? Ron Broglio wants to know from the inside, from underneath the fur and feathers. In examining this question, he bypasses the perspectives of biology or natural history to explore how one can construct an animal phenomenology, to think and feel as an animal other—or any other.

Until now phenomenology has grappled with how humans are embedded in their world. According to philosophical tradition, animals do not practice the self-reflexive thought that provides humans with depth of being. Without human interiority, philosophers have believed, animals live on the surface of things. But, Broglio argues, the surface can be a site of productive engagement with the world of animals, and as such he turns to humans who work with surfaces: contemporary artists.

Taking on the negative claim of animals living only on the surface and turning the premise into a positive set of possibilities for human–animal engagement, Broglio considers artists—including Damien Hirst, Carolee Schneemann, Olly and Suzi, and Marcus Coates—who take seriously the world of the animal on its own terms. In doing so, these artists develop languages of interspecies expression that both challenge philosophy and fashion new concepts for animal studies.

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Survival Schools
The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities
Julie L. Davis
University of Minnesota Press, 2013


In the late 1960s, Indian families in Minneapolis and St. Paul were under siege. Clyde Bellecourt remembers, “We were losing our children during this time; juvenile courts were sweeping our children up, and they were fostering them out, and sometimes whole families were being broken up.” In 1972, motivated by prejudice in the child welfare system and hostility in the public schools, American Indian Movement (AIM) organizers and local Native parents came together to start their own community school. For Pat Bellanger, it was about cultural survival. Though established in a moment of crisis, the school fulfilled a goal that she had worked toward for years: to create an educational system that would enable Native children “never to forget who they were.”


While AIM is best known for its national protests and political demands, the survival schools foreground the movement’s local and regional engagement with issues of language, culture, spirituality, and identity. In telling of the evolution and impact of the Heart of the Earth school in Minneapolis and the Red School House in St. Paul, Julie L. Davis explains how the survival schools emerged out of AIM’s local activism in education, child welfare, and juvenile justice and its efforts to achieve self-determination over urban Indian institutions. The schools provided informal, supportive, culturally relevant learning environments for students who had struggled in the public schools. Survival school classes, for example, were often conducted with students and instructors seated together in a circle, which signified the concept of mutual human respect. Davis reveals how the survival schools contributed to the global movement for Indigenous decolonization as they helped Indian youth and their families to reclaim their cultural identities and build a distinctive Native community.


The story of these schools, unfolding here through the voices of activists, teachers, parents, and students, is also an in-depth history of AIM’s founding and early community organizing in the Twin Cities—and evidence of its long-term effect on Indian people’s lives.


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Suspect Communities
Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror
Nicole Nguyen
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

The first major qualitative study of “countering violent extremism” in key U.S. cities
 

Suspect Communities is a powerful reassessment of the U.S. government’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) program that has arisen in major cities across the United States since 2011. Drawing on an interpretive qualitative study, it examines how the concept behind CVEaimed at combating homegrown terrorism by engaging Muslim community members, teachers, and religious leaders in monitoring and reporting on young peoplehas been operationalized through the everyday work of CVE actors, from high-level national security workers to local community members, with significant penalties for the communities themselves.

Nicole Nguyen argues that studying CVE provides insight into how the drive to bring liberal reforms to contemporary security regimes through “community-driven” and “ideologically ecumenical” programming has in fact further institutionalized anti-Muslim racism in the United States. She forcefully contends that the U.S. security state has designed CVE to legitimize and shore up support for the very institutions that historically have criminalized, demonized, and dehumanized communities of color, while appearing to learn from and attenuate past practices of coercive policing, racial profiling, and political exclusion. 

By undertaking this analysis, Suspect Communities offers a vital window into the inner workings of the U.S. security state and the devastating impact of CVE on local communities. 

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Suspended Apocalypse
White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition
Dylan Rodríguez
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

Suspended Apocalypse is a rich and provocative meditation on the emergence of the Filipino American as a subject of history. Culling from historical, popular, and ethnographic archives, Dylan Rodríguez provides a sophisticated analysis of the Filipino presence in the American imaginary. Radically critiquing current conceptions of Filipino American identity, community, and history, he puts forth a genealogy of Filipino genocide, rooted in the early twentieth-century military, political, and cultural subjugation of the Philippines by the United States.

Suspended Apocalypse critically addresses what Rodríguez calls "Filipino American communion," interrogating redemptive and romantic notions of Filipino migration and settlement in the United States in relation to larger histories of race, colonial conquest, and white supremacy. Contemporary popular and scholarly discussions of the Filipino American are, he asserts, inseparable from their origins in the violent racist regimes of the United States and its historical successor, liberal multiculturalism.

