Resolutions 3 explores the wide-ranging implications of video art and video-based production in contemporary media culture. It is the third volume in a series composed of Resolution: A Critique of Video Art (1986) and Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (1996). While Resolution was one of the first critical texts on video art in the United States, Resolutions was one of the first books to address video as a medium across disciplines from theoretical, activist, and transnational perspectives.
Resolutions 3 articulates this legacy as a challenge to reengage with the explosive viral reach of moving image–based content and its infiltration into and impact on culture and everyday life. The contributors to this work analyze what is now a fourth decade of video practices as marked within and outside the margins of art production, networked interventions, projected spectacle, museum entombment, or 24/7 streaming. Intending to broaden, contest, and amplify the mediated space that was defined by its two predecessors, this volume investigates the ever-changing state of video’s deployment as examiner, tool, journal reportage, improvisation, witness, riff, leverage, and document.
Contributors: Kathleen Ash-Milby, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; Myriam-Odile Blin, Rouen U, France; Nancy Buchanan, California Institute of the Arts; Derek A. Burrill, U of California, Riverside; Sean Cubitt, U of Melbourne; Faisal Devji, New York U; Jennifer Doyle, U of California, Riverside; Jennifer Friedlander, Pomona College; Kathy High, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Lucas Hilderbrand, U of California, Irvine; Nguyen Tan Hoang, Bryn Mawr College; Kathy Rae Huffman; Amelia Jones, McGill U; David Joselit, Yale U; Alexandra Juhasz, Pitzer College; Jessica Lawless, Santa Fe Community College; Hea Jeong Lee; Jesse Lerner, Pitzer College; Akira Mizuta Lippit, U of Southern California; Lionel Manga; Laurence A. Rickels, U of California, Santa Barbara; Kenneth Rogers, U of California, Riverside; Michael Rush, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State U; Freya Schiwy, U of California, Riverside; Beverly R. Singer, U of New Mexico; Yvonne Spielmann, U of the West of Scotland; Catherine Taft, Getty Research Institute; Holly Willis, U of Southern California.
Hegel or Spinoza is the first English-language translation of the modern classic Hegel ou Spinoza. Published in French in 1979, it has been widely influential, particularly in the work of the philosophers Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri, and Gilles Deleuze.
Hegel or Spinoza is a surgically precise interrogation of the points of misreading of Spinoza by Hegel. Pierre Macherey explains the necessity of Hegel’s misreading in the kernel of thought that is “indigestible” for Hegel, which makes the Spinozist system move in a way that Hegel cannot grasp. In doing so, Macherey exposes the limited and situated truth of Hegel’s perspective—which reveals more about Hegel himself than about his object of analysis. Against Hegel’s characterization of Spinoza’s work as immobile, Macherey offers a lively alternative that upsets the accepted historical progression of philosophical knowledge. He finds in Spinoza an immanent philosophy that is not subordinated to the guarantee of an a priori truth.
Not simply authorizing a particular reading—a “good” Spinoza against a “bad” Hegel—Hegel or Spinoza initiates an encounter that produces a new understanding, a common truth that emerges in the interval that separates the two.
Faith and History in the Old Testament was first published in 1963. 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 absorbing and readable account of the religion of ancient Israel is presented against the background of other cultures of the time. Father MacKenzie traces the development of Israel's belief and draws upon modern knowledge of the cultures of the ancient Near East to illuminate the history. But the main stress is on the religious meaning which the Israelites themselves perceived in the events they experienced, a meaning which is accepted and extended in different ways by modern Jews and by Christians.
The author explains, in non-technical style, the distinctive features of the faith of the Old Testament as evident in such themes as covenant, creation, retribution, the pursuit of wisdom, and the hope of salvation. At the outset, he defines the study of theology and places the study of Chrisson with that of Israel. He analyzes Israel's concept of God and the character of the covenant between God and the people of Israel, discusses the Israelite literature on the creation of earth and its creatures, and considers the interrelationship between myth and history. He discusses the search for wisdom in Israel, the public prayers, and the concept of a promise from the deity. In conclusion, he presents the interpretation by the Old Testament authors of these distinctive features of Israel's religion.
The book is intended for lay people interested in modern Bible interpretation, as well as for priests, ministers, and rabbis who wish a general survey of the Old Testament. It is suitable for use as a text or supplementary reading in religion or theology courses.
A groundbreaking feminist perspective on Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) rule in Bolivia and the country’s radical transformation under Evo Morales
The presidency of Evo Morales in Bolivia (2006–2019) has produced considerable academic scholarship, much of it focused on indigenous social movements or extractivism, and often triumphalist about the successes of Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). Turning a new lens on the movement, Cash, Clothes, and Construction presents the first gender-based analysis of “pluri-economy,” a central pillar of Bolivia’s program under Morales, evaluating the potential of this vision of “an economy where all economies fit” to embrace feminist critiques of capitalism and economic diversity.
Based on more than twelve years of empirical research exploring the remarkable transformations in Bolivia since 2006, this book focuses on three sectors—finance, clothing, and construction—in which indigenous women have defied gendered expectations. Kate Maclean presents detailed case studies of women selling secondhand high street clothes from the United States in the vast, peri-urban markets of Bolivian cities; Aymaran designers of new pollera (traditional Andean dress) fashions, one of whom exhibited her collection in New York City; and the powerful and rich chola paceña, whose real estate investments have transformed the cultural maps of La Paz and El Alto.
Cash, Clothes, and Construction offers a gendered analysis of the mission of MAS to dismantle neoliberalism and decolonize politics and economy from the perspective of the Indigenous women who have radically transformed Bolivia’s economy from the ground up.
The Medieval Monastery was first published in 1991. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
In Chains of Babylon, Daryl J. Maeda presents a cultural history of Asian American activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, showing how the movement created the category of "Asian American" to join Asians of many ethnicities in racial solidarity. Drawing on the Black Power and antiwar movements, Asian American radicals argued that all Asians in the United States should resist assimilation and band together to oppose racism within the country and imperialism abroad.
As revealed in Maeda's in-depth work, the Asian American movement contended that people of all Asian ethnicities in the United States shared a common relationship to oppression and exploitation with each other and with other nonwhite peoples. In the early stages of the civil rights era, the possibility of assimilation was held out to Asian Americans under a model minority myth. Maeda insists that it was only in the disruption of that myth for both African Americans and Asian Americans in the 1960s and 1970s that the full Asian American culture and movement he describes could emerge. Maeda challenges accounts of the post-1968 era as hopelessly divisive by examining how racial and cultural identity enabled Asian Americans to see eye-to-eye with and support other groups of color in their campaigns for social justice.
