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

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

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

“The Common Pot,” a metaphor that appears in Native writings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, embodies land, community, and the shared space of sustenance among relations. Far from being corrupted by forms of writing introduced by European colonizers, Brooks contends, Native people frequently rejected the roles intended for them by their missionary teachers and used the skills they acquired to compose petitions, political tracts, and speeches; to record community councils and histories; and most important, to imagine collectively the routes through which the Common Pot could survive.Reframing the historical landscape of the region, Brooks constructs a provocative new picture of Native space before and after colonization. By recovering and reexamining Algonquian and Iroquoian texts, she shows that writing was not a foreign technology but rather a crucial weapon in the Native Americans’ arsenal as they resisted—and today continue to oppose—colonial domination.
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Developing Animals
Wildlife and Early American Photography
Matthew Brower
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Pictures of animals are now ubiquitous, but the ability to capture animals on film was a significant challenge in the early era of photography. In Developing Animals, Matthew Brower takes us back to the time when Americans started taking pictures of the animal kingdom, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the moment when photography became a mass medium and wildlife photography an increasingly popular genre.

Developing Animals compellingly investigates the way photography changed our perception of animals. Brower analyzes how photographers created new ideas about animals as they moved from taking pictures of taxidermic specimens in so-called natural settings to the emergence of practices such as camera hunting, which made it possible to capture images of creatures in the wild.

By combining approaches in visual cultural studies and the history of photography, Developing Animals goes further to argue that photography has been essential not only to the understanding of wildlife but also to the conceptual separation of humans and animals.
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Insect Poetics
Eric C. Brown
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Insects are everywhere. There are millions of species sharing the world with humans and other animals. Though literally woven into the fabric of human affairs, insects are considered alien from the human world. Animal studies and rights have become a fecund field, but for the most part scant attention has been paid to the relationship between insects and humans. Insect Poetics redresses that imbalance by welcoming insects into the world of letters and cultural debate.

In Insect Poetics, the first book to comprehensively explore the cultural and textual meanings of bugs, editor Eric Brown argues that insects are humanity’s “other.” In order to be experienced, the insect world must be mediated by art or technology (as in the case of an ant farm or Kafka’s Metamorphoses) while humans observe, detached and fascinated.

In eighteen original essays, this book illuminates the ways in which our human intellectual and cultural models have been influenced by the natural history of insects. Through critical readings contributors address such topics as performing insects in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, the cockroach in the contemporary American novel, the butterfly’s “voyage out” in Virginia Woolf, and images of insect eating in literature and popular culture. In surprising ways, contributors tease out the particularities of insects as cultural signifiers and propose ways of thinking about “insectivity,” suggesting fertile cross-pollinations between entomology and the arts, between insects and the humanities.

Contributors: May Berenbaum, Yves Cambefort, Marion W. Copeland, Nicky Coutts, Bertrand Gervais, Sarah Gordon, Cristopher Hollingsworth, Heather Johnson, Richard J. Leskosky, Tony McGowan, Erika Mae Olbricht, Marc Olivier, Roy Rosenstein, Rachel Sarsfield, Charlotte Sleigh, Andre Stipanovic.

Eric C. Brown is assistant professor of English at the University of Maine at Farmington. He has written previously about insects and eschatology in Edmund Spenser’s Muiopotmos.
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Huntington Brown
University of Minnesota Press
Prose Styles was first published in 1966.How can one distinguish in any text between features answering to the timeless function of its type and those accountable to passing tendencies of periods, fashions, schools, and individual writers? This study is addressed to that general question, and, while it is not a writer’s manual in any sense, it should prove enlightening and helpful to anyone with a genuine interest in style.The author identifies, with concreteness as to detail and illustration, the styles of five broad types of non-metrical communication in spoken or written discourse that have been conspicuous in the culture or life of the western world from remote times. He names these styles the deliberative, the expository, the tumbling, the prophetic, and the indenture. In discussing each, he explains how each set of features is the virtually inevitable articulation of the purpose of a type of transaction the conditions of which have remained constant from age to age. He demonstrates, for example, that there are striking elementary affinities between such otherwise dissimilar works as the Sermon on the Mount and Lamb’s “Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” or between Beowulf and a modern-day newspaper sports column.Dudley Fitts comments: “This is a popular book for the literate public: no ‘easy,’ not ‘superficial,’ but clearly not recondite.”The book will be especially interesting to professional writers, as well as to students and teachers of literature.This is Volume 1, Minnesota Monographs in the Humanities, of which Gerhard H. Weiss is the series editor.
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Judith Brown
University of Minnesota Press
Everywoman’s Guide to Nutrition was first published in 1991.This comprehensive, practical book, based on Judith Brown’s considerable experience as a nutrition counselor, teacher, and researcher, is a resource women can turn to with confidence for information on nutrition and healthy eating. The author has talked extensively with women to identify the nutrition information they are looking for, and has tailored this book to meet their needs. Fertility, pregnancy, and breast-feeding are discussed, as are the prevention and treatment of obesity, heart disease, cancer, PMS, osteoporosis, and other health problems. Special attention has been given to the results of studies conducted with women. Unique features are a section of tasty, low-fat recipes developed for the book and a self-assessment exercise that helps identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current diet.
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Kenneth Burke - American Writers 75
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Merle E. Brown
University of Minnesota Press, 1989

