Troubling the Family argues that the emergence of multiracialism during the 1990s was determined by underlying and unacknowledged gender norms. Opening with a germinal moment for multiracialism—the seemingly massive and instantaneous popular appearance of Tiger Woods in 1997—Habiba Ibrahim examines how the shifting status of racial hero for both black and multiracial communities makes sense only by means of an account of masculinity.
Ibrahim looks across historical events and memoirs—beginning with the Loving v. Virginia case in 1967 when miscegenation laws were struck down—to reveal that gender was the starting point of an analytics that made categorical multiracialism, and multiracial politics, possible. Producing a genealogy of multiracialism’s gendered basis allows Ibrahim to focus on a range of stakeholders whose interests often ran against the grain of what the multiracial movement of the 1990s often privileged: the sanctity of the heteronormative family, the labor of child rearing, and more precise forms of racial tabulation—all of which, when taken together, could form the basis for creating so-called neutral personhood.
Ibrahim concludes with a consideration of Barack Obama as a representation of the resurrection of the assurance that multiracialism extended into the 2000s: a version of personhood with no memory of its own gendered legacy, and with no self-account of how it became so masculine that it can at once fill the position of political leader and the promise of the end of politics.
A personal account of the aging body and advanced technologies by a preeminent philosopher of technology
Medical Technics is a rigorous examination of how medical progress has modified our worlds and contributed to a virtual revolution in longevity. Don Ihde offers a unique autobiographical tour of medical events experienced in a decade, beginning in his 70s. Ihde offers experiential and postphenomenological analyses of technologies such as sonography and microsurgery, and ultimately asks what it means to increasingly become a cyborg.
Forerunners: Ideas FirstA vital contribution to environmental humanities that explores artistic responses to the plastic age
Since at least the 1960s, plastics have been a defining feature of contemporary life. They are undeniably utopian—wondrously innovative, cheap, malleable, durable, and convenient. Yet our proliferating use of plastics has also triggered catastrophic environmental consequences. Plastics are piling up in landfills, floating in oceans, and contributing to climate change and cancer clusters. They are derived from petrochemicals and enmeshed with the global oil economy, and they permeate our consumer goods and their packaging, our clothing and buildings, our bodies and minds. Plastic reshapes our cultural and social imaginaries.
With impressive breadth and compelling urgency, the essays in Life in Plastic examine the arts and literature of the plastic age. Focusing mainly on post-1960s North America, the collection spans a wide variety of genres, including graphic novels, superhero comics, utopic and dystopic science fiction, poetry, and satirical prose, as well as vinyl records and visual arts. Essays by a remarkable lineup of cultural theorists interrogate how plastic—as material and concept—has affected human sensibilities and expression. The collection reveals the place of plastic in reshaping how we perceive, relate to, represent, and re-imagine bodies, senses, environment, scale, mortality, and collective well-being.
Ultimately, the contributors to Life in Plastic think through plastic with an eye to imagining our way out of plastic, moving toward a postplastic future.
Contributors: Crystal Bartolovich, Syracuse U; Maurizia Boscagli, U of California, Santa Barbara; Christopher Breu, Illinois State U; Loren Glass, U of Iowa; Sean Grattan, U of Kent; Nayoung Kim, Brandeis U; Jane Kuenz, U of Southern Maine; Paul Morrison, Brandeis U; W. Dana Phillips, Towson U in Maryland and Rhodes U in Grahamstown, South Africa; Margaret Ronda, UC-Davis; Lisa Swanstrom, U of Utah; Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Pennsylvania State U; Phillip E. Wegner, U of Florida; Daniel Worden, Rochester Institute of Technology.
Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints investigates cultural icons of the late nineteenth century from Mexico’s largely unstudied northwest borderlands, present-day Sonora, Baja California, and western Chihuahua. Robert McKee Irwin looks at popular figures such as Joaquín Murrieta, the gold rush social bandit; Lola Casanova, the anti-Malinche, whose marriage to a Seri Indian symbolized a forbidden form of mestizaje; and la Santa de Cabora, a young faith healer who inspired armed insurgencies and was exiled to Arizona.
Cultural icons such as Murrieta, Lola Casanova, and la Santa de Cabora are products of intercultural dialogue, Irwin reveals, and their characterizations are unstable. They remain relevant for generations because there is no consensus regarding their meanings, and they are weapons in struggles of representation in the borderlands. The figures studied here are especially malleable, he argues, because they are marginalized from the mainstream of historiography.
