front cover of Machado de Assis
Machado de Assis
Toward a Poetics of Emulation
João Cezar de Castro Rocha
Michigan State University Press, 2015
This book offers an alternative explanation for one of the core dilemmas of Brazilian literary criticism: the “midlife crisis” Machado de Assis underwent from 1878 to 1880, the result of which was the writing of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, as well as the remarkable production of his mature years—with an emphasis on his masterpiece, Dom Casmurro.

At the center of this alternative explanation, Castro Rocha situates the fallout from the success enjoyed by Eça de Queirós with the publication of Cousin Basílio and Machado’s two long texts condemning the author and his work. Literary and aesthetic rivalries come to the fore, allowing for a new theoretical framework based on a literary appropriation of “thick description,” the method proposed by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. From this method, Castro Rocha derives his key hypothesis: an unforeseen consequence of Machado’s reaction to Eça’s novel was a return to the classical notion of aemulatio, which led Machado to develop a “poetics of emulation.”
[more]

front cover of Making Animal Meaning
Making Animal Meaning
Linda Kalof
Michigan State University Press, 2012

An elucidating collection of ten original essays, Making Animal Meaning reconceptualizes methods for researching animal histories and rethinks the contingency of the human-animal relationship. The vibrant and diverse field of animal studies is detailed in these interdisciplinary discussions, which include voices from a broad range of scholars and have an extensive chronological and geographical reach. These exciting discourses capture the most compelling theoretical underpinnings of animal significance while exploring meaning-making through the study of specific spaces, species, and human-animal relations. A deeply thoughtful collection — vital to understanding central questions of agency, kinship, and animal consumption — these essays tackle the history and philosophy of constructing animal meaning.

[more]

front cover of Making New People
Making New People
Politics, Cinema, and Liberation in Burkina Faso, 1983–1987
James Genova
Michigan State University Press
On August 4, 1983, Captain Thomas Sankara led a coalition of radical military officers, communist activists, labor leaders, and militant students to overtake the government of the Republic of Upper Volta. Almost immediately following the coup’s success, the small West African country—renamed Burkina Faso, or Land of the Dignified People—gained international attention as it charted a new path toward social, economic, cultural, and political development based on its people’s needs rather than external pressures and Cold War politics. James E. Genova’s Making New People: Politics, Cinema, and Liberation in Burkina Faso, 1983–1987 recounts in detail the revolutionary government’s rise and fall, demonstrating how it embodied the critical transition period in modern African history between the era of decolonization and the dawning of neoliberal capitalism. It also uncovers one of the revolution’s most enduring and significant aspects: its promotion of film as a vehicle for raising the people’s consciousness, inspiring their efforts at social transformation, and articulating a new self-generated image of Africa and Africans. Foregrounding film and drawing evocative connections between Sankara’s political philosophy and Frantz Fanon, Making New People provides a deeply nuanced explanation for the revolution’s lasting influence throughout Africa and the world.
[more]

front cover of The Making of Brazil's Black Mecca
The Making of Brazil's Black Mecca
Bahia Reconsidered
Scott Ickes
Michigan State University Press, 2018
One of the few interdisciplinary volumes on Bahia available, The Making of Brazil’s Black Mecca: Bahia Reconsidered contains contributions covering a wide chronological and topical range by scholars whose work has made important contributions to the field of Bahian studies over the last two decades. The authors interrogate and problematize the idea of Bahia as a Black Mecca, or a haven where Brazilians of African descent can embrace their cultural and spiritual African heritage without fear of discrimination. In the first section, leading historians create a century-long historical narrative of the emergence of these discourses, their limitations, and their inability to effect meaningful structural change. The chapters by social scientists in the second section present critical reflections and insights, some provocative, on deficiencies and problematic biases built into current research paradigms on blackness in Bahia. As a whole the text provides a series of insights into the ways that inequality has been structured in Bahia since the final days of slavery.
 
[more]

front cover of Making the Case
Making the Case
Advocacy and Judgment in Public Argument
Kathryn M. Olson
Michigan State University Press, 2012

In an era when the value of the humanities and qualitative inquiry has been questioned in academia and beyond, Making the Case is an engaging and timely collection that brings together a veritable who’s who of public address scholars to illustrate the power of case-based scholarly argument and to demonstrate how critical inquiry into a specific moment speaks to general contexts and theories. Providing both a theoretical framework and a wealth of historically situated texts, Making the Case spans from Homeric Greece to twenty-first-century America. The authors examine the dynamic interplay of texts and their concomitant rhetorical situations by drawing on a number of case studies, including controversial constitutional arguments put forward by activists and presidents in the nineteenth century, inventive economic pivots by Franklin Roosevelt and Alan Greenspan, and the rhetorical trajectory and method of Barack Obama.

[more]

front cover of Malaria, Poems
Malaria, Poems
Cameron Conaway
Michigan State University Press, 2014
Malaria kills nearly one million people each year. Hundreds of millions more are sickened by the disease, and many of them are permanently disabled. Billions are spent each year to understand it. Researchers know the molecular details of the interaction between the mosquito and our own red blood cells, and the myriad ways in which malaria impacts the global economy and the advancement of humanity. But what of the public? Though its story is told in thousands of articles and in hundreds of books, many in the developed world are unaware of how prevalent malaria still is. Malaria, Poems testifies to the importance of bridging the chasm between science and art. It adds thread to a tattered and tragic global narrative; it is poetry’s attempt to reawaken care in a cold case that keeps killing. According to Cicero the aim of the orator is threefold: to teach, to delight, and to move. Poets during the renaissance embraced this idea, and Malaria, Poems reinvigorates it. Allen Ginsberg called for a poetry of social consciousness, a “bare knuckle warrior poetics.” Cameron Conaway, a former MMA fighter, offers Malaria, Poems both as a response to Ginsberg’s call and as a new call to contemporary poetry.
[more]

front cover of Malcolm X
Malcolm X
Inventing Radical Judgment
Robert E. Terrill
Michigan State University Press, 2004

Few figures haunt the collective American psyche like Malcolm X. Hoodlum, convict, convert, prophet, nationalist, and martyr, Malcolm’s life spans the Civil Rights era like an index of America’s racial anxiety. Dozens of books and hundreds of articles have analyzed his life, his work, and the various ways that his image has been appropriated by American culture. Not much has been done, however, to analyze his speeches. This would be a glaring omission in the body of scholarship about almost any public figure, but is especially troubling with regard to Malcolm X. His legacy does not consist of marches preserved on newsreels, legislation passed by Congress, or holidays observed by the state; his legacy consists almost exclusively of his words. 
     Malcolm X, like any orator, did not fashion his discourse in a vacuum but worked within and modified modes fashioned by his predecessors. Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment begins by exploring the interpretive strategies presented in key texts from the history of African American protest, establishing a spectrum against which Malcolm’s oratory can be assessed. The texts of speeches that Malcolm delivered while he was a minister for the Nation of Islam and the texts of speeches and statements he made after he left the Nation are analyzed carefully to discern the strategies of interpretation and judgment that he enacted and fostered in his audiences. Finally, this radical judgment, presented in and through Malcolm’s public discourse, is re-contextualized by using three disparate theoretical approaches. The purpose of this triangulation is not to contain the rhetoric of Malcolm X within the limitations of these vocabularies, but rather to show that the changing potential of Malcolm’s rhetoric lies, in part, in its iconoclastic refusal to be constrained by definitive boundaries.