Kenneth Burke - American Writers 75 was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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Gang Nation
Delinquent Citizens In Puerto Rican, Chicano, And Chicana Narratives
Monica Brown
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
Explores how Latino gang culture mirrors the most destructive aspects of the American Dream through a look at novels and memoirs. "There's a place for us / Somewhere a place for us . . ." With the emergence of a rich body of literature chronicling the experiences of Latino and Latina gang members, popular understanding of this outlaw culture has advanced far beyond West Side Story. However, the diverse works discussed in this important book-ranging from the breakthrough 1967 memoir Down These Mean Streets and the crime novel Carlito's Way to the play Zoot Suit and the World War II-era historical novel Don't Spit on My Corner, to more recent works such as Always Running/La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. and Chicana gang narratives like Locas and Two Badges-all share with the award-winning musical a crucial discourse on nationality, citizenship, and belonging. In Gang Nation, Monica Brown offers a sophisticated analysis of these narratives produced by former gang members and by "outside" observers writing within the Latino community. She examines the ubiquity of language and behavior within this literature that reveal the frustrated longings within gangs for greater participation in America's national culture and the desire of members to craft an alternative environment in which they are welcome. Through literature and memoirs written from within the culture, Brown illustrates how these youth mimic the rhetoric and rituals of American nationalism's most destructive aspects-intense territoriality, justification of violence, and cultural chauvinism-to assert their citizenship in an alternative nation. Before now, studies of gang culture have centered on either the choices of individual members or the social forces that inspire their unfocused rage. But through Latino and Chicano gang literature, Brown provides a more nuanced portrait of that culture, one that raises broader concerns about dominant nationalism, civil rights, the criminalization of urban youth of color, and the often unfulfilled sense of communal identity and acceptance among American youth. Monica Brown is assistant professor of English at Northern Arizona University.
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Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s
A Gay Life In The 1940S
Ricardo J. Brown
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
A surprising and vivid remembrance of gay life in the wake of World War II. For many, it is often difficult to imagine gay gathering places in the decades before the Stonewall riots of the 1960s, and nearly impossible to think of such communities outside the nation's largest cities. Yet such places did exist, and their histories tell amazing stories of survival and the struggle for acceptance and self-respect. When Ricardo J. Brown died in 1999, he left a compelling memoir of his youth and experiences as a young gay man in St. Paul. After being discharged from the navy for revealing his sexual orientation to a commanding officer in 1945, Brown returned to his hometown with a new self-awareness and a desire to find a group of people like himself. He discovered such a place in Kirmser's. A small neighborhood bar owned by a German immigrant couple in St. Paul's downtown, Kirmser's served working-class customers during daylight hours, but became an unofficial home to the gay men and lesbians who gathered there nightly in the years following World War II. The Evening Crowd at Kirmser's introduces us to often humorous but frequently tragic stories of those who would become the author's friends: Flaming Youth, a homely, sardonic man who carried the nickname from his younger years ironically into middle age; Bud York, the "All-American Boy," who seduced all with his wholesome good looks and confidence; Dickie Grant, a likable, gentle boy who is arrested for writing bad checks and is murdered while in prison; and Dale, the author's best friend, who suddenly loses his job of six years after an anonymous note informed his employer that he is gay. A revealing look at the origins of gay culture in a mid-sized city and among working-class people, The Evening Crowd at Kirmser's is destined to become a rare and unique classic. "This posthumous memoir is by a GI who, after being discharged from the navy for his homosexuality in the 1940s, returned to his hometown, St. Paul, Minnesota, where he became part of the community centered on a gay bar." --Washington Post Book World "Brown colorfully if sparingly depicts the claustrophobic atmosphere of one seedy, ill-kept workingman's bar, heterosexual by day and gay by night. Kirmser's itself is the major character in this lively, intimate book." --Gay & Lesbian Review "Here is a look at a St. Paul that has seldom been documented, and at a moment in gay history that is usually shrouded in silence. Those who experienced the history had so much to lose if they were exposed." --City Pages "A fascinating and engaging memoir of post-WWII, pre-Stonewall gay life. Remarkable because of its compactness, its commitment to detail, and its attention to the emotions of people living in a sexual police state." --Rain Taxi Review of Books "The Evening Crowd at Kirmser's is a reminder of how life was in the bad old days; and warning that we must do all we can to keep them from coming back." --The Weekly News "Whimsical, insightful, and compellingly readable, Ricardo Brown's memoir offers a remarkable portrait of the life gay men built for themselves after the Second World War in small cities far from the coastal meccas of gay life. A fascinating portrait of working class gay male life in the postwar period." --George Chauncey, author of Gay New York A lifelong journalist, Ricardo J. Brown (1927-1999) was born in Stillwater, Minnesota. During his long career, he worked as a court reporter for the Alabama Journal, court reporter and sports editor for the Fairbanks Daily News Mirror of Alaska, and as the Minneapolis bureau chief for Fairchild Publications. William Reichard is a poet and fiction writer, and author of An Alchemy in the Bones (1999).
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Politics Of Selfhood
Bodies And Identities In Global Capitalism
Richard Harvey Brown
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
Looks at the ways social change is expressed through debates over identities and bodies. In bodies and selves, we can see politics, economics, and culture play out, and the tensions and crises of society made visible. The women's movement, lobbies for the elderly, pro-choice and pro-life movements, AIDS research and education, pedophilia and repressed memory, global sports spectacles, organ donor networks, campaigns for safe sex, chastity, or preventive medicine--all are aspects of the contemporary politics of bodies and identities touched on in this book. Three broad themes run through the collection: how the body is constructed in various ways for different purposes, how the electronic media and its uses shape selves and sensualities and contribute to civic discourse, and how global capitalism acts as a direct force in these processes. By taking a distinctly cross-cultural and comparative approach, this volume explores more fully than ever the political, economic, institutional, and cultural settings of corporeality, identity, and representation. Contributors: Antonella Fabri, Eva Illouz, Philip W. Jenks, Lauren Langman, Timothy W. Luke, Timothy McGettigan, Margaret J. Tally.
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The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage
An Enlightenment Problematic
Tony C. Brown
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Tony C. Brown examines “the inescapable yet infinitely troubling figure of the not-quite-nothing” in Enlightenment attempts to think about the aesthetic and the savage. The various texts Brown considers—including the writings of Addison, Rousseau, Kant, and Defoe—turn to exotic figures in order to delimit the aesthetic, and to aesthetics in order to comprehend the savage.