Asian American opposition to the war in Vietnam, unlike that of the broader antiwar movement, was predicated on understanding it as a racial, specifically anti-Asian genocide. Throughout he argues that cultural critiques of racism and imperialism, the twin "chains of Babylon" of the title, informed the construction of a multiethnic Asian American identity committed to interracial and transnational solidarity.
An Introduction to Ancient Iranian Religion was first published in 1983. 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 Persia fell to Islam in the mid-seventh century, the ancient Iranian religion of Zoroastrianism all but disappeared (although it is still practiced by small groups in India and Iran). As one of the dominant religions of antiquity, it influenced the Judeo- Christian tradition as well as some forms of gnosticism. Despite its age and venerable place in the history of world religions, Zoroastrianism remains little known outside of a few philologists and historians of religion. Because of the difficulty of translation, there is little primary textual material available for nonspecialists; the few translations that do exist are quite old.
In An Introduction to Ancient Iranian Religion, William Malandra provides not only modern English translations of the sacred texts but also a comprehensive introduction to the subject of Zoroastrianism itself. In an introductory essay Malandra outlines the main features of Zoroastrianism in its historical, cultural, and spiritual setting. His new translations of readings from the Avesta, the sacred book of Zoroastrianism, and selections from the Achaemenid inscriptions of the great kings Darius and Xerxes are accompanied by interpretive notes that allow students to make their way through this difficult material. This book is, therefore, not just a collection of texts but a selfcontained introduction to Zoroastrianism that can be used by the nonspecialist without recourse to additional interpretive works.How the “bad feelings” of trans experience inform trans survival and flourishing
Some days—or weeks, or months, or even years—being trans feels bad. Yet as Hil Malatino points out, there is little space for trans people to think through, let alone speak of, these bad feelings. Negative emotions are suspect because they unsettle narratives of acceptance or reinforce virulently phobic framings of trans as inauthentic and threatening.
In Side Affects, Malatino opens a new conversation about trans experience that acknowledges the reality of feeling fatigue, envy, burnout, numbness, and rage amid the ongoing onslaught of casual and structural transphobia in order to map the intricate emotional terrain of trans survival. Trans structures of feeling are frequently coded as negative on both sides of transition. Before transition, narratives are framed in terms of childhood trauma and being in the “wrong body.” Posttransition, trans individuals—especially trans people of color—are subject to unrelenting transantagonism. Yet trans individuals are discouraged from displaying or admitting to despondency or despair.
By moving these unloved feelings to the center of trans experience, Side Affects proposes an affective trans commons that exists outside political debates about inclusion. Acknowledging such powerful and elided feelings as anger and exhaustion, Malatino contends, is critical to motivating justice-oriented advocacy and organizing—and recalibrating new possibilities for survival and well-being.
A radical and necessary rethinking of trans care
What does it mean for trans people to show up for one another, to care deeply for one another? How have failures of care shaped trans lives? What care practices have trans subjects and communities cultivated in the wake of widespread transphobia and systemic forms of trans exclusion?
Trans Care is a critical intervention in how care labor and care ethics have been thought, arguing that dominant modes of conceiving and critiquing the politics and distribution of care entrench normative and cis-centric familial structures and gendered arrangements. A serious consideration of trans survival and flourishing requires a radical rethinking of how care operates.
Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
Studies in English Philology was first published in 1929. 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 theory and practice of social movements come together in strategy—whether, why, and how people can realize their visions of another world by acting together. Strategies for Social Change offers a concise definition of strategy and a framework for differentiating between strategies. Specific chapters address microlevel decision-making processes and creativity, coalition building in Northern Ireland, nonviolent strategies for challenging repressive regimes, identity politics, GLBT rights, the Christian right in Canada and the United States, land struggles in Brazil and India, movement-media publicity, and corporate social movement organizations.
Contributors: Jessica Ayo Alabi, Orange Coast College; Kenneth T. Andrews, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Anna-Liisa Aunio, U of Montreal; Linda Blozie; Tina Fetner, McMaster U; James M. Jasper, CUNY; Karen Jeffreys; David S. Meyer, U of California, Irvine; Sharon Erickson Nepstad, U of New Mexico; Francesca Polletta, U of California, Irvine; Belinda Robnett, U of California, Irvine; Charlotte Ryan, U of Massachusetts–Lowell; Carrie Sanders, Wilfrid Laurier U; Kurt Schock, Rutgers U; Jackie Smith, U of Pittsburgh; Suzanne Staggenborg, U of Pittsburgh; Stellan Vinthagen, U West, Sweden; Nancy Whittier, Smith College.
Learning from children about citizenship status and how it shapes their schooling
There is a persistent assumption in the field of education that children are largely unaware of their immigration status and its implications. In Knowing Silence, Ariana Mangual Figueroa challenges this “myth of ignorance.” By listening carefully to both the speech and significant silences of six Latina students from mixed-immigration-status families, from elementary school into middle school and beyond, she reveals the complex ways young people understand and negotiate immigration status and its impact on their lives.
Providing these children with iPod Touches to record their own conversations, Mangual Figueroa observes when and how they choose to talk about citizenship at home, at school, and in public spaces. Analyzing family conversations about school forms, in-class writing assignments, encounters with the police, and applications for college, she demonstrates that children grapple with the realities of citizenship from an early age. Educators who underestimate children’s knowledge, Mangual Figueroa shows, can marginalize or misunderstand these students and their families.
Combining significant empirical findings with reflections on the ethical questions surrounding research and responsibility, Mangual Figueroa models new ways scholars might collaborate with educators, children, and families. With rigorous and innovative ethnographic methodologies, Knowing Silence makes audible the experiences of immigrant-origin students in their own terms, ultimately offering teachers and researchers a crucial framework for understanding citizenship in the contemporary classroom.
Hollywood Independents explores the crucial period from 1948 to 1962 when independent film producers first became key components of the modern corporate entertainment industry. Denise Mann examines the impact of the radically changed filmmaking climate—the decline of the studios, the rise of television, and the rise of potent talent agencies like MCA—on a group of prominent talent-turned-producers including Burt Lancaster, Joseph Mankiewicz, Elia Kazan, and Billy Wilder.
In order to show how these newly independent filmmakers negotiated through an increasingly fraught, reactionary creative atmosphere, Mann analyzes the reflexive portraits of their altered working conditions in such films as A Face in the Crowd, Sweet Smell of Success, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? These artists, she shows, took on the corporate middle-managers at television networks and talent agencies as a way of challenging the status quo without risking censorship or blacklisting.
This period saw the evolution of film production from the studio-governed system to one of entrepreneurs. Out of this new arrangement, which encouraged greater creative freedom, emerged a nascent form of independent art cinema that sowed the seeds of the Hollywood Renaissance that followed.
Denise Mann is associate professor of film, TV and digital media at UCLA. She is coeditor of Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer (Minnesota, 1992).