A timely analysis, Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints challenges current paradigms of border studies and presents a rich understanding of the ways in which cultural icons influence people’s minds and lives.
Robert McKee Irwin is associate professor of Spanish at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Mexican Masculinities (Minnesota, 2003).
Internationalism and Its Betrayal was first published in 1995. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
A new world order, proclaimed Western leaders after the cold war, could extend liberal democracy and human rights around the globe. Yet the specter of nationalism once again haunts the world, threatening to extinguish the spirit of internationalism.
Although internationalism is typically understood to be diametrically opposed to nationalism, Micheline Ishay argues to the contrary, maintaining that internationalism often incorporates an individualist element that manifests itself as nationalism during critical periods such as war. For example, the new liberal internationalism invoked after the cold war is now revealing its limits-as reflected by the UN's inability to interfere promptly to stop ethnic and nationalist conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere.
Internationalism and Its Betrayal explores the tensions and contradictions between ideas of nationalism and internationalism, focusing on the major political thinkers from the early modern period into the nineteenth century. Ishay examines the writings of Vico, Grotius, Rousseau, Kant, Paine, Robespierre, Burke, Fichte, de Maistre, and Hegel. She speaks to an audience of individuals interested in the spread of democracy, students of human rights and international relations, historians of the French Revolution, and political theorists.
Isherwood’s lectures on writing and writers, now all available for the first time
In the 1960s, Christopher Isherwood gave an unprecedented series of lectures at California universities about his life and work. During this time Isherwood, who would liberate the memoir and become the founding father of modern gay writing, spoke openly for the first time about his craft—on writing for film, theater, and novels—and spirituality. Isherwood on Writing brings these free-flowing, wide-ranging public addresses together to reveal a distinctly American Isherwood at the top of his form.
This updated edition contains the long-lost conclusion to the second lecture, published here for the first time, including its discussion of A Single Man, his greatest novel, and A Meeting by the River, his final novel.
Germania, USA was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
An unusual community in southern Minnesota, New Ulm, a town of about 12,000 inhabitants, is the subject of this sociological study. New Ulm was founded in 1856 by a group of German immigrants who came to the United States as refugees from the revolution of 1848 in Germany. They were members of the Turnverein, a society of liberal thinkers who were a political minority in Germany. In founding New Ulm they established a "utopian" ethnic community, became the town's status elite, and for a long time monopolized its economic, political, and cultural life.
Professor Iverson analyzes four aspects of sociological change in the community—class, status, power, and assimilation. Each aspect is viewed according to the differences found between two generations of the upper status group, the Turners, and two corresponding generations of non-Turners.
In addition to its substantive contribution to our knowledge of ethnic settlements, the study demonstrates a gain in methodological precision over many earlier studies of ethnic communities. Its chief methodological innovation is in the use of scales to verify and measure the changing structure of class, status, and power, and to gauge the extent of assimilation.
The book is of interest not only to sociologists, especially those concerned with the study of community change, but also to political scientists interested in the study of community power structures. Also, the methodology will be instructive to those interested in the design of community studies.
In May 1904, the residents of Halcyon—a small utopian community on California’s central coast—invited their neighbors to attend the grand opening of the Halcyon Hotel and Sanatorium. As part of the entertainment, guests were encouraged to have their hands X-rayed. For the founders and members of Halcyon, the X-ray was a demonstration of mysterious spiritual forces made practical to human beings.
Radiance from Halcyon is the story not only of the community but also of its uniquely inventive members’ contributions to religion and science. The new synthesis of religion and science attempted by Theosophy laid the foundation for advances produced by the children of the founding members, including microwave technology and atomic spectral analysis. Paul Eli Ivey’s narrative starts in the 1890s in Syracuse, New York, with the rising of the Temple of the People, a splinter group of the theosophical movement. After developing its ideals for an agricultural and artisanal community, the Temple purchased land in California and in 1903 began to live its dream there.
In addition to an intriguing account of how a little-known utopian religious community profoundly influenced modern science, Ivey offers a wide-ranging cultural history, encompassing Theosophy, novel healing modalities, esoteric architecture, Native American concepts of community, socialist utopias, and innovative modern music.
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