In his intriguing exploration Brown discovers that the primitive introduces into the aesthetic and the savage an element that proves necessary yet difficult to conceive. At its most profound, Brown explains, this element engenders a loss of confidence in one’s ability to understand the human’s relation to itself and to the world. That loss of confidence—what Brown refers to as a breach in anthropological security—traces to an inability to maintain a sense of self in the face of the New World. Demonstrating the impact of the primitive on the aesthetic and the savage, he shows how the eighteenth-century writers he focuses on struggle to define the human’s place in the world. As Brown explains, these authors go back again and again to “exotic” examples from the New World—such as Indian burial mounds and Maori tattooing practice—making them so ubiquitous that they come to underwrite, even produce, philosophy and aesthetics.

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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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Curiouser
On The Queerness Of Children
Steven Bruhm
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

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The Third Space of Sovereignty
The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations
Kevin Bruyneel
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

The imposition of modern American colonial rule has defined U.S.–indigenous relations since the time of the American Civil War. In resistance, Kevin Bruyneel asserts, indigenous political actors work across American spatial and temporal boundaries, demanding rights and resources from the government while also challenging the imposition of colonial rule over their lives. This resistance engenders what he calls a “third space of sovereignty,” which resides neither inside nor outside the U.S. political system but rather exists on its boundaries, exposing both the practices and limitations of American colonial rule. 

The Third Space of Sovereignty offers fresh insights on such topics as the crucial importance of the formal end of treaty-making in 1871, indigenous responses to the prospect of U.S. citizenship in the 1920s, native politics during the tumultuous civil rights era of the 1960s, the question of indigenousness in the special election of California’s governor in 2003, and the current issues surrounding gaming and casinos.

In this engaging and provocative work, Bruyneel shows how native political actors have effectively contested the narrow limits that the United States has imposed on indigenous people’s ability to define their identity and to develop economically and politically on their own terms.

Kevin Bruyneel is assistant professor of politics at Babson College.

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Eudora Welty - American Writers 66
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
J.A. Bryant Jr.
University of Minnesota Press, 1968

Eudora Welty - American Writers 66 was first published in 1968. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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David Bryn-Jones
University of Minnesota Press

Toward a Democratic New Order was first published in 1945. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

We have succeeded, at a tremendous cost in human suffering, in preventing the imposition of a totalitarian new order upon the world. But our victory will be hollow and temporary unless democracy, in whose name we have fought, can gird itself to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world. It cannot remain a static faith, whose triumph in its nineteenth-century form is taken for granted. It must be re-examined and redefined, not in terms of shibboleths and tenets a century old, but in the light of today's conditions and problems. That this redefinition is an urgent need of our time is the underlying conviction of Toward a Democratic New Order.

Men have not made the utmost sacrifice for a return to the world as it was before 1939. That world crashed because of its inherent weaknesses. Restored with inadequate modifications, it may well crash again. Can a stronger, more stable order be established within the democratic framework? Is democracy the best form of government? Can the normal processes of democratic government effect the far-reaching changes now necessary? Can the industrial problems of our age be solved on democratic lines? Can labor and management free themselves from the prejudices of an era that is now dead? Are we justified in believing the democratic order capable of securing and maintaining the welfare of the individual and society as a whole? Can democracy resolve the conflict between nationalistic claims on the one hand and conditions essential for economic stability and efficiency on the other?