[more]

front cover of Malcolm X's Michigan Worldview
Malcolm X's Michigan Worldview
An Exemplar for Contemporary Black Studies
Rita Kiki Edozie
Michigan State University Press, 2015
The provocative debate about Malcolm X’s legacy that emerged after the publication of Manning Marable’s 2011 biography raised critical questions about the revolutionary Black Nationalist’s importance to American and world affairs: What was Malcolm’s association with the Nation of Islam? How should we interpret Malcolm’s discourses? Was Malcolm antifeminist? What is Malcolm’s legacy in contemporary public affairs? How do Malcolm’s early childhood experiences in Michigan shape and inform his worldview? Was Malcolm trending toward socialism during his final year? Malcolm X’s Michigan Worldview responds to these questions by presenting Malcolm’s subject as an iconography used to deepen understanding of African descendent peoples’ experiences through advanced research and disciplinary study. A Black studies reader that uses the biography of Malcolm X both to interrogate key aspects of the Black world experience and to contribute to the intellectual expansion of the discipline, the book presents Malcolm as a Black subject who represents, symbolizes, and associates meaning with the Black/Africana studies discipline. Through a range of multidisciplinary prisms and themes including discourse, race, culture, religion, gender, politics, and community, this rich volume elicits insights about the Malcolm iconography that contribute to the continuous formulation, deepening, and strengthening of the Black studies discipline.
[more]

front cover of Maltese in Michigan
Maltese in Michigan
Joseph M. Lubig
Michigan State University Press, 2011

Maltese in Michigan is an enlivening volume depicting the struggles and accomplishments of a singular culture, an immigrant narrative at once recognizable and enigmatic. Without realizing it, most Americans are probably familiar with the Maltese people through the cross displayed by firefighters, which bears a strong similarity in design and meaning to the one used by the Knights of Malta. The noble qualities embodied by the Maltese Cross are reflected in the pride and accomplishments of Maltese immigrants in Michigan, a small but vibrant ethnic group. Rooted in the post–World War II experiences of the 20th century, the Maltese established themselves in the city of Detroit, and thrived due to a strong work ethic and Catholic faith, while maintaining a strong central identity. This volume is a tribute to the Maltese of Michigan and all who have begun anew in an unfamiliar land and culture.

[more]

front cover of Manchurian Legacy
Manchurian Legacy
Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist
Kazuko Kuramoto
Michigan State University Press, 1999

Kazuko Kuramoto was born and raised in Dairen, Manchuria, in 1927, at the peak of Japanese expansionism in Asia. Dairen and the neighboring Port Arthur were important colonial outposts on the Liaotung Peninsula; the train lines established by Russia and taken over by the Japanese, ended there. When Kuramoto's grandfather arrived in Dairen as a member of the Japanese police force shortly after the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the family's belief in Japanese supremacy and its "divine" mission to "save" Asia from Western imperialists was firmly in place. As a third-generation colonist, the seventeen-year-old Kuramoto readily joined the Red Cross Nurse Corps in 1944 to aid in the war effort and in her country's sacred cause. A year later, her family listened to the emperor's radio broadcast ". . . we shall have to endure the unendurable, to suffer the insufferable." Japan surrendered unconditionally. 
     Manchurian Legacy is the story of the family's life in Dairen, their survival as a forgotten people during the battle to reclaim Manchuria waged by Russia, Nationalist China, and Communist China, and their subsequent repatriation to a devastated Japan. Kuramoto describes a culture based on the unthinking oppression of the colonized by the colonizer. And, because Manchuria was, in essence, a Japanese frontier, her family lived a freer and more luxurious life than they would have in Japan—one relatively unscathed by the war until after the surrender.  
     As a commentator Kuramoto explores her culture both from the inside, subjectively, and from the outside, objectively. Her memoirs describe her coming of age in a colonial society, her family's experiences in war-torn Manchuria, and her "homecoming" to Japan—where she had never been—just as Japan is engaged in its own cultural upheaval.

[more]

front cover of Manoomin
Manoomin
The Story of Wild Rice in Michigan
Barbara J Barton
Michigan State University Press, 2018
This is the first book of its kind to bring forward the rich tradition of wild rice in Michigan and its importance to the Anishinaabek people who live there. Manoomin: The Story of Wild Rice in Michigan focuses on the history, culture, biology, economics, and spirituality surrounding this sacred plant. The story travels through time from the days before European colonization and winds its way forward in and out of the logging and industrialization eras. It weaves between the worlds of the Anishinaabek and the colonizers, contrasting their different perspectives and divergent relationships with Manoomin. Barton discusses historic wild rice beds that once existed in Michigan, why many disappeared, and the efforts of tribal and nontribal people with a common goal of restoring and protecting Manoomin across the landscape.
[more]

front cover of Mansfield and Vietnam
Mansfield and Vietnam
A Study in Rhetorical Adaptation
Gregory A. Olson
Michigan State University Press, 1995

Mansfield and Vietnam: A Study in Rhetorical Adaptation is the first major work to examine the role played by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, Democrat from Montana, in the formulation and execution of U.S. Vietnam policy. Drawing upon material from the Mansfield Papers, personal interviews, public speeches, and recently declassified documents, Olson traces Mansfield's journey from ardent supporter of Diem in the late 1950s to quiet critic of LBJ in the mid-1960s, and finally, to outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  
     Olson focuses his attention on Mansfield's speaking ability and his use of the written word, analyzing the ways in which they proved crucial in shaping the policies of the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford presidential administrations. He also examines the way personal and political situations converged to force Mansfield into the center of the stormy Vietnam controversy, and eventually into a position of leadership in the campaign to end America's military presence in Southeast Asia. To date, little has been done to evaluate the roles played by key congressional figures in the Vietnam War debate; thus, Mansfield and Vietnam is bound to become a significant contribution, not only to rhetorical studies, but also to twentieth-century diplomatic history and to the study of congressional-presidential relations.

[more]

front cover of The Manufacture of Consent
The Manufacture of Consent
J. Edgar Hoover and the Rhetorical Rise of the FBI
Stephen M. Underhill
Michigan State University Press, 2020
The second Red Scare was a charade orchestrated by a tyrant with the express goal of undermining the New Deal—so argues Stephen M. Underhill in this hard-hitting analysis of J. Edgar Hoover’s rhetorical agency. Drawing on Classification 94, a vast trove of recently declassified records that documents the longtime FBI director’s domestic propaganda campaigns in the mid-twentieth century, Underhill shows that Hoover used the growing power of his office to subvert the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and redirect the trajectory of U.S. culture away from social democracy toward a toxic brand of neoliberalism. He did so with help from Republicans who opposed organized labor and Southern Democrats who supported Jim Crow in what is arguably the most culturally significant documented political conspiracy in U.S. history, a wholesale domestic propaganda program that brainwashed Americans and remade their politics. Hoover also forged ties with the powerful fascist leaders of the period to promote his own political ambitions. All the while, as a love letter to Clyde Tolson still preserved in Hoover’s papers attests, he strove to pass for straight while promoting a culture that demonized same-sex love. The erosion of democratic traditions Hoover fostered continues to haunt Americans today.
[more]

front cover of Masculindians
Masculindians
Conversations about Indigenous Manhood
Sam McKegney
Michigan State University Press, 2014
Between October 2010 and August 2013, Sam McKegney conducted interviews with leading Indigenous artists, critics, activists, and elders on the subject of Indigenous manhood. In offices, kitchens, and coffee shops, and once in a car driving down the 401, McKegney and his participants tackled crucial questions about masculine self-worth and how to foster balanced and empowered gender relations. Masculindians captures twenty-two of these conversations in a volume that is intensely personal, yet speaks across generations, geography, and gender boundaries. As varied as their speakers, the discussions range from culture, history, and world view to gender theory, artistic representations, and activist interventions. They speak of possibility and strength, of beauty and vulnerability. They speak of sensuality, eroticism, and warriorhood, and of the corrosive influence of shame, racism, and violence. Firmly grounding Indigenous continuance in sacred landscapes, interpersonal reciprocity, and relations with other-than-human kin, these conversations honor and embolden the generative potential of healthy Indigenous masculinities.