Micro-Politics was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Patricia S. Mann explains our current period as a time of social transformation resulting from an "unmooring" of women, men, and children from the nuclear family, gender relations having replaced economic relations as the primary site of social tension and change in our lives. The feminist movement has evolved, according to Mann, into a popularly based postfeminist struggle to reconstruct relationships between women and men within everyday contexts of work, family, education, and politics.
Mann formulates a "postmodern" theory of political agency, utilizing it to explain political events such as the Hill-Thomas Senate hearings and their social aftermath. While liberal and progressive theories have explained political agency in terms of individual or group forms of identity, Mann suggests another alternative. Individuals such as Anita Hill are drawn into socially meaningful struggles in the context of their daily lives-as we all are potentially participating in micro-political forms of activism in a variety of institutional contexts. These dynamic micropolitical situations involve intersecting dimensions of race, class, and sexuality, as well as gender. Within specific conflicts, individuals rearticulate their notions of desire and responsibility, and their expectations for recognition and reward; according to Mann political agency resides in these choices. Addressing some of the most important controversies in political philosophy, Mann weaves together strands of the "participatory politics" of the 1960s and the multicultural politics of the 1990s. In doing so, she offers a new basis for understanding social change.“Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from Thought in the Act
Combining philosophy and aesthetics, Thought in the Act is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” a wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art.
Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. Thought in the Act enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics.
Understanding the political and ecological implications of Heidegger’s work without ignoring his noxious public engagements
The most controversial philosopher of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger has influenced generations of intellectuals even as his involvement with Nazism and blatant anti-Semitism, made even clearer after the publication of his Black Notebooks, have recently prompted some to discard his contributions entirely. For Michael Marder, Heidegger’s thought remains critical for interpretations of contemporary politics and our relation to the natural environment.
Bringing together and reframing more than a decade of Marder’s work on Heidegger, this volume questions the wholesale rejection of Heidegger, arguing that dismissive readings of his project overlook the fact that it is impossible to grasp without appreciating his lifelong commitment to phenomenology and that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is an aberration in his still-relevant ecological and political thought, rather than a defining characteristic. Through close readings of Heidegger’s books and seminars, along with writings by other key phenomenologists and political philosophers, Marder contends that neither Heidegger’s politics nor his reflections on ecology should be considered in isolation from his phenomenology. By demonstrating the codetermination of his phenomenological, ecological, and political thinking, Marder accounts for Heidegger’s failures without either justifying them or suggesting that they invalidate his philosophical endeavor as a whole.
An exploration of the explosive illegal trade in succulents and the passion that drives it
Cacti and succulents are phenomenally popular worldwide among plant enthusiasts, despite being among the world’s most threatened species. The fervor driving the illegal trade in succulents might also be driving some species to extinction. Delving into the strange world of succulent collecting, The Cactus Hunters takes us to the heart of this conundrum: the mystery of how and why ardent lovers of these plants engage in their illicit trade. This is a world of alluring desires, where collectors and conservationists alike are animated by passions that at times exceed the limits of law.
What inspires the desire for a plant? What kind of satisfaction does it promise? The answer, Jared D. Margulies suspects, might be traced through the roots and workings of the illegal succulent trade—an exploration that traverses the fields of botany and criminology, political ecology and human geography, and psychoanalysis. His globe-spanning inquiry leads Margulies from a spectacular series of succulent heists on a small island off the coast of Mexico to California law enforcement agents infiltrating a smuggling ring in South Korea, from scientists racing to discover new and rare species before poachers find them to a notorious Czech “cacto-explorer” who helped turn a landlocked European country into the epicenter of the illegal succulent trade.
A heady blend of international intrigue, social theory, botanical lore, and ecological study, The Cactus Hunters offers complex insight into species extinction, conservation, and more-than-human care.
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Proposes a revolutionary approach to the interpretation of art, film, and the digital.
In Touch, Laura U. Marks develops a critical approach more tactile than visual, an intensely physical and sensuous engagement with works of media art that enriches our understanding and experience of these works and of art itself.
These critical, theoretical, and personal essays serve as a guide to developments in nonmainstream media art during the past ten years—sexual representation debates, documentary ethics, the shift from analog to digital media, a new social obsession with smell. Marks takes up well-known artists like experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and mysterious animators the Brothers Quay, and introduces groundbreaking, lesser-known film, video, and digital artists.
From this emerges a materialist theory—an embodied, erotic relationship to art and to the world. Marks’s approach leads to an appreciation of the works’ mortal bodies: film’s volatile emulsion, video’s fragile magnetic base, crash-prone Net art; it also offers a productive alternative to the popular understanding of digital media as "virtual" and immaterial. Weaving a continuous fabric from philosophy, fiction, science, dreams, and intimate experience, Touch opens a new world of art media to readers.
While Betty Crocker is often associated with 1950s happy homemaking, she originally belonged to a different generation. Created in 1921 as a “friend to homemakers” for the Washburn Crosby Company (a forerunner to General Mills) in Minneapolis, her purpose was to answer consumer mail. “She” was actually the women of the Home Service Department who signed Betty’s name. Eventually, Betty Crocker’s local radio show on WCCO expanded, and audiences around the nation tuned her in, tried her money-saving recipes, and wrote Betty nearly 5,000 fan letters per day. In Finding Betty Crocker, Susan Marks offers an utterly unique look at the culinary and marketing history of America’s First Lady of Food.
Susan Marks is a writer/producer/director with her own production company, Lazy Susan Productions.
Neurofilaments was first published in 1983. 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.
Neurofilaments are fibrous organelles that serve as one of the main structural elements of neurons. Synthesized in the perikaryon ,or nerve cell body, neurofilaments are transported along the axon, where they help to maintain the neuronal architecture. Recent research has shown that neurofilaments are biochemically distinct from other kinds of cellular filaments and that they play a special role in the health and functioning of neurons. Although their existence has been recognized for over a century, scientists have only recently started to apply the methods of cellular and molecular biology to the study of neurofilaments, aided by the use of the electron microscope. The study of neurofilaments has raised a number of interesting biological questions with implications for our understanding of neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, and neurology. This book is the first to provide, in one place, reports by specialists on the most significant areas of research on these neuronal organelles.
The book opens with a historical background to current research, followed by chapters dealing with the neuronal cytoskeleton; the biochemistry of neurofilaments; neurofilaments of the mammalian peripheral nerve; the functional role of neurofilaments in axonal transport; the metabolism of neurofilaments; experimental models of abnormal neurofilamentous pathology; and the relation of these abnormal structures to Alzheimer's disease. Editor Charles Marotta's closing chapter surveys current and future neurofilament research.