These are some of the questions considered in this philosophical approach to world problems by David Bryn-Jones. His provocative analysis and interpretations make Toward a Democratic New Order truly significant reading for our postwar world.

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The Quay Brothers
Into a Metaphysical Playroom
Suzanne Buchan
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
This work is the first thorough analysis of the creative oeuvre of the Quay Brothers. Known for their animation shorts that rely on puppetry, miniatures, and stop-motion techniques, their fiercely idiosyncratic films are fertile fields for Suzanne Buchan's engaging descriptions and provocative insights into the Quays' art-and into the art of independent puppet animation.

Buchan's aesthetic investigation stems from extensive access to the Quay Brothers' artistic practices and work, which spans animation and live-action film, stage design and illustration. She also draws on a long acquaintance with them and on interviews with collaborators essential to their productions, as well as archival sources. Discussions of their films' literary origins, space, puppets, montage, and the often-overlooked world of sound and music in animation shed new light on the expressive world that the Quay Brothers generate out of their materials to create the poetic alchemy of their films.

At once a biography of the Quays' artistic trajectory and a detailed examination of one of their best-known films, Street of Crocodiles, this book goes further and provides interdisciplinary methodologies and tools for the analysis of animation.
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Batman Saves the Congo
How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development
Alexandra Cosima Budabin
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

How celebrity strategic partnerships are disrupting humanitarian space

Can a celebrity be a “disrupter,” promoting strategic partnerships to bring new ideas and funding to revitalize the development field—or are celebrities just charismatic ambassadors for big business? Examining the role of the rich and famous in development and humanitarianism, Batman Saves the Congo argues that celebrities do both, and that understanding why and how yields insight into the realities of neoliberal development. 

In 2010, entertainer Ben Affleck, known for his superhero performance as Batman, launched the Eastern Congo Initiative to bring a new approach to the region’s development. This case study is central to Batman Saves the Congo. Affleck’s organization operates with special access, diversified funding, and significant support of elites within political, philanthropic, development, and humanitarian circuits. This sets it apart from other development organizations. With his convening power, Affleck has built partnerships with those inside and outside development, staking bipartisan political ground that is neither charity nor aid but “good business.” Such visible and recognizable celebrity humanitarians are occupying the public domain yet not engaging meaningfully with any public, argues Batman Saves the Congo. They are an unruly bunch of new players in development who amplify business solutions. 

As elite political participants, celebrities shape development practices through strategic partnerships that are both an innovative way to raise awareness and funding for neglected causes and a troubling trend of unaccountable elite leadership in North–South relations. Batman Saves the Congo helps illuminate the power of celebritized business solutions and the development contexts they create. 

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Paul Buhle
University of Minnesota Press

Popular Culture in America was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This book collects some of the best work from the journal Cultural Correspondence (1975–83), which editor Paul Buhle calls "the first political journal of culture to assume its readers (and writers) watched television." The twenty-four contributors are part of a new generation of cultural critics and historians who are self-conscious products of the mass culture of the fifties and sixties. Their work attempts to update an elementary democratic principle - that people seek understanding and solutions, real or fanciful, through the mechanisms available to them. Although these writers condemn the manipulative qualities of commercial culture, they just as vehemently reject most of what has passed for Marxist (or liberal or conservative) orthodoxy on popular culture. Americans, they argue, have had a unique opportunity as well as a unique need to make the most of popular culture; the collective cultural experience is our only shared past. The richness and vitality of that culture is the focus of this book.

The thirty-four essays work toward an understanding of American mass culture not through abstraction but by exploring the real pleasures of ordinary people's lives. Pulp literature (utopian and horror themes, sports and nurse novels, and contemporary science fiction); radio thrillers; TV horror movies: television evangelists; sitcoms; music (polka, country-western, blues, jazz, and rock 'n roll); comic strips (Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, Zippy); women's humor—these and other topics are given sensitive, detailed—sometimes humorous—attention. Paul Buhle's essay, "The 1960s Meet the 1980s," discusses popular culture scholarship, drawing on a wide range of theory—the Frankfort School, art history, literary criticism, and social science approaches. Buhle argues for the importance of this scholarship as a way of understanding "that missed connection between the cultural promise of a richly diverse, democratic society and the reality at hand."

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Hermon Carey Bumpus, Yankee Naturalist
Hermon C. Bumpus, Jr.
University of Minnesota Press, 1947

Hermon Carey Bumpus, Yankee Naturalist was first published in 1947. 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 small volume, Dr. Bumpus' son has outlined the personal history and professional career of his distinguished father, who will be known to countless associates through his work with American museums, and his outstanding career as educator and administrator: as director of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts; as professor of biology at Brown University; as the first director of the American Museum of Natural History; as business manager of the University of Wisconsin; as president of Tufts College; and as chairman of the advisory board of the National Park Service.

The trailside museums and natural history shrines that have taught thousands of Americans the story behind the scenic and natural wonders of our national parks are an enduring memorial to this man of enthusiasm and unceasing energy.