Contributors: Taiaiake Alfred, Kim Anderson, Joanne Arnott, Joseph Boyden, Alison Calder, Warren Cariou, Jessica Danforth, Louise Halfe, Tomson Highway, Daniel Heath Justice, Janice C. Hill Kanonhsyonni, Lee Maracle, Neal McLeod, Daniel David Moses, Gregory Scofield, Thomas Kimeksum Thrasher, and Richard Van Camp.
[more]

front cover of Mashairi ya Vita vya Kuduhu
Mashairi ya Vita vya Kuduhu
War Poetry in Kiswahili Exchanged at the Time of the Battle of Kuduhu
Ann Biersteker
Michigan State University Press, 1995

Mashairi Ya Vita Vya Kuduhu is a presentation and discussion of both manuscript and published versions of poems written by Lamu poets around the time of the Battle of Kuduhu. The poetic dialogue studied in this volume has played a significant role in the history of Swahili poetry, and its primary concern is to inform continued work in this area. The poems contained in this work were transmitted and preserved by speakers of Kiswahili and later collected and preserved by scholars. Chapter One contains the edited poems; Chapter Two consists of the translations. Subsequent chapters include accounts of the Battle of Kuduhu, editing and translating practices, and annotated poems and source versions. This work is presented as an example of the importance of research, fieldwork, and the consideration of available versions and alternative styles of presentation in the study of Swahili poetry.

[more]

front cover of Meaninglessness
Meaninglessness
Time, Rhythm, and the Undead in Postcolonial Cinema
Vlad Dima
Michigan State University Press, 2023
For too long, the approach to seemingly universal experiences like love, death, and even time in film has been dominated by the Global North. But what if such explorations developed horizontally instead? Drawing from both European and African cultural theorists, including Gilles Deleuze and Wole Soyinka, Vlad Dima invites us to consider what happens to postcolonial African film if we no longer privilege the idea of time. How else might we understand the cinematic image, and how would its meanings change? Meaninglessness: Time, Rhythm, and the Undead in Postcolonial Cinema is a study of meaning and meaninglessness through the figure of the undead, beginning with francophone Africa and extending to postcolonial France. Through the analysis of films like Mati Diop’s Atlantics and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Miraculous Weapons, Dima shows how the African cinematic image may produce meaning without any attachment to European time, and how that meaning is connected instead to the philosophy of negritude and to the notion of rhythm. Meaninglessness introduces the concept of the rhythm-sequence as a new way to understand the African moving image.
[more]

front cover of Mediating Indianness
Mediating Indianness
Cathy Covell Waegner
Michigan State University Press, 2015
Mediating Indianness investigates a wide range of media—including print, film, theater, ritual dance, music, recorded interviews, photography, and treaty rhetoric—that have been used in exploitative, informative, educative, sustaining, protesting, or entertaining ways to negotiate Native American identities and images. The contributors to this collection are (Native) American and European scholars whose initial findings were presented or performed in a four-panel format at the 2012 MESEA (Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas) conference in Barcelona. The selection of the term Indianness is deliberate. It points to the intricate construction of ethnicity as filtered through media, despite frequent assertions of “authenticity.” From William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s claim, extravagantly advertised on both sides of the Atlantic, that he was staging “true-to-life” scenes from Indian life in his Wild West shows to contemporary Native hip-hop artist Quese IMC’s announcement that his songs tell his people’s “own history” and draw on their “true” culture, media of all types has served to promote disparate agendas claiming legitimacy. This volume does not shy away from the issue of evaluation and how it is only tangential to medial artificiality. As evidenced in this collection, “the vibrant, ever-transforming future of Native peoples is located within a complex intersection of cultural influences,” said Susan Power, author of Sacred Wilderness.
[more]

front cover of Medicine and Health in Africa
Medicine and Health in Africa
Multidisciplinary Perspectives
Paula Viterbo
Michigan State University Press, 2011
Over the last two decades, the implosion of economies under the burden of debt, the negative repercussions of structural adjustment programs, the crisis of legitimacy, civil wars, and the collapse of some states have resulted in serious health issues across the African continent. Newly emerging diseases, such as Ebola virus and HIV/AIDS have killed and disabled millions. Some “old diseases,” such as yellow fever, tuberculosis, and polio have reappeared. Malaria, cholera, and meningitis continue to kill thousands. In many countries, the medical infrastructure has collapsed, while an increasing number of physicians and nurses have migrated to more hospitable places. Stigmatization of the affected people has exacerbated social and racial discrimination and has affected the implementation of national and international public health programs. The complexity of the situation requires an interdisciplinary approach. This collection, including contributions by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and biologists, emphasizes the social and cultural contexts of African health, paying particular attention to the history of the colonial public health system and its legacy.
[more]

front cover of The Medicine Wheel
The Medicine Wheel
Environmental Decision-Making Process of Indigenous Peoples
Michael E. Marchand
Michigan State University Press, 2020
The Medicine Wheel built by Indigenous people acknowledges that ecosystems experience unpredictable recurring cycles and that people and the environment are  interconnected. The Western science knowledge framework is incomplete unless localized intergenerational knowledge is respected and becomes part of the problem-definition and solution process. The goal of this book is to lay the context for how to connect Western science and Indigenous knowledge frameworks to form a holistic and ethical decision process for the environment. What is different about this book is that it not only describes the problems inherent to each knowledge framework but also offers new insights for how to connect culture and art to science knowledge frameworks. Read this book and learn how you can move beyond stereotypes to connect with nature.
[more]

logo for Michigan State University Press
A Memoir
John A. Hannah
Michigan State University Press, 1980

This is a very personal look at the growth and evolution of Michigan State University, as seen from the eyes of its dynamic president. As twelfth president of Michigan State University, John Alfred Hannah served from July 1, 1941, to April 1, 1969. His tenure was characterized by extensive growth of the University, in both size and enrollments. President Hannah's activities were not limited to the University, as he filled a variety of positions in both the federal government and private industry.

[more]

front cover of The Merchant John Askin
The Merchant John Askin
Furs and Empire at British Michilimackinac
Justin M. Carroll
Michigan State University Press, 2017
John Askin, a Scots-Irish migrant to North America, built his fur trade between the years 1758 and 1781 in the Great Lakes region of North America. His experience serves as a   vista from which to view important aspects of the British Empire in North America. The close interrelationship between trade and empire enabled Askin’s economic triumphs but also made him vulnerable to the consequences of imperial conflicts and mismanagement. The ephemeral, contested nature of British authority during the 1760s and 1770s created openings for men like Askin to develop a trade of smuggling liquor or to challenge the Hudson’s Bay Company’s monopoly over the fur trade, and allowed them to boast in front of British officers of having the “Key of Canada” in their pockets. How British officials responded to and even sanctioned such activities demonstrates the vital importance of trade and empire working in concert. Askin’s life’s work speaks to the collusive nature of the British Empire—its vital need for the North American merchants, officials, and Indigenous communities to establish effective accommodating relationships, transgress boundaries (real or imagined), and reject certain regulations in order to achieve the empire’s goals.
[more]

front cover of Metaphorical World Politics
Metaphorical World Politics
Francis A. Beer
Michigan State University Press, 2004

Metaphorical World Politics argues that language and metaphor are important parts of international political reality. Metaphors and world politics have appeared together many times in recent history. The blended space that results is metaphorical world politics, a real- world game for political and scientific actors. This collection picks up the challenge to unravel the game, to examine its rules, to clarify the mixture of images and facts that is so real in politics but so exceptional in science. Scholars have studied metaphor mostly from a linguistic or a literary point of view. This work forces those primarily interested in metaphors to think about applications and implications beyond the text. Others concerned mainly with world politics may consider how metaphors may help to energize and structure international political thought and action.
     Scholars have most often studied world politics embedded in so-called "facts." Metaphorical World Politics shows that facts are misleading in their compactness, that facts are often meaningless, that metaphors in contrast are energetic processors of meaning, and that facts in world politics are nothing more than weak emulsions of metaphor. This work outlines the general place of metaphor on the map of politics and highlights the location of specific metaphors on the political terrain.