Cultures have long defined themselves through biological elements to prove their strength and longevity, from cherry blossoms in Japan to amber waves of grain in the United States. In Ecology without Culture, Christine L. Marran introduces the concept of biotropes—material and semiotic figures that exist for human perception—to navigate how and why the material world has proven to be such an effective medium for representing culture. A bold and timely reconsideration of ecocriticism, Ecology without Culture insists on decentering questions of culture to highlight the materiality of poetry, film, and prose fiction.
Marran argues that ecocriticism can critique ecological realities more effectively from outside the frame of human exceptionalism. Through discussions of primarily non-Anglophone literature, poetry, and cinema about toxic events in contemporary history— from the depiction of slow violence in documentary by Tsuchimoto Noriaki to the powerful poetry of Ishimure Michiko—Marran argues that ecocriticism must find a way to engage culture without making the perpetuation of ethnos and anthropos the endgame of ecopolitics.
Using the biological foundations and geological time scales of textual worlds to more deeply critique cultural humanism, Marran ultimately contends that the chief stumbling block to ecological thinking is not the image of nature, but the image of culture.
Based on the lives and crimes of no less than twenty real women, dokufu (poison women) narratives emerged as a powerful presence in Japan during the 1870s. During this tumultuous time, as the nation moved from feudalism to oligarchic government, such accounts articulated the politics and position of underclass women, sexual morality, and female suffrage. Over the next century, the figure of the oversexed female criminal, usually guilty of robbery or murder, became ubiquitous in modern Japanese culture.
In Poison Woman, Christine L. Marran investigates this powerful icon, its shifting meanings, and its influence on defining women’s sexuality and place in Japan. She begins by considering Meiji gesaku literature, in which female criminality was often medically defined and marginalized as abnormal. She describes the small newspapers (koshinbun) that originally reported on poison women, establishing journalistic and legal conventions for future fiction about them. She examines zange, or confessional narratives, of female and male ex-convicts from the turn of the century, then reveals how medical and psychoanalytical literature of the 1920s and 1930s offered contradictory explanations of the female criminal as an everywoman or a historical victim of social circumstances and the press. She concludes by exploring postwar pulp fiction (kasutori), film and underground theater of the 1970s, and the feminist writer Tomioka Taeko’s take on the transgressive woman.
Persistent stories about poison women illustrate how a few violent acts by women were transformed into myriad ideological, social, and moral tales that deployed notions of female sexual desire and womanhood. Bringing together literary criticism, the history of science, media theory, and gender and sexuality studies, Poison Woman delves into genre and gender in ways that implicate both in projects of nation-building.
Christine L. Marran is associate professor of Japanese literature and cultural studies at the University of Minnesota.
The Celebrity Persona Pandemic explores how the construction of a public persona is fetishized in contemporary culture. As social media has progressively led to a greater focus on the production of the self, so this book looks at the most visible versions of persona through figures such as Stephen Colbert, Cate Blachett, and Justin Bieber, as well as fictional characters like Spock and Harry Potter. Ultimately, P. David Marshall closely studies how persona culture shapes our notions of value and significance, and dramatically shifts cultural politics.
Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
An irresistible read-aloud picture book, in which a little odd-duck-out discovers her unique strengths
When these ducks go to the pond, it is Bim, Bam, Bop . . . and Oona, always last. They’re all ducks, but Bim, Bam, and Bop are runners, and Oona’s a waddler. “Last is a blot on my life,” she says to her frog friend, Roy. “I don’t feel as big as a duck should feel.” But she’s good with gizmos, Roy reminds her. So Oona tinkers with things, scraps, and strings, and eventually creates just the right gadget to get her to the pond first.
Spunky Oona will inspire and delight all who see her final triumphant creation. With its fun read-aloud words (from Brrrrrring to OOO-hoolie-hoo!), her story is wonderful to hear. Its charming illustrations invite readers to imagine our own new gizmos, and her victory reminds us to look for our own special gifts. A tale about being true to yourself, building confidence, and finding friendship, Bim, Bam, Bop . . . and Oona is sure to bring smiles to readers and listeners of all ages.
Robert Lowell - American Writers 92 was first published in 1970. 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.
International Propaganda was first published in 1958. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
As the principal weapon of the cold war, international propaganda is a matter of grave importance to anyone concerned with international relations. Here, in the first study of its kind, Dr. Martin analyzes the efforts and trends toward the control of such propaganda by means of international law, domestic law, and diplomacy. As a background for his study, he traces the development of international propaganda, discusses its definitions, and describes the propaganda activities of the three giants in the field - the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union.
Examining architecture’s foundational role in the repression of democracy
Reinhold Martin and Claire Zimmerman bring together essays from an array of scholars exploring the troubled relationship between architecture and antidemocratic politics. Comprising detailed case studies throughout the world spanning from the early nineteenth century to the present, Architecture against Democracy analyzes crucial occasions when the built environment has been harnessed as an instrument of authoritarian power.
Alongside chapters focusing on paradigmatic episodes from twentieth-century German and Italian fascism, the contributors examine historic and contemporary events and subjects that are organized thematically, including the founding of the Smithsonian Institution, Ellis Island infrastructure, the aftermath of the Paris Commune, Cold War West Germany and Iraq, Frank Lloyd Wright’s domestic architecture, and Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Through the range and depth of these accounts, Architecture against Democracy presents a selective overview of antidemocratic processes as they unfold in the built environment throughout Western modernity, offering an architectural history of the recent “nationalist international.”
As new forms of nationalism and authoritarian rule proliferate across the globe, this timely collection offers fresh understandings of the role of architecture in the opposition to democracy.
Contributors: Esra Akcan, Cornell U; Can Bilsel, U of San Diego; José H. Bortoluci, Getulio Vargas Foundation; Charles L. Davis II, U of Texas at Austin; Laura diZerega; Eve Duffy, Duke U; María González Pendás, Cornell U; Paul B. Jaskot, Duke U; Ana María León, Harvard U; Ruth W. Lo, Hamilton College; Peter Minosh, Northeastern U; Itohan Osayimwese, Brown U; Kishwar Rizvi, Yale U; Naomi Vaughan; Nader Vossoughian, New York Institute of Technology and Columbia U; Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia U.
A new ethics for the global practice of curating
Today, everyone is a curator. What was once considered a hallowed expertise is now a commonplace and global activity. Can this new worldwide activity be ethical and, if yes, how? This book argues that curating can be more than just selecting, organizing, and presenting information in galleries or online. Curating can also constitute an ethics, one of acquiring, arranging, and distributing an always conjectural knowledge about the world.
Curating as Ethics is primarily philosophical in scope, evading normative approaches to ethics in favor of an intuitive ethics that operates at the threshold of thought and action. It explores the work of authors as diverse as Heidegger, Spinoza, Meillassoux, Mudimbe, Chalier, and Kofman. Jean-Paul Martinon begins with the fabric of these ethics: how it stems from matter, how it addresses death, how it apprehends interhuman relationships. In the second part he establishes the ground on which the ethics is based, the things that make up the curatorial—for example, the textual and visual evidence or the digital medium. The final part focuses on the activity of curating as such—sharing, caring, preparing, dispensing, and so on.