The habitat exhibits in our museums of natural history bear further witness to the imagination and practical originality of this distinguished American naturalist, who was the first president of the American Association of Museums and who contributed so much to the change of attitude and policy at a time when museums of every type were just thawing out of their ice age.

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Chaucer’s Queer Nation
Glenn Burger
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
Looks at the ways social change is expressed through debates over identities and bodies. In bodies and selves, we can see politics, economics, and culture play out, and the tensions and crises of society made visible. The women's movement, lobbies for the elderly, pro-choice and pro-life movements, AIDS research and education, pedophilia and repressed memory, global sports spectacles, organ donor networks, campaigns for safe sex, chastity, or preventive medicine--all are aspects of the contemporary politics of bodies and identities touched on in this book. Three broad themes run through the collection: how the body is constructed in various ways for different purposes, how the electronic media and its uses shape selves and sensualities and contribute to civic discourse, and how global capitalism acts as a direct force in these processes. By taking a distinctly cross-cultural and comparative approach, this volume explores more fully than ever the political, economic, institutional, and cultural settings of corporeality, identity, and representation. Contributors: Antonella Fabri, Eva Illouz, Philip W. Jenks, Lauren Langman, Timothy W. Luke, Timothy McGettigan, Margaret J. Tally.
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Theory Of The Avant-Garde
Peter Burger
University of Minnesota Press, 1984

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Robert Burgoyne
University of Minnesota Press
Our movies have started talking back to us, and Film Nation takes a close look at what they have to say. In movies like JFK and Forrest Gump, Robert Burgoyne sees a filmic extension of the debates that exercise us as a nation--debates about race and culture and national identity, about the nature and makeup of American history. In analyses of five films that challenge the traditional myths of the nation-state--Glory, Thunderheart, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, and Forrest Gump--Burgoyne explores the reshaping of our collective imaginary in relation to our history. These movies, exploring the meaning of "nation" from below, highlight issues of power that underlie the narrative construction of nationhood. Film Nation exposes the fault lines between national myths and the historical experience of people typically excluded from those myths. Throughout, Burgoyne demonstrates that these films, in their formal design, also preserve relics of the imaginary past they contest. Here we see how the "genre memory" of the western, the war film, and the melodrama shapes these films, creating a complex exchange between old concepts of history and the alternative narratives of historical experience that contemporary texts propose. The first book to apply theories of nationalism and national identity to contemporary American films, Film Nation reveals the cinematic rewriting of history now taking place as a powerful attempt to rearticulate the cultural narratives that define America as a nation. "The chief merit of Film Nation is that it outlines a study of an important but neglected period of American film--the 1980s--from a sophisticated historiographical perspective, a complex version of postmodernism and cultural studies. That is, it arises, conceptually speaking, from within the film studies orbit and takes advantage in a provocative, and in my view, compelling way, the resources and perspectives of contemporary critical theory more generally." Nick Brown "Film Nation makes a real contribution to film studies by underscoring how much the 'war film' has been revived for the purpose of contemplating nationhood, and how, more implicitly, the idea of 'America' or even 'identity' has become increasingly problematic in the era of international democratic capitalism." Tom Conley "A brilliant and elegant series of essays which demonstrate how the best contemporary historical films provide a powerful counternarrative to traditional history and help us to rethink the American past. Burgoyne's is by far the best book to date on the important relationship between American history and American film." Robert A. Rosenstone Contents: Introduction Race and Nation in Glory History vs. Folklore Two Historical Trajectories Racial Identity into National Identity Native America, Thunderheart, and the National Imaginary Reversing the Territorial Imaginary The Western and the National Imaginary The Western and its Tropes of Space and Nation War and the Forging of Ethnic Community National Identity, Gender Identity and the "Rescue Fantasy" in Born on the 4th of July Melodrama and National Identity The Critique of Masculinity as "Punitive Agency" Imaging the Nation Modernism and the Narrative of Nation in JFK The Temporality of Trauma The Imagined Community as Lost Object Prosthetic Memory/National Memory: Forrest Gump Memory and National Identity Nation and Religion Redefining the Sixties Conclusion Robert Burgoyne is professor of English and film studies at Wayne State University and is chair of the Department of English. He is the author of Bertolucci's 1900: A Narrative and Historical Analysis (1991) and coauthor, with Robert Stam and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, of New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (1992).
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Film Nation
Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition
Robert Burgoyne
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Events of the past decade have dramatically rewritten the American national narrative, bringing to light an alternate history of nation, marked since the country’s origins by competing geopolitical interests, by mobility and migration, and by contending ethnic and racial groups.
 
In this revised and expanded edition of Film Nation, Robert Burgoyne analyzes films that give shape to the counternarrative that has emerged since 9/11—one that challenges the traditional myths of the American nation-state. The films examined here, Burgoyne argues, reveal the hidden underlayers of nation, from the first interaction between Europeans and Native Americans (The New World), to the clash of ethnic groups in nineteenth-century New York (Gangs of New York), to the haunting persistence of war in the national imagination (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima) and the impact of the events of 9/11 on American identity (United 93 and World Trade Center).
 