[more]

front cover of Mexican American Civil Rights in Texas
Mexican American Civil Rights in Texas
Robert Brischetto
Michigan State University Press, 2022
Inspired by a 1968 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights six-day hearing in San Antonio that introduced the Mexican American people to the rest of the nation, this book is an examination of the social change of Mexican Americans of Texas over the past half century. The San Antonio hearing included 1,502 pages of testimony, given by more than seventy witnesses, which became the baseline twenty experts used to launch their research on Mexican American civil rights issues during the following fifty years. These experts explored the changes in demographics and policies with regard to immigration, voting rights, education, employment, economic security, housing, health, and criminal justice. While there are a number of anecdotal historical accounts of Mexican Americans in Texas, this book adds an evidence-based examination of racial and ethnic inequalities and changes over the past half century. The contributors trace the litigation on behalf of Latinos and other minorities in state and federal courts and the legislative changes that followed, offering public policy recommendations for the future. The fact that this study is grounded in Texas is significant, as it was the birthplace of a majority of Chicano civil rights efforts and is at the heart of Mexican American growth and talent, producing the first Mexican American in Congress, the first Mexican American federal judge, and the first Mexican American candidate for president. As the largest ethnic group in the state, Latinos will continue to play a major role in the future of Texas.
[more]

front cover of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Michigan
Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Michigan
Rudolph V. Alvarado
Michigan State University Press, 2003

Unlike most of their immigrant counterparts, up until the turn of the twentieth century most Mexicans and Mexican Americans did not settle permanently in Michigan but were seasonal laborers, returning to homes in the southwestern United States or Mexico in the winter. Nevertheless, during the past century the number of Mexicans and Mexican Americans settling in Michigan has increased dramatically, and today Michigan is undergoing its third “great wave” of Mexican immigration. Though many Mexican and Mexican American immigrants still come to Michigan seeking work on farms, many others now come seeking work in manufacturing and construction, college educations, opportunities to start businesses, and to join family members already established in the state. In Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Michigan, Rudolph Valier Alvarado and Sonya Yvette Alvarado examine the settlement trends and growth of this population, as well as the cultural and social impact that the state and these immigrants have had on one another. The story of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Michigan is one of a steadily increasing presence and influence that well illustrates how peoples and places combine to create traditions and institutions.

[more]

front cover of Michael Osborn on Metaphor and Style
Michael Osborn on Metaphor and Style
Michael Osborn
Michigan State University Press, 2018
This volume features two dimensions of Michael Osborn’s work with rhetorical metaphor. The first focuses on his early efforts to develop a conception of metaphor to advance the understanding of rhetoric, while the second concerns more recent efforts to apply this enriched conception in the analysis and criticism of significant rhetorical practice. The older emphasis features four of Osborn’s more prominent published essays, revealing the personal context in which they were generated, their strengths and shortcomings, and how they may have inspired the work of others. His more recent unpublished work analyzes patterns of metaphor in the major speeches of Demosthenes, the evolution of metaphors of illness and cure in speeches across several millennia, the exploitation of the birth-death-rebirth metaphor in Riefenstahl’s masterpiece of Nazi propaganda Triumph of the Will, and the contrasting forms of spatial imagery in the speeches of Edmund Burke and Barack Obama and what these contrasts may portend.
 
[more]

front cover of Michigan at the Millennium
Michigan at the Millennium
A Benchmark and Analysis of Its Fiscal and Economic Structure
Charles L. Ballard
Michigan State University Press, 2003

Michigan at the Millennium provides objective background and analysis on a wide variety of key economic and fiscal issues. The chapters are written by economists and policy analysts at leading universities and other institutions in Michigan. Written in clear, non-technical language, the articles are aimed at an audience that includes members of the legislative and executive branches of state government, members of the judicial system, local government officials, policy analysts, and informed citizens.
     This volume follows in the tradition of the landmark 1982 study, Michigan’s Fiscal and Economic Structure, edited by Harvey E. Brazer. The first section of the volume focuses on broad aspects of the economy, people, and land of Michigan, including chapters on demographics, the labor force, land use, the manufacturing sector, high-technology industries, and health care. Section two focuses on public expenditures and public services, and includes chapters on economic-development efforts, K–12 education, the transportation system, the welfare system, policies for low-wage workers and displaced workers, and pensions. The third section is concerned with taxes and other government revenues. It includes chapters on the Headlee Amendment, income taxes, sales and use taxes, property taxes, the Single Business Tax, intergovernmental fiscal relations, and other sources of revenue.

[more]

front cover of Michigan mammals
Michigan mammals
Rollin H. Baker
Michigan State University Press, 1983

front cover of Michigan Railroads & Railroad Companies
Michigan Railroads & Railroad Companies
Graydon M. Meints
Michigan State University Press, 1992

Michigan Railroads and Railroad Companies is an invaluable reference manual for everyone interested in regional transportation history, the history of railroading, and Michigan history in general. It contains complete, cross-referenced listings for every company formed to operate a railroad in the state of Michigan. In addition to the comprehensive entries for major lines, Graydon Meints has included details about the many small, common-carrier steam and electric companies, logging roads, and numerous other primitive and contemporary rail systems. This encyclopedic reference guide also contains information on the so-called "paper railroads," companies that were projected but which never laid a foot of track.  
     Michigan Railroads is divided into three parts. One includes alphabetical entries for the actual and intended railroad companies themselves, the date and purpose for their organization, and a brief history from their origins to their dispositions. Included in this portion of the work are a number of railroad "family trees" showing the corporate antecedents of the largest of the rail lines operating in the state today. Another contains a chronology of significant corporate events; it works as a useful finding aid for accessing source data contained in the first section. A third contains a statewide county-by-county listing of railroads, both paper and real.

[more]

logo for Michigan State University Press
Michigan Railway Company
The Northern and Southern Divisions
Norman L. Krentel
Michigan State University Press, 2024
Michigan Railway Company: The Northern and Southern Divisions, the first comprehensive history of the Michigan United Railway Company, traces the rise and fall of Michigan’s most significant electric railway. This volume covers the company’s founding in local rail-based public transportation systems in Lansing, Jackson, Battle Creek, Kalamazoo, and Owosso-Corunna and ends with its eventual demise, abandoned prior to the stock market crash of 1929. Norman L. Krentel follows the fragments of lines in lower Michigan, which came together to form the MUR. He examines the interurban lines, which were broken down into five divisions, each with a separate superintendent. These divisions were Northern and Southern, which had formerly been Michigan United Railways; Northwestern, which had been Grand Rapids, Holland, and Chicago Railway; Western; and Northeastern. 
This also explores how electric railway history is intertwined with the state of Michigan. The interurban electric rail system supported automobile manufacturing, allowing for the shipment of parts supplies, and finished automobiles through Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. Major auto plants like REO and Oldsmobile had rail sidetracks served by Michigan Railway’s interurban freight trains. Electric railway history is thus an essential, previously overlooked factor in Michigan’s industrial development.
[more]