With its invigorating new approach to curatorial studies, Curating as Ethics moves beyond the field of museum and exhibition studies to provide an ethics for anyone engaged in this highly visible activity, including those using social media as a curatorial endeavor, and shows how philosophy and curating can work together to articulate the world today.
John Berryman - American Writers 85 was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The post–Civil Rights era was marked by an explosion of black political thought and aesthetics. Reflecting a shifting horizon of expectations around race relations, the unconventional sounds of free jazz coupled with experimental literary creation nuanced the push toward racial equality and enriched the possibilities for aesthetic innovation within the Black Arts Movement. In Imagine the Sound, Carter Mathes demonstrates how African American writers used sound to further artistic resistance within a rapidly transforming political and racial landscape.
While many have noted the oral and musical qualities of African American poetry from the post–Civil Rights period, Mathes points out how the political implications of dissonance, vibration, and resonance produced in essays, short stories, and novels animated the ongoing struggle for equality. Situating literary works by Henry Dumas, Larry Neal, and Toni Cade Bambara in relation to the expansive ideas of sound proposed by free jazz musicians such as Marion Brown and Sun Ra, not only does this book illustrate how the presence of sound can be heard and read as political, but it recuperates critically neglected, yet important, writers and musicians. Ultimately, Mathes details how attempts to capture and render sound through the medium of writing enable writers to envision alternate realities and resistance outside of the linear frameworks offered by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.
In precise and elegant prose, Mathes shows how in conceptualizing sound, African American writers opened up the political imaginations of their readers. By exploring this intellectual convergence of literary artistry, experimental music, and sound theory, Imagine the Sound reveals how taking up radically new forms of expression allows us to speak to the complexities of race and political resistance.
Reporting the Wars was first published in 1957. 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.
News of the wars has always intrigued the public, from the time of the Napoleonic wars up to the present. In this period of the last century and a half, however, the character both of the public and of the news has changed. Mr. Mathews traces the history of war news coverage from John Bell, who, in 1794, was probably the first war correspondent, to Ernie Pyle of World War II fame. The account is colorful, since war correspondents are notably adventurous individuals, and it is significant for a basic understanding of history, since the reporting of war news has represented a constant struggle against the forces of censorship and propaganda. The book is illustrated with newspaper cartoons.
For years, pundits have trumpeted the earthshattering changes that big data and smart networks will soon bring to our cities. But what if cities have long been built for intelligence, maybe for millennia? In Code and Clay, Data and Dirt Shannon Mattern advances the provocative argument that our urban spaces have been “smart” and mediated for thousands of years.
Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt goes far beyond the standard historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Mattern shows that in their architecture, laws, street layouts, and civic knowledge—and through technologies including the telephone, telegraph, radio, printing, writing, and even the human voice—cities have long negotiated a rich exchange between analog and digital, code and clay, data and dirt, ether and ore.
Mattern’s vivid prose takes readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories, scenes, and locations, synthesizing a new narrative for our urban spaces. Taking media archaeology to the city’s streets, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt reveals new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories.
Going beyond current scholarship on the “media city” and the “smart city,” Shannon Mattern argues that our global cities have been mediated and intelligent for millennia. Deep Mapping the Media City advocates for urban media archaeology, a multisensory approach to investigating the material history of networked cities. Mattern explores the material assemblages and infrastructures that have shaped the media city by taking archaeology literally—using techniques like excavation and mapping to discover the modern city’s roots in time.
Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
A mother whose child has had a cochlear implant tells Laura Mauldin why enrollment in the sign language program at her daughter’s school is plummeting: “The majority of parents want their kids to talk.” Some parents, however, feel very differently, because “curing” deafness with cochlear implants is uncertain, difficult, and freighted with judgment about what is normal, acceptable, and right. Made to Hear sensitively and thoroughly considers the structure and culture of the systems we have built to make deaf children hear.
Based on accounts of and interviews with families who adopt the cochlear implant for their deaf children, this book describes the experiences of mothers as they navigate the health care system, their interactions with the professionals who work with them, and the influence of neuroscience on the process. Though Mauldin explains the politics surrounding the issue, her focus is not on the controversy of whether to have a cochlear implant but on the long-term, multiyear undertaking of implantation. Her study provides a nuanced view of a social context in which science, technology, and medicine are trusted to vanquish disability—and in which mothers are expected to use these tools. Made to Hear reveals that implantation has the central goal of controlling the development of the deaf child’s brain by boosting synapses for spoken language and inhibiting those for sign language, placing the politics of neuroscience front and center.
Examining the consequences of cochlear implant technology for professionals and parents of deaf children, Made to Hear shows how certain neuroscientific claims about neuroplasticity, deafness, and language are deployed to encourage compliance with medical technology.
The Spectacle of Democracy was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
In this age of increased global communication the media seem like juggernauts paving the way from dictatorship to democracy. Richard Maxwell's study of television in Spain overturns this myth of technological power. He shows us how transitions themselves have a profound impact on the media, as controllers of national television clash with commercial media promoters and with regionalists who want television to extend their nationalist politics and collective identity.
Maxwell's sophisticated analysis of the many variables shaping communication policy within the nation-state draws on a decade of research into Spanish culture, mass media, and political economy. Although focused on Spain, his work provides general insight into the nature of communication policy debates in today's globalized economy. A study of the transformation of television in Spain following the end of Franco's dictatorship, Maxwell's book examines the politics of the privatization of television, the rise of regional television, and the transnational realignment of national media space.Richard Maxwell is assistant professor in the department of radio, television, and film in the School of Speech at Northwestern University.
How special education used disability labels to marginalize Black students in public schools
The Unteachables examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. As African American children integrated predominantly white schools, many were disproportionately labeled educable mentally retarded (EMR), learning disabled (LD), and emotionally behavioral disordered (EBD). Keith A. Mayes charts the evolution of disability categories and how these labels kept Black learners segregated in American classrooms.
The civil rights and the educational disability rights movements, Mayes shows, have both collaborated and worked at cross-purposes since the beginning of school desegregation. Disability rights advocates built upon the opportunity provided by the civil rights movement to make claims about student invisibility at the level of intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Although special education ostensibly included children from all racial groups, educational disability rights advocates focused on the needs of white disabled students, while school systems used disability discourses to malign and marginalize Black students.