Rodríguez deftly contrasts the colonization of the Philippines with present-day disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and Mount Pinatubo to show how the global subjection of Philippine, black, and indigenous peoples create a linked history of genocide. But in these juxtapositions, Rodríguez finds moments and spaces of radical opportunity. Engaging the violence and disruption of the Filipino condition sets the stage, he argues, for the possibility of a transformation of the political lens through which contemporary empire might be analyzed, understood, and perhaps even overcome.

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Swamplife
People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades
Laura A. Ogden
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Little in North America is wilder than the Florida Everglades—a landscape of frightening reptiles, exotic plants in profusion, swarms of mosquitoes, and unforgiving heat. And yet, even from the early days of taming the wilderness with clearing and drainage, the Everglades has been considered fragile, unique, and in need of restorative interventions. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork with hunters in the Everglades, Laura A. Ogden explores the lives and labors of people, animals, and plants in this most delicate and tenacious ecosystem.

Today, the many visions of the Everglades—protectionist, ecological, commercial, historical—have become a tangled web of contradictory practices and politics for conservation and for development. Yet within this entanglement, the place of people remains highly ambivalent. It is the role of people in the Everglades that interests Ogden, as she seeks to reclaim the landscape’s long history as a place of human activity and, in doing so, discover what it means to be human through changing relations with other animals and plant life.

Ogden tells this story through the lives of poor rural whites, gladesmen, epitomized in tales of the Everglades’ most famous outlaws, the Ashley Gang. With such legends and lore on one side, and outsized efforts at drainage and development on the other, Swamplife strikes a rare balance, offering a unique insight into the hidden life of the Everglades—and into how an appreciation of oppositional culture and social class operates in our understanding of wilderness in the United States.
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Sweden’s Development From Poverty to Affluence, 1750-1970
Steven Koblik, EditorTranslated by Joanne Johnson
University of Minnesota Press, 1975

Sweden's Development From Poverty to Affluence, 1750–1970 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.

Contemporary Sweden commands a degree of interest and attention from foreigners that is all out of proportion to its small size and its present position among the world powers. The country, at least since the publication of Marquis Childs's book Sweden: The Middle Way in 1936, has become synonymous with the idea of a welfare state or cradle-to-grave social security. But accurate, unbiased information about the development of modern Sweden has been scanty, and this book is designed to fill the gap.

Thirteen Swedish scholars—historians, political scientists, sociologists, and an economist—look at particular aspects of Swedish history over the last two centuries. Steven Koblik, the editor, provides an extensive general introduction as well as brief introductions as background for each of the essays.
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Swedish-American Borderlands
New Histories of Transatlantic Relations
Dag Blanck
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

Reframing Swedish–American relations by focusing on contacts, crossings, and convergences beyond migration 

Studies of Swedish American history and identity have largely been confined to separate disciplines, such as history, literature, or politics. In Swedish–American Borderlands, this collection edited by Dag Blanck and Adam Hjorthén seeks to reconceptualize and redefine the field of Swedish–American relations by reviewing more complex cultural, social, and economic exchanges and interactions that take a broader approach to the international relationship—ultimately offering an alternative way of studying the history of transatlantic relations. 

Swedish–American Borderlands studies connections and contacts between Sweden and the United States from the seventeenth century to today, exploring how movements of people have informed the circulation of knowledge and ideas between the two countries. The volume brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences to investigate multiple transcultural exchanges between Sweden and the United States. Rather than concentrating on one-way processes or specific national contexts, Swedish–American Borderlands adopts the concept of borderlands to examine contacts, crossings, and convergences between the nations, featuring specific case studies of topics like jazz, architecture, design, genealogy, and more.

By placing interactions, entanglements, and cross-border relations at the center of the analysis, Swedish–American Borderlands seeks to bridge disciplinary divides, joining a diverse set of scholars and scholarship in writing an innovative history of Swedish–American relations to produce new understandings of what we perceive as Swedish, American, and Swedish American. 

Contributors: Philip J. Anderson, North Park U; Jennifer Eastman Attebery, Idaho State U; Marie Bennedahl, Linnaeus U; Ulf Jonas Björk, Indiana U–Indianapolis; Thomas J. Brown, U of South Carolina; Margaret E. Farrar, John Carroll U; Charlotta Forss, Stockholm U; Gunlög Fur, Linnaeus U; Karen V. Hansen, Brandeis U; Angela Hoffman, Uppsala U; Adam Kaul, Augustana College; Maaret Koskinen, Stockholm U; Merja Kytö, Uppsala U; Svea Larson, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Franco Minganti, U of Bologna; Frida Rosenberg, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm; Magnus Ullén, Stockholm U.

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