front cover of Michigan Salvage
Michigan Salvage
The Fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell
Lisa DuRose
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Michigan Salvage is the first scholarly collection on celebrated writer Bonnie Jo Campbell, the author of two novels and three short story collections, including National Book Award finalist American Salvage (2009). Her writing captures a diverse and bustling rural America, brimming with complex characters who struggle with addiction, poverty, and land degradation—issues that have become, undeniably, part of the southwestern Michigan landscape that she calls home. The essays in this volume demonstrate many rich ways to approach Campbell’s writing, from historical and cultural overviews to essays examining the class and gender implications of her stories and novels, to teaching essays highlighting how to use her work in the classroom and beyond. Along with each essay, Michigan Salvage also features lesson plans and writing prompts meant to spark discussion and encourage further investigation into these stories and novels. This essential and teachable collection makes plain Campbell’s contributions to contemporary American literature.
[more]

front cover of Michigan State University
Michigan State University
The Rise of a Research University and the New Millennium, 1970-2005
Douglas A. Noverr
Michigan State University Press, 2015
In the 1960s and ’70s, Michigan State College transformed into the major research institution known today as Michigan State University, a true “megaversity.” Michigan State University, the final volume of this trilogy, explores the history of that transformation and the growing pains the school endured as it became a part of the Association of American Universities. From President John A. Hannah’s vision, the new university has been defined by rapid expansion, growth, new opportunities, and the occasional crisis. Its development has been a massive undertaking that marshaled individuals, research interests, federal funds, state appropriations, and more.
Through the vicissitudes of government funding and other challenges, the university has established itself as a renowned research and educational institution with a remarkably rich array of facilities, scientists, and researchers who continue to make landmark contributions to their fields. At the same time it has strived to be known for its accessibility, diversity, equality of opportunity, and antidiscrimination policies and practices. Michigan State University sheds new light on the growth of this dynamic and multifaceted institution.
[more]

front cover of Michigan Supreme Court Historical Reference Guide, 2nd Edition
Michigan Supreme Court Historical Reference Guide, 2nd Edition
David Chardavoyne
Michigan State University Press, 2015
This second edition of the Michigan Supreme Court Historical Reference Guide contains the biographies of Michigan Supreme Court’s justices from its territorial beginnings in 1803 through 2015. It includes summaries of twenty top cases of the Michigan Supreme Court, which contextualize the eras in which the justices were on the bench, giving a greater depth of understanding to both who the justices were and the historical significance of the cases they decided. A rich reference for historians and attorneys, this book also includes valuable charts detailing election dates and candidates as well as court compositions (who served with whom); lists of chief justices and the ten longest—and shortest—serving justices with dates of service; and a history of the structural evolution of the Michigan Supreme Court.
[more]

front cover of Michigan Visions of Our Past
Michigan Visions of Our Past
Richard J. Hathaway
Michigan State University Press, 1989
Several Michigan scholars believe there is much to learn from Michigan's colorful history. People study history to learn about the growth and experiences of their forebears, how they shaped the land we know today. One can gain much more from this study, however, if the lessons are used as a guide in making today's decisions.
  Throughout the history of michigan, many problems occur and recur: satisfying a diverse population, economic booms and busts, business and labor conflicts, religion in public education, environmental concerns.
  A number of writers collaborated to bring such themes to light in 18 illuminating essays. The collection provides a tool for the teacher, a sourse for the scholar, and a pleasurable trip through Michigan history. Michigan: Visions of Our Past, also provides a challenge; a challenge to citizens to understand the past, and apply its lessons to the future of Michigan.
[more]

front cover of Michigan's Company K
Michigan's Company K
Anishinaabe Soldiers, Citizenship, and the Civil War
Michelle K Cassidy
Michigan State University Press, 2023
As much as the Civil War was a battle over the survival of the United States, for the men of Company K of the First Michigan Sharpshooters, it was also one battle in a longer struggle for the survival of Anishinaabewaki, the homelands of the Anishinaabeg—Ojibwe, Odawa, and Boodewaadamii peoples . The men who served in what was often called ‘the Indian Company’ chose to enlist in the Union army to contribute to their peoples’ ongoing struggle with the state and federal governments over status, rights, resources, and land in the Great Lakes. This meticulously researched history begins in 1763 with Pontiac’s War, a key moment in Anishinaabe history. It then explores the multiple strategies the Anishinaabeg deployed to remain in Michigan despite federal pressure to leave. Anishinaabe men claimed the rights and responsibilities associated with male citizenship—voting, owning land, and serving in the army—while actively preserving their status as ‘Indians’ and Anishinaabe peoples. Indigenous expectations of the federal government, as well as religious and social networks, shaped individuals’ decisions to join the U.S. military. The stories of Company K men also broaden our understanding of the complex experiences of Civil War soldiers. In their fight against removal, dispossession, political marginalization, and loss of resources in the Great Lakes, the Anishinaabeg participated in state and national debates over citizenship, allegiance, military service, and the government’s responsibilities to veterans and their families.
[more]

front cover of Michigan's Economic Future
Michigan's Economic Future
A New Look
Charles Ballard
Michigan State University Press, 2010

This accessible, engaging text examines the impact of the trends that have shaped Michigan’s economy, and offers innovative solutions to the current economic crisis. Charles Ballard’s illuminating book explores the structure of Michigan’s economy, including its roots in agriculture, the rise and fall of the automotive industry, and the long-term decline of manufacturing. Ballard proposes that investing in education to create a highly skilled workforce can help Michigan’s people to compete in the rapidly evolving global economy. Discussing the state’s transportation infrastructure, environment, public expenditures, and tax system, Ballard describes how changes in attitudes, policies, and political institutions will help to promote economic recovery and growth.

[more]

logo for Michigan State University Press
Michigan's economic future
challenges and opportunities
Charles L. Ballard
Michigan State University Press, 2006

front cover of Michigan's State Forests
Michigan's State Forests
A Century of Stewardship
William B. Botti
Michigan State University Press, 2006

It has been said that Michigan’s nineteenth century white pine stands were the finest the world has ever seen. Dense, parklike stands, more than 150 feet tall, covered vast areas northward from the Bay City– Muskegon line. The sheer quantity of timber lured many adventurous entrepreneurs and enterprising farmers to Michigan. Lumber became a mainstay of Michigan’s economy as logging interests and railroad entrepreneurs became adept at harvesting, transporting, and processing pine logs. Many considered the pine to be practically limitless.
    In October of 1871, the first indication of a troubled future occurred when Michigan settlers experienced fires unlike any they had ever seen. Following two months of serious drought, and fed by hundreds of small fires set by land-clearing operations, much of northern Lower Michigan erupted in flames; dry winds fanned the many small fires into one unbelievable conflagration that swept entirely across the Lower Peninsula, from Lake Michigan to Lake Huron. Many towns were reduced to ashes, among them Holland, Glen Haven, Huron City, Sand Beach, White Rock, and Forestville. Navigation was interrupted on Lake Huron and as far downriver as Detroit because of the heavy smoke. More than 200 people lost their lives. 
    Michigan’s State Forests recounts how an abandoned, cutover, and often burned wilderness has been converted once again into highly productive and protected public lands. For more than 100 years, these lands have been preserved, managed and developed to form one of Michigan’s great assets, not only for economic development but also as enhancements to our quality of life.