From the 1940s to the present, social science researchers, policymakers, school administrators, and teachers have each contributed to the overrepresentation of Black students in special education. Excavating the deep-seated racism embedded in both the public school system and public policy, The Unteachables explores the discriminatory labeling of Black students, and how it indelibly contributed to special education disproportionality, to student discipline and push-out practices, and to the school-to-prison pipeline effect.
Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492-1700 was first published in 1984. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Spanish and Portuguese expansion substantially altered the social, political, and economic contours of the modern world. In his book, Lyle McAlister provides a narrative and interpretive history of the exploration and settlement of the Americas by Spain and Portugal.
McAlister divides this period (and the book) into three parts. First, he describes the formation of Old World societies with particular attention to those features that influenced the directions and forms of overseas expansion. Second, he traces the dynamic processes of conquest and colonization that between 1492 and about 1570 firmly established Spanish and Portuguese dominion in the New World. The third part deals with colonial growth and consolidation down to about 1700. McAlister's main themes are: the post-conquest territorial expansion that established the limits of what later came to be called Latin America, the emergence of distinctively Spanish and Portuguese American societies and economies, the formation of systems of imperial control and exploitation, and the ways in which conflicts between imperial and American interests were reconciled.
This comprehensive history, with its extensive bibliographic essay and attention to historiographic issues, will be a standard reference for students and scholars of the period.
Marsden Hartley was first published in 1952. 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.
Art connoisseurs and students, who are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of Marsden Hartley in an understanding of modern at, will welcome this book. It contains a biographical and critical essay on the artist and his work, a checklist of items in the Hudson D. Walker collection of Hartley's works, a biography of writings by and about Hartley, a chronology of his life, and halftone reproductions illustrating his development as an artist. The illustrations are taken from works in the Walker collection, which is on long-term loan to the University of Minnesota Gallery.
Caroline Gordon - American Writers 59 was first published in 1966. 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.
American Studies was first published in 1948. 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.
Although the immediate subject of this book is American Studies, its ultimate concern is with the broad pattern of higher education in the United States. The program of American Studies uses the materials of the American scene to advance a contemporary movement in education, and to modify a tendency of mankind to live predominantly in one of the three tenses: past, present, or future. The movement in education is an attempt to supplement, but not replace, extreme academic specialization with a synthesis of knowledge.
Mr. McDowell, who has made firsthand observation of procedures in more than thirty colleges and universities in all parts of the United States, discusses curriculums and courses in American civilization throughout the country and the American Studies program at the University of Minnesota, which is the most extensive and inclusive existing today. In summing up, he analyzes the relationship of American Studies to regional culture, national loyalty, and world society.
The book is addressed to all who are concerned with American civilization or American education, but most particularly to those concerned with both. The discussion, though dealing chiefly with the liberal arts college and the graduate school, also has relevance for the general public and for high school teachers and administrators in higher education, for college teachers of the social sciences and humanities, and for graduate students and mature undergraduates about to choose a major field or already engaged in a study of American culture.
More than sixty years ago, McCarthyism silenced Hollywood. In the pages of Tender Comrades, those who were suppressed, whose lives and careers were ruined, finally have their say. A unique collection of profiles in cinematic courage, this extraordinary oral history brings to light the voices of thirty-six blacklist survivors (including two members of the Hollywood Ten), seminal directors of film noir and other genres, starring actresses and memorable supporting players, top screenwriters, and many less known to the public, who are rescued from obscurity by the stories they offer here that, beyond politics, open a rich window into moviemaking during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
In our current age of cynicism, John McGowan suggests that the time is right to take a fresh look at pragmatism, the philosophy of American democracy. As McGowan shows, pragmatism can be an inspiring alternative to the despair that seems to dominate contemporary American politics. Pragmatist Politics is passionate and convincing, both heartfelt and clear-eyed. It offers an expansive vision of what the United States could be and should be.
From John Dewey and William James, McGowan derives a history of democracy as a way of life, characterized by a distinctive ethos and based on an understanding of politics as potentially effective collective agency. That democratic ideal is wedded to a liberalism that focuses on extending the benefits of democracy and of material prosperity to all. Beyond the intellectual case for liberal democracy, McGowan turns to how James, especially, was attuned to the ways that emotional appeals often trump persuasion through arguments, and he examines the work of Kenneth Burke, among others, to investigate the link between liberal democracy and a comic view of human life. Comedy, McGowan notes, allows consideration of themes of love, forgiveness, and generosity that figure far too infrequently in philosophical accounts of politics.
In McGowan’s work, the combination of pragmatism and comedy takes us on a wide-ranging exploration of what American politics—and by extension American life—could actually be like if it truly reflected American values.
An illuminating volume of critical essays charting the diverse territory of digital humanities scholarship
The digital humanities have traditionally been considered to be the domain of only a small number of prominent and well-funded institutions. However, through a diverse range of critical essays, this volume serves to challenge and enlarge existing notions of how digital humanities research is being undertaken while also serving as a kind of alternative guide for how it can thrive within a wide variety of institutional spaces.
Focusing on the complex infrastructure that undergirds the field of digital humanities, People, Practice, Power examines the various economic, social, and political factors that shape such academic endeavors. The multitude of perspectives comprising this collection offers both a much-needed critique of the existing structures for digital scholarship and the means to generate broader representation within the field.
This collection provides a vital contribution to the realm of digital scholarly research and pedagogy in acknowledging the role that small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, historically black colleges and universities, and other underresourced institutions play in its advancement. Gathering together a range of voices both established and emergent, People, Practice, Power offers practitioners a self-reflexive examination of the current conditions under which the digital humanities are evolving, while helping to open up new sustainable pathways for its future.
Contributors: Matthew Applegate, Molloy College; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; Eduard Arriaga, U of Indianapolis; Lydia Bello, Seattle U; Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State U; Christina Boyles, Michigan State U; Laura R. Braunstein, Dartmouth College; Abby R. Broughton; Maria Sachiko Cecire, Bard College; Brennan Collins, Georgia State U; Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, U of Maryland; Brittany de Gail, U of Maryland; Madelynn Dickerson, UC Irvine Libraries; Nathan H. Dize, Vanderbilt U; Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U; Ashley Sanders Garcia, UCLA; Laura Gerlitz; Erin Rose Glass; Kaitlyn Grant; Margaret Hogarth, Claremont Colleges; Maryse Ndilu Kiese, U of Alberta; Pamella R. Lach, San Diego State U; James Malazita, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Susan Merriam, Bard College; Chelsea Miya, U of Alberta; Jamila Moore Pewu, California State U, Fullerton; Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, Aalto U, Finland; Jessica Pressman, San Diego State U; Jana Remy, Chapman U; Roopika Risam, Salem State U; Elizabeth Rodrigues, Grinnell College; Dylan Ruediger, American Historical Association; Rachel Schnepper, Wesleyan U; Anelise Hanson Shrout, Bates College; Margaret Simon, North Carolina State U; Mengchi Sun, U of Alberta; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond; Michelle R. Warren, Dartmouth College.