Film Nation provides innovative readings of attempts by such directors as Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, and Oliver Stone to visualize historical events that have acquired a mythical aura in order to open up the past to the contemporary moment.
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The New American War Film
Robert Burgoyne
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A look at how post-9/11 cinema captures the new face of war in the twenty-first century
 

While the war film has carved out a prominent space within the history of cinema, the twenty-first century has seen a significant shift in the characteristics that define it. Serving as a roadmap to the genre’s contemporary modes of expression, The New American War Film explores how, in the wake of 9/11, both the nature of military conflict and the symbolic frameworks that surround it have been dramatically reshaped. 

 

Featuring in-depth analyses of contemporary films like The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Eye in the Sky, American Sniper, and others, The New American War Film details the genre’s turn away from previously foundational themes of heroic sacrifice and national glory, instead emphasizing the procedural violence of advanced military technologies and the haptic damage inflicted on individual bodies. Unfolding amid an atmosphere of profound anxiety and disillusionment, the new American war film demonstrates a breakdown of the prevailing cultural narratives that had come to characterize conflict in the previous century. 

 

With each chapter highlighting a different facet of war’s cinematic representation, The New American War Film charts society’s shifting attitudes toward violent conflict and what is broadly considered to be its acceptable repercussions. Drawing attention to changes in gender dynamics and the focus on war’s lasting psychological effects within these recent films, Robert Burgoyne analyzes how cinema both reflects and reveals the makeup of the national imaginary.

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When Time Warps
The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence
Megan Burke
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

An inquiry into the phenomenology of “woman” based in the relationship between lived time and sexual violence

 
Feminist phenomenologists have long understood a woman’s life as inhibited, confined, and constrained by sexual violence. In this important inquiry, author Megan Burke both builds and expands on this legacy by examining the production of normative womanhood through racist tropes and colonial domination. Ultimately, Burke charts a new feminist phenomenology based in the relationship between lived time and sexual violence.

By focusing on time instead of space, When Time Warps places sexualized racism at the center of the way “woman” is lived. Burke transports questions of time and gender outside the realm of the historical, making provocative new insights into how gendered individuals live time, and how their temporal existence is changed through particular experiences.

Providing a potent reexamination of the theory of Simone de Beauvoir—while also bringing to the fore important women of color theorists and engaging in the temporal aspects of #MeToo—When Time Warps makes a necessary, lasting contribution to our understanding of gender, race, and sexual violence.

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Mainsprings of Indian and Pakistani Foreign Policies
S.M. Burke
University of Minnesota Press, 1974

Mainsprings of Indian and Pakistani Foreign Policies was first published in 1974. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This study by a South Asian specialist illuminates a vast and complex field. For the first time Indian and Pakistani foreign policies have been paralleled within the covers of a single volume. Also for the first time the author has not chosen as his starting point the year 1947, when these ancient lands reemerged as sovereign states, but has adopted it as the middle point, devoting equal attention to the pre-independence period.

Part I provides a cogent answer to the query, often raised but seldom answered to the satisfaction of outsiders, why the Hindus and the Muslims, nourished by the same soil for hundreds of years, were unable to form a single united and strong nation after releasing themselves from foreign domination. And it highlights the surprising extent to which the foreign policies of India and Pakistan have been motivated by impulses inherited from their long past.

Part II evaluates the actual performance of independent India and Pakistan on the world stage; reviews the rivalry between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China to gain influence in South Asia; and probes the vital question why India and Pakistan have belied the original expectation that they would rapidly become prosperous and powerful members of the international community. Domestic pressures bearing on the foreign policies of both countries, including circumstances culminating in the emergence of Bangladesh, are explained.

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When Pain Strikes
Bill Burns
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

When Pain Strikes 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.

When pain strikes, do you raid the medicine cabinet? Read a self-help manual? Hit the roof? How we in North America respond to pain-what we think about it, what we say, and what we do-is the subject of this collection of writings and images.

The book's five sections contain a myriad of complex reactions to the occurrence of pain: "Measure It" discusses biomedical responses; "Scream and Yell" explores therapeutic solutions; "Cut It Open" takes up surgical interventions; "Take a Pill" looks at pharmacology; and "Intensify It" examines positions that embrace pain. Each section comprises original artwork, scholarly analyses, poetic and literary texts, and discussions by activists. Hailing from the university, the gallery, and the community organization, the authors—as TV watchers, recreational drug users, recipients of medical attention, caregivers, midwives, or the HIV positive—inhabit and reconfigure our contemporary painscape, offering a new approach to the puzzle of pain.

Contributors: Charles R. Acland; Barbara McGill Balfour; Isabelle Brabant; Stephen Busby; Millie Chen; Michael Fernandes; Bob Flanagan; Thyrza Nichols Goodeve; Marie-Paule Macdonald; Ronald Melzack; Margaret Morse; Celeste Olalquiaga; John O'Neill; Gerard Päs; Elsie Petch; D. L. Pughe; Julia Scher; Cathy Sisler; Johanne Sloan; Jana Sterbak; Fred Tomaselli; Patrick D. Wall; Theodore Wan; Gregory Whitehead; Fred Wilson.

When Pain Strikes is published in collaboration with the Banff Centre for the Arts.

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Alfred Leroy Burt
University of Minnesota Press

A Short History of Canada for Americans was first published in 1942. 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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Old Province of Quebec
Alfred Leroy Burt
University of Minnesota Press, 1933

Old Province of Quebec was first published in 1933. 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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Notes on Nowhere
Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation
Jennifer Burwell
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

Notes on Nowhere 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.

The term utopia implies both "good place" and "nowhere." Since Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1516, debates about utopian models of society have sought to understand the implications of these somewhat contradictory definitions. In Notes on Nowhere, author Jennifer Burwell uses a cross section of contemporary feminist science fiction to examine the political and literary meaning of utopian writing and utopian thought.

Burwell provides close readings of the science fiction novels of five feminist writers-Marge Piercy, Sally Gearhart, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, and Monique Wittig-and poses questions central to utopian writing: Do these texts promote a tradition in which narratives of the ideal society have been used to hide rather than reveal violence, oppression, and social divisions? Can a feminist critical utopia offer a departure from this tradition by using utopian narratives to expose contradiction and struggle as central aspects of the utopian impulse? What implications do these questions have for those who wish to retain the utopian impulse for emancipatory political uses?

As one way of answering these questions, Burwell compares two "figures" that inform utopian writing and social theory. The first is the traditional abstract "revolutionary" subject who contradicts existing conditions and who points us to the ideal body politic. The second, "resistant," subject is partial, concrete, and produced by conditions rather than operating outside of them. In analyzing contemporary changes in the subject's relationship to social space, Burwell draws from and revises "standpoint approaches" that tie visions of social transformation to a group's position within existing conditions.

By exploring the dilemmas, antagonisms, and resolutions within the critical literary feminist utopia, Burwell creates connections to a similar set of problems and resolutions characterizing "nonliterary" discourses of social transformation such as feminism, gay and lesbian studies, and Marxism. Notes on Nowhere makes an original, significant, and persuasive contribution to our understanding of the political and literary dimensions of the utopian impulse in literature and social theory.

Jennifer Burwell teaches in the Department of English at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

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Undoing Empire
Race And Nation In The Mulatto Caribbean
Jose F. Buscaglia-Salgado
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
A revelatory account that places mulatto experience at the center of Caribbean history. This ambitious book brings to light the story of what José F. Buscaglia-Salgado terms mulataje-the ways Caribbean aesthetics offer the possibility of the ultimate erasure of racial difference. Undoing Empire gives a broad panorama stretching from the complex politics of medieval Iberian societies to the beginning of direct U.S. hegemony in the Caribbean at the end of the nineteenth century. Buscaglia-Salgado begins with an examination of Washington Irving's "American Columbiad" as an act of historical and territorial plundering. He then traces the roots of mulatto society to the pre-1492 Iberian world, not only finding a connection between the Moors of "Old Spain" and the morenos-the blacks and mulattos of the New World-but also offering a profound critique of creole and imperial discourses. Buscaglia-Salgado reads the pursuit and contestation of what he terms the European Ideal in colonial texts, architecture, and paintings; then identifies the mulatto movement of "undoing" the Ideal in the wars that shook the nineteenth-century Caribbean from Haiti to Cuba, arguing that certain projects of national liberation have moved contrary to the historical claims to freedom in the mulatto world. José F. Buscaglia-Salgado is assistant professor of modern languages and comparative literature and director of Cuban and Caribbean Programs at the University at Buffalo.
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Verdi’s Aida
The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents
Hans Busch
University of Minnesota Press, 1978

Verdi's Aida was first published in 1978. 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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Globalizing Family Values
The Christian Right In International Politics
Doris Buss
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
A timely exposé of the efforts of the religious right to influence global policy. With little fanfare and profound effect, "family values" have gone global, and the influence of the Christian Right is increasingly felt internationally. This is the first comprehensive study of the Christian Right's global reach and its impact on international law and politics. Doris Buss and Didi Herman explore tensions, contradictions, victories, and defeats for the Christian Right's global project, particularly in the United Nations. The authors consult Christian Right materials, from pamphlets to novels; conduct interviews with people in the movement; and provide a firsthand account of the World Congress of Families II in 1999, a key event in formulating Christian Right global policy and strategy. The result is a detailed look at a new global player-its campaigns against women's rights, population policy, and gay and lesbian rights; its efforts to build an alliance of orthodox faiths with non-Christians; and the tensions and strains as it seeks to negotiate a role for conservative Christianity in a changing global order. Doris Buss is assistant professor of law at Carleton University in Ottawa. Didi Herman is professor of law at Keele University in the United Kingdom.
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Animals, Aging, and the Aged
Leo K. Bustad
University of Minnesota Press, 1981

Animals, Aging, and the Aged 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.

This volume explores the significant contributions of animals to our understanding of aging, to improving geriatric medicine, and to providing companionship and assistance to the elderly. Leo L. Bustad discusses what can be learned from animal life-span studies about the process of aging, including the problems of cardiovascular disease, cancer, osteoporosis, and age-related mental conditions. The results of these studies suggest that changes in life-style—especially the diet—may modify the effects of chronic degenerative diseases.

Other studies show that caring for a pet can contribute greatly to the health and well being of the elderly. Bustad surveys experiments using animals in therapy and he presents, for the first time, evaluative instruments for choosing the appropriate pet. Companion animals allow many elderly people to maintain their independence. Animals are also helpful as aids for those with visual, hearing, and physical impairments. An appendix lists agencies that train dogs as aids to the physically impaired.

Animals, Aging, and the Aged is a thoughtful discussion of the physical, psychological, and social problems faced by the elderly, with emphasis on the ways that animals have contributed to the solution of some of those problems. As such, it will be useful for those involved in geriatric medicine and social work and in veterinary medicine and research. This book is volume 5 in the series Wesley W. Spink Lectures in Comparative Medicine.

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James N. Butcher
University of Minnesota Press

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James N. Butcher
University of Minnesota Press
All the core research literature in one convenient, up-to-date volume. Since its release in 1989, the MMPI-2 (the revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) has generated an extensive body of research. A core of articles fundamental to an understanding of the MMPI-2 has emerged and is now available here in one essential resource. Edited by a recognized authority, the volume contains the published empirical and theoretical articles on scale construction for the original MMPI and the structure and development of MMPI-2 scales as well as two original pieces that fill gaps in the literature. With introductory comments preceding each section, the volume is divided into parts devoted to the development of the traditional validity and clinical scales; the MMPI-2 norms, including the development of uniform T scores; validity and supplementary scales created for the MMPI-2, as well as a set of subscales for clinical scale Si; validation research on the content scales introduced in the MMPI-2, providing information about empirical correlates that is crucial to MMPI-2 interpretation; studies on the reliability of the MMPI-2; studies on cultural and subcultural factors in MMPI-2 interpretation; and computer applications of the MMPI-2. Designed for researchers, graduate students in psychology, and professionals who use the MMPI-2 in their work, this volume will be an indispensable reference and resource.
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James N. Butcher
University of Minnesota Press
The best resource for interpreting these widely used personality assessment tests. Essentials of MMPI-2 and MMPI-A Interpretation presents innovative interpretive strategies for both the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2, or MMPI-2, and the adaptation for adolescents, the MMPI-A. James N. Butcher and Carolyn L. Williams detail the rationale for the revision and development of the instruments and their scales, and describe how to administer, score, profile, code, and interpret the tests. The revised edition includes the most recent MMPI research, including new information on ethnic background and cultural setting as they relate to assessment. Focusing primarily on studies of profile validity and external correlates, the revision also includes interpretive guidelines for several scales that will be introduced into the MMPI tests in 2000. James N. Butcher is professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. The author of numerous articles and books on the MMPI, he was a member of the MMPI Restandardization and Adolescent Project committees. Carolyn L. Williams is associate professor of epidemiology in the School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, and coauthor of two previous books on the MMPI.
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Essentials of MMPI-2 and MMPI-A Interpretation
James N. Butcher
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

The best resource for interpreting these widely used personality assessment tests.

The best resource for interpreting these widely used personality assessment tests.

Essentials of MMPI-2 and MMPI-A Interpretation presents innovative interpretive strategies for both the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2, or MMPI-2, and the adaptation for adolescents, the MMPI-A. James N. Butcher and Carolyn L. Williams detail the rationale for the revision and development of the instruments and their scales, and describe how to administer, score, profile, code, and interpret the tests.The revised edition includes the most recent MMPI research, including new information on ethnic background and cultural setting as they relate to assessment. Focusing primarily on studies of profile validity and external correlates, the revision also includes interpretive guidelines for several scales that will be introduced into the MMPI tests in 2000.Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
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The Transit of Empire
Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism
Jodi A. Byrd
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

In 1761 and again in 1768, European scientists raced around the world to observe the transit of Venus, a rare astronomical event in which the planet Venus passes in front of the sun. In The Transit of Empire, Jodi A. Byrd explores how indigeneity functions as transit, a trajectory of movement that serves as precedent within U.S. imperial history. Byrd argues that contemporary U.S. empire expands itself through a transferable “Indianness” that facilitates acquisitions of lands, territories, and resources.

Examining an array of literary texts, historical moments, and pending legislations—from the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma’s vote in 2007 to expel Cherokee Freedmen to the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization bill—Byrd demonstrates that inclusion into the multicultural cosmopole does not end colonialism as it is purported to do. Rather, that inclusion is the very site of the colonization that feeds U.S. empire.

Byrd contends that the colonization of American Indian and indigenous nations is the necessary ground from which to reimagine a future where the losses of indigenous peoples are not only visible and, in turn, grieveable, but where indigenous peoples have agency to transform life on their own lands and on their own terms.

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