[more]

front cover of Migrant World Making
Migrant World Making
Sergio F Juárez
Michigan State University Press, 2023
For most migrants, developing communication strategies in host countries is vital for finding social connections, navigating the pressures of assimilation, and maintaining links to their original cultures. Migrant World Making explores this process of constructing a homeplace by creating a network of communication tools and strategies to connect with multiple communities. Since what it means to be a migrant differs from person to person, the contributors to this edited collection showcase numerous practices migrants adopt to communicate and connect with others as they forge their own identities in globalized yet highly nationalistic societies. With varying aspirations and motives for seeking new homes, migrants build communities by telling stories, engaging in social media activism, protesting, writing scholarly criticism, and using many other modes of communication. To match this variety, the transnational scholars represented here use a wide array of rhetorical, cultural, and communication methodologies and epistemologies to describe what the experience of migration means to those who have lived it.
[more]

front cover of The Militarization of Indian Country
The Militarization of Indian Country
Winona LaDuke
Michigan State University Press, 2013

When it became public that Osama bin Laden’s death was announced with the phrase “Geronimo, EKIA!” many Native people, including Geronimo’s descendants, were insulted to discover that the name of a Native patriot was used as a code name for a world-class terrorist. Geronimo descendant Harlyn Geronimo explained, “Obviously to equate Geronimo with Osama bin Laden is an unpardonable slander of Native America and its most famous leader.” The Militarization of Indian Country illuminates the historical context of these negative stereotypes, the long political and economic relationship between the military and Native America, and the environmental and social consequences. This book addresses the impact that the U.S. military has had on Native peoples, lands, and cultures. From the use of Native names to the outright poisoning of Native peoples for testing, the U.S. military’s exploitation of Indian country is unparalleled and ongoing.

[more]

front cover of Mimesis and Science
Mimesis and Science
Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion
Scott R. Garrels
Michigan State University Press, 2011

This exciting compendium brings together, for the first time, some of the foremost scholars of René Girard’s mimetic theory, with leading imitation researchers from the cognitive, developmental, and neuro sciences. These chapters explore some of the major discoveries and developments concerning the foundational, yet previously overlooked, role of imitation in human life, revealing the unique theoretical links that can now be made from the neural basis of social interaction to the structure and evolution of human culture and religion. Together, mimetic scholars and imitation researchers are on the cutting edge of some of the most important breakthroughs in understanding the distinctive human capacity for both incredible acts of empathy and compassion as well as mass antipathy and violence. As a result, this interdisciplinary volume promises to help shed light on some of the most pressing and complex questions of our contemporary world.

[more]

front cover of Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel
Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel
Rene Girard and Literary Criticism
Pierpaolo Antonello
Michigan State University Press, 2015
Fifty years after its publication in English, René Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1965) has never ceased to fascinate, challenge, inspire, and sometimes irritate, literary scholars. It has become one of the great classics of literary criticism, and the notion of triangular desire is now part of the theoretical parlance among critics and students. It also represents the genetic starting point for what has become one of the most encompassing, challenging, and far-reaching theories conceived in the humanities in the last century: mimetic theory. This book provides a forum for new generations of scholars and critics to reassess, challenge, and expand the theoretical and hermeneutical reach of key issues brought forward by Girard’s book, including literary knowledge, realism and representation, imitation and the anxiety of influence, metaphysical desire, deviated transcendence, literature and religious experience, individualism and modernity, and death and resurrection. It also provides a more extensive and detailed historical understanding of the representation of desire, imitation, and rivalry within European and world literature, from Dante to Proust and from Dickens to Jonathan Littell.
[more]

front cover of The Mimetic Brain
The Mimetic Brain
Jean-Michel Oughourlian
Michigan State University Press, 2016
The discovery of mirror neurons in the 1990s led to an explosion of research and debate about the imitative capacities of the human brain. Some herald a paradigm shift on the order of DNA in biology, while others remain skeptical. In this revolutionary volume Jean- Michel Oughourlian shows how the hypotheses of René Girard can be combined with the insights of neuroscientists to shed new light on the “mimetic brain.”
Offering up clinical studies and a complete reevaluation of classical psychiatry, Oughourlian explores the interaction among reason, emotions, and imitation and reveals that rivalry—the blind spot in contemporary neuroscientific understandings of imitation—is a misunderstood driving force behind mental illness. Oughourlian’s analyses shake the very foundations of psychiatry as we know it and open up new avenues for both theoretical research and clinical practice.
[more]

front cover of Mimetic Politics
Mimetic Politics
Dyadic Patterns in Global Politics
Roberto Farneti
Michigan State University Press, 2015
War, violence, and the disruption of social orders are critical areas of focus in mimetic theory, and a mimetic perspective applied to the study of politics illuminates social processes and phenomena over and beyond typical explanations offered by mainstream political science. Unlike traditional political science ontology, the mimetic perspective highlights neither individuals nor groups, but “doubles,” or “mimetic twins.” According to this perspective, in order to grasp the fundamental rationales of political processes, we need to concentrate on the distinctive propensity of either individuals or groups to engage in mimetic contests resulting from their unreflective disposition to imitate each other’s desire. This disposition has been strikingly described by the French-American anthropologist Rene Girard: “Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what.” Via mimetic theory, Farneti highlights phenomena that political scientists have consistently failed to notice, such as reciprocal imitation as the fundamental cause of human discord, the mechanisms of spontaneous polarization in human conflicts (i.e., the emergence of dyads or “doubles”), and the strange and ever-growing resemblance of the mimetic rivals, which is precisely what pushes them to annihilate each other.
[more]

front cover of Mimetic Theory and Its Shadow
Mimetic Theory and Its Shadow
Girard, Milbank, and Ontological Violence
Scott Cowdell
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Leading Girardian theologian Scott Cowdell seeks to resolve a long-standing challenge to mimetic theory: that it entails a fundamental brutishness—an ontological violence. Girard’s account of scapegoating violence, seen as providing the initial stability for our species to emerge and consolidate, hardly seems compatible with Christian belief in God’s good creation, with violence only appearing after a subsequent Fall. The brilliant but controversial theologian John Milbank has long raised this concern about Girard, grounded in a remarkably sophisticated (though seldom fathomed) philosophical theology. Unpacking Milbank’s program, along with Girard’s recasting of Continental philosophy in light of mimetic theory, Cowdell finds a way between two apparently irreconcilable positions. With irenic spirit but analytic tenacity, he probes for ways through Milbank’s arguments while pressing on growth points in Girard’s. Cowdell’s proposals involve reframing divine creation in light of salvation history, reimagining divine participation by thinking Christ and evolution together, and developing a semiotic approach to mimetic theory that delivers ontological peace hermeneutically. Cowdell shows how Girard’s vision of human transformation through faith in Christ reveals a different world beyond ontological violence while preserving the divine participation that Milbank champions.
[more]

front cover of Mimetic Theory and World Religions
Mimetic Theory and World Religions
Wolfgang Palaver
Michigan State University Press, 2017
Those who anticipated the demise of religion and the advent of a peaceful, secularized global village have seen the last two decades confound their predictions. René Girard’s mimetic theory is a key to understanding the new challenges posed by our world of resurgent violence and pluralistic cultures and traditions. Girard sought to explain how the Judeo-Christian narrative exposes a founding murder at the origin of human civilization and demystifies the bloody sacrifices of archaic religions. Meanwhile, his book Sacrifice, a reading of conflict and sacrificial resolution in the Vedic Brahmanas, suggests that mimetic theory’s insights also resonate with several non-Western religious and spiritual traditions. This volume collects engagements with Girard by scholars of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism and situates them within contemporary theology, philosophy, and religious studies.
[more]

front cover of Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934
Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934
Philip Korth
Michigan State University Press, 1995

The 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters Strike proved to be a pivotal event in twentieth-century American labor history. The Minneapolis Teamsters challenged the muscle of big business, as well as the authority of local, state, and federal government, and in the process they changed the very nature of labor relations in the United States. In The Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934, Philip Korth's description of events surrounding this landmark labor action are filtered through the recollections of the people who were there. Korth blends historical record with the words of actual participants to draw a thorough and compelling portrait of a labor strike and its consequences. Philip Korth's study illustrates the organizational strategies that made the Minneapolis strike a success, as well as how opposition and public perception defined emerging labor relations practices and public policy. At the same time, the author provides an in-depth examination of the conflict through interviews with witnesses and participants in this pivotal event in labor history.