A tour de force chronicling the development of realism in Chinese cinema
The history of Chinese cinema is as long and complicated as the tumultuous history of China itself. Be it the silent, the Communist, or the contemporary, each Chinese cinematic era has necessitated its own form in conversation with broader trends in politics and culture.
In Chinese Film, Jason McGrath tells this fascinating story by tracing the varied claims to cinematic realism made by Chinese filmmakers, officials, critics, and scholars. Understanding realism as a historical dynamic that is both enabled and mitigated by aesthetic conventions of the day, he analyzes it across six different types of claims: ontological, perceptual, fictional, social, prescriptive, and apophatic.
Through this method, McGrath makes major claims not just about Chinese cinema but also about realism as an aesthetic form that negotiates between cultural conventions and the ever-evolving real. He comes to envision it as more than just a cinematic question, showing how the struggle for realism is central to the Chinese struggle for modernity itself.
Public and Private 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.
This groundbreaking work examines the emergent and fluctuating relationship between the public and private social spheres of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By assessing novels such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Jane Austen's Emma through the lens of the social theories of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault, Patricia McKee presents a fresh and highly original contribution to literary studies.
McKee explores the themes of production and consumption as they relate to gender and class throughout the works of many of the most influential novels of the age including Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Emma, Frankenstein, Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers, Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit and The Old Curiosity Shop, Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne, and Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native.
McKee analyzes portrayals of a society in which abstract idealism belonged to knowledgeable, productive men and the realm of ignorance was left to emotional, consuming women and the uneducated. She traces the various ways British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries worked to reform this social experience. Topics include Dickens's attack on the bureaucratic use of knowledge to maintain the status quo; the function of antiprogressive depictions of knowledge in Trollope, Shelley, and Hardy; and Austen's characterization of the protagonist Emma as an exception in a society that denied women's productive use of knowledge.
Offering a sharp challenge to theorists who have charted a linear division of public and private experience, McKee highlights the unexpected configurations of the emergence of the public and private spheres and the effect of knowledge distribution across class and gender lines.
Patricia McKee is professor of English at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Heroic Commitment in Richardson, Eliot, and James (1986).
A complete history and theory of internet daemons brings these little-known—but very consequential—programs into the spotlight
We’re used to talking about how tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon rule the internet, but what about daemons? Ubiquitous programs that have colonized the Net’s infrastructure—as well as the devices we use to access it—daemons are little known. Fenwick McKelvey weaves together history, theory, and policy to give a full account of where daemons come from and how they influence our lives—including their role in hot-button issues like network neutrality.
Going back to Victorian times and the popular thought experiment Maxwell’s Demon, McKelvey charts how daemons evolved from concept to reality, eventually blossoming into the pandaemonium of code-based creatures that today orchestrates our internet. Digging into real-life examples like sluggish connection speeds, Comcast’s efforts to control peer-to-peer networking, and Pirate Bay’s attempts to elude daemonic control (and skirt copyright), McKelvey shows how daemons have been central to the internet, greatly influencing everyday users.
Internet Daemons asks important questions about how much control is being handed over to these automated, autonomous programs, and the consequences for transparency and oversight.
Background of Thomson's Seasons 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.
There have been many valuable scattered studies of James Thomson's famous Seasons,but this is the first comprehensive book on the subject to be published in this country. This most popular long poem published in England in the eighteenth century well deserves reexamination. It is interesting not only to students of literature but also to those concerned with the history of ideas and the relationship of the fields of human knowledge.
Thomson's Seasons reflects the trends of his time in literature, philosophy, science, history, and religion. Professor McKillop presents an illuminating and systematic analysis of the general philosophic and literary situation in which Thomson worked. Then he discusses Thomson's use of the natural sciences and of the literature of history, geography, and travel. He shows that the poet was also concerned with the patterns of human society, both primitive and civilized.
The author reveals clearly how Thomson was indebted to the classical tradition; to the literary inspiration of Milton; to the scientific discussions and theories of Newton, Halley, Burnet, and the writers of popular physico-theological manuals; to the philosophical discussions of Shaftesbury and Locke; to the contemporary periodical essay; to the religious works of Blackmore and Hill; to the descriptions of remote regions and peoples in such writers as Scheffer, Varenius, and Maupertuis. All Thomson's borrowings and characteristic ideas fall into the framework of his poem.
As this book was leaving the bindery, discovery was made in Glasgow of a catalogue of Thomson's library. The document substantiates many of Professor McKillop's deductions.
Cloning was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Cloning has become in recent years a subject of widespread speculation: the word is a source of fear and wonder, the concept a jumping-off point for the fantasies of cartoonists, film producers, and novelists. With this book, cell biologist Robert Gilmore McKinnell provides the first clear scientific explanation of the procedure for general readers.
Cloning is best defined as the asexual reproduction of genetic duplicates. The word clone derives from the Greek word for a twig or a slip, and the first "cloners" were in fact horticulturalists. Early attempts to clone animals culminated in 1952 when biologists reported that they had produced frogs by transplanting genetic material from an embryonic body cell into an egg from which the nucleus had been removed.
In this account, McKinnell traces the historical background of cloning and describes in detail the modern procedure used in the cloning of frogs—the highest animal thus far cloned. He emphasizes that the purpose of cloning is not to produce numerous frogs—or people—but rather to serve as a tool in biological research—to achieve greater understanding of cancer and aging, immunobiology and the differentiation of cells.
McKinnell also deals with questions about potential mammalian clones and examines the social, ethical, and biological problems we face in our considerations about human cloning. He concludes that human clones are not necessary for research purposes and that the diversity achieved with sexual reproduction is far more desirable than the sameness of cloned creatures.
How Pee-wee and his playhouse help us reimagine our relationships to technology
I Know You Are, but What Am I? explores the cultural legacy of Pee-wee Herman, the cult television star of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. This children’s show—that was also for adults—ran on network TV from 1986 to 1990 and starred comedian Paul Reubens as Herman, a queer man-boy whose playhouse, the set for the show, was tricked out with a profusion of animate computational toys and technologies.
Cait McKinney shows how three defining scenes from the show inform, and even foretell and challenge, our present moment: the playhouse as an alternative precursor to networked smart homes that foregrounds caring and ethical relationships between humans and technologies; a reparative retelling of Reubens’s career-wrecking 1991 arrest for indecent exposure inside a Florida adult film theater as part of an AIDS-phobic, antigay sting operation; and worn-out, Talking Pee-wee dolls and their broken afterlives on eBay and YouTube.
McKinney looks at how queer people who were children in the 1980s remember and relate to Pee-wee now, showing that the moral panic about sexuality, gender, and children from the past can help us refute anti-trans and anti-queer political movements organized today.