[more]

front cover of Minong
Minong
The Good Place Ojibwe and Isle Royale
Timothy Cochrane
Michigan State University Press, 2009

Minong (the Ojibwe name for Isle Royale) is the search for the history of the Ojibwe people's relationship with this unique island in the midst of Lake Superior. Cochrane uses a variety of sources: Ojibwe oral narratives, recently rediscovered Jesuit records and diaries, reports of the Hudson's Bay post at Fort William, newspaper accounts, and numerous records from archives in the United States and Canada, to understand this relationship to a place. What emerges is a richly detailed account of Ojibwe activities on Minong—and their slow waning in the latter third of the nineteenth century.
     Piece by piece, Cochrane has assembled a narrative of a people, an island, and a way of life that transcends borders, governments, documentation, and tidy categories. His account reveals an authentic 'history': the missing details, contradictions, deviations from the conventions of historical narrative—the living entity at the intersection of documentation by those long dead and the narratives of those still living in the area. Significantly, it also documents how non-natives symbolically and legally appropriated Isle Royale by presenting it to fellow non-natives as an island that was uninhabited and unused.

[more]

front cover of A Motorcycle on Hell Run
A Motorcycle on Hell Run
Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964–1974
Seth M. Markle
Michigan State University Press, 2017
Between 1964 and 1974 Tanzania came to be regarded as a model nation and a leading frontline state in the struggle for African liberation on the continent and beyond. During this time, a number of African American and Caribbean nationalists, leftists, and pan-Africanists traveled to and settled in Tanzania to join the country that many believed to be leading Africa’s liberation struggle. This historical study examines the political landscape of that crucial moment when African American, Caribbean, and Tanzanian histories overlapped, shedding light on the challenges of creating a new nation and the nature of African American and Caribbean participation in Tanzania’s nationalist project. In examining the pragmatic partnerships and exchanges between socialist Tanzania and activists and organizations associated with the Black Power movements in the United States and the Caribbean, this study argues that the Tanzanian one-party government actively engaged with the diaspora and sought to utilize its political, cultural, labor, and intellectual capital to further its national building agenda, but on its own terms, creating tension within the pan-Africanism movement. An excellent resource for academics and nonacademics alike, this work is the first of its kind, revealing the significance of the radical political and social movements of Tanzania and what it means for us today.
[more]

front cover of Mountain Path
Mountain Path
Harriette Simpson Arnow
Michigan State University Press, 2012

Masterfully wrought and keenly observed, Mountain Path draws on Harriette Simpson Arnow’s experiences as a schoolteacher in downtrodden Pulaski County, Kentucky, deep in the heart of Appalachia, prior to WWII. Far from a quaint portrait of rural life, Arnow’s novel documents hardships, poverty, illiteracy, and struggles. She also recognizes a fragile cultural richness, one characterized by “those who like open fires, hounds, children, human talk and song instead of TV and radio, the wisdom of the old who had seen all of life from birth to death,” and which has since been eroded by the advent of highways and industry. In Mountain Path, Arnow exquisitely captures the voices, faces, and ways of a people she cared for deeply, and who evoked in her a deep respect and admiration.

[more]

front cover of Mourning Animals
Mourning Animals
Rituals and Practices Surrounding Animal Death
Margo DeMello
Michigan State University Press, 2016
We live more intimately with nonhuman animals than ever before in history. The change in the way we cohabitate with animals can be seen in the way we treat them when they die. There is an almost infinite variety of ways to help us cope with the loss of our nonhuman friends—from burial, cremation, and taxidermy; to wearing or displaying the remains (ashes, fur, or other parts) of our deceased animals in jewelry, tattoos, or other artwork; to counselors who specialize in helping people mourn pets; to classes for veterinarians; to tips to help the surviving animals who are grieving their animal friends; to pet psychics and memorial websites. But the reality is that these practices, and related beliefs about animal souls or animal afterlife, generally only extend, with very few exceptions, to certain kinds of animals—pets. Most animals, in most cultures, are not mourned, and the question of an animal afterlife is not contemplated at all. Mourning Animals investigates how we mourn animal deaths, which animals are grievable, and what the implications are for all animals.
 
[more]

front cover of Mourning in the Anthropocene
Mourning in the Anthropocene
Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence
Joshua Trey Barnett
Michigan State University Press, 2022
Enormous ecological losses and profound planetary transformations mean that ours is a time to grieve beyond the human. Yet, Joshua Trey Barnett argues in this eloquent and urgent book, our capacity to grieve for more-than-human others is neither natural nor inevitable. Weaving together personal narratives, theoretical meditations, and insightful readings of cultural artifacts, he suggests that ecological grief is best understood as a rhetorical achievement. As a collection of worldmaking practices, rhetoric makes things matter, bestows value, directs attention, generates knowledge, and foments feelings. By dwelling on three rhetorical practices—naming, archiving, and making visible—Barnett shows how they prepare us to grieve past, present, and future ecological losses. Simultaneously diagnostic and prescriptive, this book reveals rhetorical practices that set our ecological grief into motion and illuminates pathways to more connected, caring earthly coexistence.
[more]

front cover of Mozambique's Experience in Building a National Extension System
Mozambique's Experience in Building a National Extension System
Helder Gemo
Michigan State University Press, 2005

Agricultural extension services are undergoing rapid change in many countries, with a shift in funding and management from the public to the private sector. This is especially true in Africa, where donors from industrial countries, and more recently from the middle-income developing countries such as Chile, have historically promoted and financed those extension models. Currently, African nations are being encouraged to import the Farmer Field School extension model, which is meeting with some success in Asia.
     Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony, became independent in 1975 but was wracked by civil war in the 1980s. It was unable to establish its public extension service until 1987. The authors analyze the growth and evolution of extension from 1987 to 2004, as provided by public, private, and NGO sources in Mozambique.
     This work highlights the Ministry of Agriculture's drive to develop and test both local and imported extension models and share its experience with other African countries.

[more]

front cover of MSU Campus—Buildings, Places, Spaces
MSU Campus—Buildings, Places, Spaces
Architecture and the Campus Park of Michigan State University
Linda O. Stanford
Michigan State University Press, 2002

Since its founding in 1855, Michigan State University has emerged from its modest “oak opening” in the wilderness to become a large campus park. This story reflects the commitment of campus leaders since the nineteenth century to develop MSU as a beautiful and educational public resource, as well as a demonstration model, befitting the premier land-grant institution in the United States.
    From early landscape gardeners influenced by Ossian Simonds and the nationally known Olmsted Brothers, to the vision of President John Hannah, the consistent intent has been to interrelate architecture and the campus park. The result is a campus whose development reflects major trends in American architecture and whose contributors include local, regional, and nationally known architectural firms. In MSU Campus—Buildings, Places, Spaces, two Michigan State University professors provide a history and way of seeing the campus by offering eight areas to explore.
     Each area includes selected historical sites or markers, public art, and natural locations that complement more than one hundred extant buildings, complete with individual stylistic and historical descriptions and photographs. Historical facts about Michigan State University, suggestions for further reading, and an ample glossary of architectural terms make this book a resource for anyone who is interested in Michigan State University, art and architectural history, Michigan history, and visual culture.
     The book will continue to serve as a documentary reminder of MSU’s heritage and vital institutional future long after the 2005 sesquicentennial.