What might become of anthropology if it were to suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans? Stuart McLean claims that anthropology stands to learn most from art and literature not as “evidence” to support explanations based on an appeal to social context or history but as modes of engagement with the materiality of expressive media—including language—that always retain the capacity to disrupt or exceed the human projects enacted through them.
At once comparative in scope and ethnographically informed, Fictionalizing Anthropology draws on an eclectic range of sources, including ancient Mesopotamian myth, Norse saga literature, Hesiod, Lucretius, Joyce, Artaud, and Lispector, as well as film, multimedia, and performance art, along with the concept of “fabulation” (the making of fictions capable of intervening in and transforming reality) developed in the writings of Bergson and Deleuze. Sharing with proponents of anthropology’s recent “ontological turn,” McLean insists that experiments with language and form are a performative means of exploring alternative possibilities of collective existence, new ways of being human and other than human, and that such experiments must therefore be indispensable to anthropology’s engagement with the contemporary world.
Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France was first published in 1983. 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.
These four essays—on Blanchot, Lacan, Giraudoux, and Gide—have as their focus the barely imaginable coherence which the writings of four major contemporaries take on when read in the light of France's pre-World War II heritage of anti-Jewish thought. As the essays delve into such crucial topics as the inaugural silence in Blanchot's sense of literature, the "style" of Lacan, Giraudoux's relation to Racine, and the sexual politics of Gide, they engage a realm that at times seems—or seemed—anti-Semitic in its essence. Negotiating the complex ramifications of a lost tradition and the structure of its obliteration, Jeffrey Mehlman, in his conclusion, speculates on the emblematic value of Walter Benjamin's perpetually deferred "journey to Palestine via France" and its import for textual interpretation.
A French version of Mehlman's essay on Blanchot, published in Tel quel,spurred an impassioned journalistic debate in Paris and London. Broadening still further the context of that inquiry, Legacies will prove a source of provocation and insight to all who are interested in the intellectual history of contemporary France.
Examining the appearance of nonhuman animals laboring alongside humans in humanitarian operations
Both critical and mainstream scholarly work on humanitarianism have largely been framed from anthropocentric perspectives highlighting humanity as the rationale for providing care to others. In Nonhuman Humanitarians, Benjamin Meiches explores the role of animals laboring alongside humans in humanitarian operations, generating new ethical possibilities of care in humanitarian practice.
Nonhuman Humanitarians examines how these animals not only improve specific practices of humanitarian aid but have started to transform the basic tenets of humanitarianism. Analyzing case studies of mine-clearance dogs, milk-producing cows and goats, and disease-identifying rats, Nonhuman Humanitarians ultimately argues that nonhuman animal contributions problematize foundational assumptions about the emotional and rational capacities of humanitarian actors as well as the ethical focus on human suffering that defines humanitarianism.
Meiches reveals that by integrating nonhuman animals into humanitarian practice, several humanitarian organizations have effectively demonstrated that care, compassion, and creativity are creaturely rather than human and that responses to suffering and injustice do not—and cannot—stop at the boundaries of the human.
How did a powerful concept in international justice evolve into an inequitable response to mass suffering?
For a term coined just seventy-five years ago, genocide has become a remarkably potent idea. But has it transformed from a truly novel vision for international justice into a conservative, even inaccessible term? The Politics of Annihilation traces how the concept of genocide came to acquire such significance on the global political stage. In doing so, it reveals how the concept has been politically contested and refashioned over time. It explores how these shifts implicitly impact what forms of mass violence are considered genocide and what forms are not.
Benjamin Meiches argues that the limited conception of genocide, often rigidly understood as mass killing rooted in ethno-religious identity, has created legal and political institutions that do not adequately respond to the diversity of mass violence. In his insistence on the concept’s complexity, he does not undermine the need for clear condemnations of such violence. But neither does he allow genocide to become a static or timeless notion. Meiches argues that the discourse on genocide has implicitly excluded many forms of violence from popular attention including cases ranging from contemporary Botswana and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to the legacies of colonial politics in Haiti, Canada, and elsewhere, to the effects of climate change on small island nations.
By mapping the multiplicity of forces that entangle the concept in larger assemblages of power, The Politics of Annihilation gives us a new understanding of how the language of genocide impacts contemporary political life, especially as a means of protesting the social conditions that produce mass violence.
Howard Nemerov - American Writers 70 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.
In the global convulsions in the aftermath of World War II, one dominant world racial order broke apart and a new one emerged. This is the story Jodi Melamed tells in Represent and Destroy, portraying the postwar racial break as a transition from white supremacist modernity to a formally antiracist liberal capitalist modernity in which racial violence works normatively by policing representations of difference.
Following the institutionalization of literature as a privileged domain for Americans to get to know difference—to describe, teach, and situate themselves with respect to race—Melamed focuses on literary studies as a cultural technology for transmitting liberal racial orders. She examines official antiracism in the United States and finds that these were key to ratifying the country’s global ascendancy. She shows how racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism made racism appear to be disappearing, even as they incorporated the assumptions of global capitalism into accepted notions of racial equality.
Yet Represent and Destroy also recovers an anticapitalist “race radical” tradition that provides a materialist opposition to official antiracisms in the postwar United States—a literature that sounds out the violence of liberal racial orders, relinks racial inequality to material conditions, and compels desire for something better than U.S. multiculturalism.
Philosophy Beside Itself was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida have been the single most powerful influence on critical theory and practice in the United States over the past decade. But with few exceptions American philosophers have taken little or no interest in Derrida's work, and the task of reception, translation, and commentary has been left to literary critics. As a result, Derrida has appeared as a figure already defined by essentially literary critical activities and interests.
Stephen Melville's aim in Philosophy Beside Itself is to insist upon and clarify the distinctions between philosophy and criticism. He argues that until we grasp Derrida's philosophical project as such, we remain fundamentally unable to see his significance for criticism. In terms derived from Stanley Cavell's writings on modernism, Melville develops a case for Derrida as a modernist philosopher, working at once within and against that tradition and discipline.
Melville first places Derrida in a Hegelian context, the structure of which he explores by examining the work of Heidegger, Lacan, and Bataille. With this foundation, he is able to reappraise the project of deconstructive criticism as developed in Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight and further articulated by other Yale critics. Central to this critique is the ambivalent relationship between deconstructive criticism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Criticism—radical self-criticism—is a central means through which the difficult facts of human community come to recognition, and Melville argues for criticism as an activity intimately bound to the ways in which we do and do not belong in time and in community. Derrida's achievement has been to find a new and necessary way to assert that the task of philosophy is criticism; the task of literary criticism is to assume the burden of that achievement.
Stephen Melville is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University, and Donald Marshall is a professor of English at the University of Iowa.
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