[more]

front cover of The Murder of Joe White
The Murder of Joe White
Ojibwe Leadership and Colonialism in Wisconsin
Erik M. Redix
Michigan State University Press, 2014
In 1894 Wisconsin game wardens Horace Martin and Josiah Hicks were dispatched to arrest Joe White, an Ojibwe ogimaa (chief), for hunting deer out of season and off-reservation. Martin and Hicks found White and made an effort to arrest him. When White showed reluctance to go with the wardens, they started beating him; he attempted to flee, and the wardens shot him in the back, fatally wounding him. Both Martin and Hicks were charged with manslaughter in local county court, and they were tried by an all-white jury. A gripping historical study, The Murder of Joe White contextualizes this event within decades of struggle of White’s community at Rice Lake to resist removal to the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation, created in 1854 at the Treaty of La Pointe. While many studies portray American colonialism as defined by federal policy, The Murder of Joe White seeks a much broader understanding of colonialism, including the complex role of state and local governments as well as corporations. All of these facets of American colonialism shaped the events that led to the death of Joe White and the struggle of the Ojibwe to resist removal to the reservation.
[more]

front cover of Musho!
Musho!
Zulu Popular Praises
Liz Gunner
Michigan State University Press, 1991
In Musho! Zulu Popular Praises Elizabeth Gunner, an authority on Zulu literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and Mafika Gwala, a South African teacher and poet, have translated, transcribed, and annotated a wide variety of Zulu izibongo poetry. In so doing, they have revealed the incredible breadth of this traditional genre, which is usually equated with nineteenth-century epic traditions that celebrate the deeds of Shaka and the successor kings of his Zulu monarchy.  
     Musho!, with its extensive historical introduction, and literary commentary on Zulu poetry, is a major contribution to the field.  
 
[more]

logo for Michigan State University Press
Music, ritual, and Falasha history
Kay Kaufman. Shelemay
Michigan State University Press, 1989

front cover of The Muskegon
The Muskegon
The Majesty and Tragedy of Michigan's Rarest River
Jeff Alexander
Michigan State University Press, 2006

Muskegon is a derivation of a Native American word meaning "river with marshes." Jeff Alexander examines the creation, uses of, devastation, and restoration of Michigan's historic and beautiful Muskegon River.
     Four of the five Great Lakes touch Michigan's shores; the state's shoreline spans more than 4,500 miles, not to mention more than 11,000 inland lakes and a multitude of rivers. The Muskegon River, the state's second longest river, runs 227 miles and has the most diverse features of any of Michigan’s many rivers. The Muskegon rises from the center of the state, widens, and moves westward, passing through the Pere Marquette and AuSable State Forests. The river ultimately flows toward Lake Michigan, where it opens into Muskegon Lake, a 12 square-mile, broad harbor located between the Muskegon River and Lake Michigan.
     Formed several thousand years ago, when the glaciers that created the Great Lakes receded, and later inhabited by Ottawa and Potawatomi Indians, the Muskegon River was used by French fur trappers in the 1600s. Rich in white pine, the area was developed during the turn-of-the-century lumber boom, and at one time Muskegon Lake boasted more than 47 sawmills. The Muskegon was ravaged following settlement by Europeans, when rivers and streams were used to transport logs to the newly developing cities. Dams on rivers and larger streams provided power for sawmills and grain milling, and later provided energy for generating electricity as technology advanced.
     There is now an ambitious effort to restore and protect this mighty river's natural features in the face of encroaching urbanization and land development that threatens to turn this majestic waterway into a mirror image of the Grand River, Michigan's longest river and one of its most polluted.

[more]

front cover of My Bayou
My Bayou
New Orleans through the Eyes of a Lover
Constance Adler
Michigan State University Press, 2012

A vividly described and intensely personal memoir, My Bayou charts a personal and spiritual transformation along the fabled banks of Bayou Saint John in New Orleans. When Constance Adler moves to New Orleans, she begins what becomes a lasting love affair with the city, and especially the bayou—a living entity and the beating heart of local culture. Rites of passage, celebrations, mysterious accidents, and magic all take place on its banks, leading Adler to a vibrant awareness of the power of being part of a community. That faith is tested in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and is ultimately proven right, as Bayou Saint John begins to rebuild.

[more]

front cover of My Eyes Feel They Need to Cry
My Eyes Feel They Need to Cry
Stories from the Formerly Homeless
Martha Aladjem Bloomfield
Michigan State University Press, 2013
As intimate as they are inspiring, these stories of transformation, drawn from the oral histories of formerly homeless adults, testify to the determination of the human spirit and the healing power of sharing one’s journey. This gripping collection gives voice to the traditionally voiceless, inviting men and women from a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds to share their experiences of what it was like to live on the streets, in cars, under bridges, and of how they discovered the inner motivation to change the course of their lives in a positive direction. An important contribution to understanding how destructive patterns can be broken, this book examines some key questions: How do those who have suffered from homelessness and the hardships that accompany it find the inspiration and courage to break the seemingly endless cycle, transform their lives, and become self-sufficient? What emotional price do they pay? When do they realize that enough is enough? How do they learn to trust new people when so many have disappointed them? Homeless people can and do find a way off the streets, as these men and women reveal through their stories, paintings, and poetry.
[more]

front cover of My Odyssey Through the Underground Press
My Odyssey Through the Underground Press
Michael Kindman
Michigan State University Press, 2011
In 1963, Michigan State University, the nation’s first land grant college, attracted a record number of National Merit Scholars by offering competitive scholarships. One of these exceptional students was Michael Kindman. After the beginning of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, Kindman, in line to be editor-in-chief of the official MSU student newspaper, felt compelled to seek a more radical forum of intellectual debate. In 1965, he dropped out of school and founded The Paper, one of the first five members of Underground Press Syndicate. This gripping autobiography follows Kindman’s inspiring journey of self-discovery, from MSU to Boston, where he joined the staff of Avatar, unaware that the large commune that controlled the paper was a charismatic cult. Five years later, he fled the commune’s outpost in Kansas and headed to San Francisco, where he came out as a gay man, changed his name to Mica, and continued his work as an activist and visionary.
[more]

front cover of The Myth of Human Races
The Myth of Human Races
Alain F. Corcos
Michigan State University Press, 1997

The idea that human races exist is a socially constructed myth that has no grounding in science. Regardless of skin, hair, or eye color, stature or physiognomy, we are all of one species. Nonetheless, scientists, social scientists, and pseudo-scientists have, for three centuries, tried vainly to prove that distinctive and separate "races" of humanity exist. These protagonists of race theory have based their flawed research on one or more of five specious assumptions:
     - humanity can be classified into groups using identifiable physical characteristics,
     - human characteristics are transmitted "through the blood,"  
     - distinct human physical characteristics are inherited together, 
     - physical features can be linked to human behavior,
     - human groups or "races" are by their very nature unequal and, therefore, they can be ranked in order of intellectual, moral, and cultural superiority.  
     The Myth of Human Races systematically dispels these fallacies and unravels the web of flawed research that has been woven to demonstrate the superiority of one group of people over another.

[more]

front cover of Mémoires of Michilimackinac and the Pays d'en Haut
Mémoires of Michilimackinac and the Pays d'en Haut
Indians and French in the Upper Great Lakes at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century
José António Brandao
Michigan State University Press, 2019
Mémoires of Michilimackinac offers corrected, unabridged, and properly annotated and edited transcriptions and translations of three important documents related to the French presence and French–Native American relations in the Great Lakes region before 1715. The Relation du sieur De lamotte Cadillac; d’Aigremont’s Mémoire of November 14, 1708; and Bégon’s Mémoire on the Establishment of Michilimackinac of September 20, 1713, are thoroughly examined, with an introduction that places these documents in context; summarizes major findings about Michilimackinac, Native American cultures, and French imperial ambitions in the Great Lakes region; and includes a critical exploration of the documents’ authorship. All three mémoires provide windows into Michilimackinac’s centrality to the French imperial and trade network and the place of Native Americans in French policy during this period, and ultimately contribute to understanding trends, enduring and new, in the scholarship of French and Indians in the upper Great Lakes.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter