Creative and diverse approaches to ethnographic knowledge production and writing
Ethnographic research has long been cloaked in mystery around what fieldwork is really like for researchers, how they collect data, and how it is analyzed within the social sciences. Naked Fieldnotes, a unique compendium of actual fieldnotes from contemporary ethnographic researchers from various modalities and research traditions, unpacks how this research works, its challenges and its possibilities.
The volume pairs fieldnotes based on observations, interviews, drawings, photographs, soundscapes, and other contemporary modes of recording research encounters with short, reflective essays, offering rich examples of how fieldnotes are composed and shaped by research experiences. These essays unlock the experience of conducting qualitative research in the social sciences, providing clear examples of the benefits and difficulties of ethnographic research and how it differs from other forms of writing such as reporting and travelogue. By granting access to these personal archives, Naked Fieldnotes unsettles taboos about the privacy of ethnographic writing and gives scholars a diverse, multimodal approach to conceptualizing and doing ethnographic fieldwork.
Contributors: Courtney Addison, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria U of Wellington; Patricia Alvarez Astacio, Brandeis U; Sareeta Amrute, The New School; Barbara Andersen, Massey U Auckland, New Zealand; Adia Benton, Northwestern U; Letizia Bonanno, U of Kent; Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, U of Victoria; Michael Cepek, U of Texas at San Antonio; Michelle Charette, York U; Tomás Criado, Humboldt-U of Berlin; John Dale, George Mason U; Elsa Fan, Webster U; Kelly Fayard, U of Denver; Michele Friedner, U of Chicago; Susan Frohlick, U of British Columbia, Okanagan, Syilx Territory; Angela Garcia, Stanford U; Danielle Gendron, U of British Columbia; Mascha Gugganig, Technical U Munich; Natalia Gutkowski, Hebrew U of Jerusalem; T. S. Harvey, Vanderbilt U; Saida Hodžić, Cornell U; K. G. Hutchins, Oberlin College; Basit Kareem Iqbal, McMaster U; Emma Kowal, Deakin U in Melbourne; Mathangi Krishnamurthy, IIT Madras; Shyam Kunwar; Margaret MacDonald, York U in Toronto; Stephanie McCallum, U Nacional de San Martín and U de San Andrés, Argentina; Diana Ojeda, Cider, U de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia; Valerie Olson, U of California, Irvine; Patrick Mbullo Owuor, Northwestern U; Stacy Leigh Pigg, Fraser U; Jason Pine, Purchase College, State U of New York; Chiara Pussetti, U of Lisbon; Tom Rice, U of Exeter; Leslie A. Robertson, U of British Columbia, Vancouver; Yana Stainova, McMaster U; Richard Vokes, U of Western Australia; Russell Westhaver, Saint Mary’s U in Nova Scotia; Paul White, U of Nevada, Reno.
Narrative Experiments 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.
In Narrative Experiments, Gayle Ormiston and Ralph Sassower bring a refreshing perspective to the domains of inquiry we call "science" and "technology," asserting that traditional definitions (like classical idealism and materialism) fail to suggest the rich and complex cultural/linguistic interplay occurring between them. This context is not merely a background, nor is Ormiston and Sassower's just one more interdisciplinary approach to the subject. Instead, their book argues, science, technology, and the humanities developed in concert with one another, and their reciprocity obliterates all traditional disciplinary boundaries.
Ormiston and Sassower build their case by devoting a chapter to each of the four themes emerging from the etymological introduction. First, they look at the role fiction and other literary modes play in developing our attitudes toward science and technology -- how the visions of Bacon, Hobbes, Galileo, Rousseau, Mary Shelley, and Orwell evoke both anxiety and hope. Next, they examine a series of eighteenth-century "fictions" -- the Enlightenment texts of Kant, Rousseau, and Hume -- and the elevated (but ambiguous) status science and technology associated with them. The last two chapters evaluate modes of discursive authority and its dissemination -- classical and modern extralinguistic approaches; the contemporary-linguistic view espoused by Rorty, Quine, and others; and their own avowedly experimental journey through the labyrinths of cultural and linguistic usage.
Nathanael West - American Writers 21 was first published in 1962. 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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne - American Writers 23 was first published in 1962. 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 Nation and the States, Rivals or Partners was first published in 1955. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Are the states losing their self-government? What did the framers of the Constitution intend with respect to states' rights? Are federal grants-in-aid to the states a boon or a bane? Is big government too big? Are overlapping taxes a necessary evil?
These are the kinds of questions -- basic, complex, and difficult yet essential to answer -- that Professor Anderson clarifies in this handbook, which is intended for general readers as well as for students of government. The language has been kept simple and clear, and the viewpoint does not presuppose any extensive knowledge of the subject on the part of the reader.
As a member of the President's Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Professor Anderson has recognized a real need on the part of the public for a better understanding of the background issues involved in any discussion of the balance of authority, functions, and finances between the nation, the states, and the local governments of America. This book will help responsible citizens, government officials, and students of political science, history, and other social sciences to reach informed decisions on the merits of any proposals for readjustments in intergovernmental relations.
After providing the historical background for the subject and scrutinizing the current issues in fact as well as in propaganda, Professor Anderson presents a constructive program designed for the strengthening of all three levels of American government.
This volume constitutes the final, general report of the comprehensive research conducted by the Upper Midwest Economic Study, a joint undertaking of the Upper Midwest Research and Development Council and the University of Minnesota. The authors present a detailed analysis of the economy of the Upper Midwest, the region coincident with the Ninth Federal Reserve District, which includes Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, twenty-six counties in northwestern Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
The present study analyzes the region’s past economic growth, its current structure, and possible future development. The region’s initial economic growth was based upon its natural resources—land, forest, and minerals. Today productivity growth is increasing more rapidly than demand in most of these sectors. Hence, total employment opportunities in resource-based industries are declining. Future employment growth generally must be based on the region’s advantage in human resources. This is the challenge for economic growth in the Upper Midwest. The same challenge exists on a nation-wide basis, but the severity of transition away from natural resources industries is greater in the Upper Midwest because of its above-average reliance on such industries.
The authors analyze economic change in the region from 1950 to 1960 and possible future development through 1975, with projections of employment, income, population, and migration for 1975. The projections, based on an assumption of no new action to facilitate economic growth in the region, serve mainly as a departure point for the analysis of regional policy and action.
What happens when American Indians take over an institution designed to eliminate them?
The Bureau of Indian Affairs was hatched in the U.S. Department of War to subjugate and eliminate American Indians. Yet beginning in the 1970s, American Indians and Alaska Natives took over and now run the agency. Choctaw anthropologist Valerie Lambert argues that, instead of fulfilling settler-colonial goals, the Indians in the BIA have been leveraging federal power to fight settler colonialism, battle white supremacy, and serve the interests of their people.
Although the missteps and occasional blunders of the Indians in the BIA have at times damaged the federal–Indian relationship and fueled the ire of their people, and although the BIA is massively underfunded, Indians began crafting the BIA into a Native agency by reformulating the meanings of concepts that lay at its heart—concepts such as tribal sovereignty, treaties, the trust responsibility, and Indian land. At the same time, they pursued actions to strengthen and bolster tribes, to foster healing, to fight the many injustices Indians face, and to restore the Indian land base.
This work provides an essential national-level look at an intriguing and impactful form of Indigenous resistance. It describes, in great detail, the continuing assaults made on Native peoples and tribal sovereignty in the United States during the twenty-first century, and it sketches the visions of the future that Indians at the BIA and in Indian Country have been crafting for themselves.
A compelling reclamation of the place of aesthetics in postcolonial literature
Literature though it may be, postcolonial literature is studied and understood largely—and often solely—in social and political terms. In neglecting its aesthetic dimension, as this book forcefully demonstrates, we are overlooking not only an essential aspect of this literature but even a critical perspective on its sociopolitical function and value. In Native Intelligence, Deepika Bahri focuses on postcolonial literature’s formal and aesthetic negotiations with sociopolitical concerns.
How, Bahri asks, do aesthetic considerations contest the social function of postcolonial literature? In answering, her book takes on two tasks: First, it identifies the burden of representation borne by postcolonial literature through its progressive politicization. Second, it draws on Frankfurt School critical theory to reclaim a place for aesthetics in literary representation by closely engaging works of Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, and Arundhati Roy. Throughout, Bahri shows how attention to the aesthetic innovations and utopian impulses of postcolonial works uncovers their complex and uneven relationship to ideology, reanimating their potential to make novel contributions to the larger project of social liberation.Examining the intersection of Palestine solidarity movements and antiracist activism in France from the 1970s to the present
For the pasty fifty years, the Palestinian question has served as a rallying cry in the struggle for migrant rights in postcolonial France, from the immigrant labor associations of the 1970s and Beur movements of the 1980s to the militant decolonial groups of the 2000s. In Natives against Nativism, Olivia C. Harrison explores the intersection of anticolonial solidarity and antiracist activism from the 1970s to the present.
Natives against Nativism analyzes a wide range of texts—novels, memoirs, plays, films, and militant archives—that mobilize the twin figures of the Palestinian and the American Indian in a crossed critique of Eurocolonial modernity. Harrison argues that anticolonial solidarity with Palestinians and Indigenous Americans has been instrumental in developing a sophisticated critique of racism across imperial formations—in this case, France, the United States, and Israel.
Serving as the first relational study of antiracism in France, Natives against Nativism observes how claims to indigeneity have been deployed in multiple directions, both in the ongoing struggle for migrant rights and racial justice, and in white nativist claims in France today.
The Navajo Nation court system is the largest and most established tribal legal system in the world. Since the landmark 1959 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Williams v. Lee that affirmed tribal court authority over reservation-based claims, the Navajo Nation has been at the vanguard of a far-reaching, transformative jurisprudential movement among Indian tribes in North America and indigenous peoples around the world to retrieve and use traditional values to address contemporary legal issues.
A justice on the Navajo Nation Supreme Court for sixteen years, Justice Raymond D. Austin has been deeply involved in the movement to develop tribal courts and tribal law as effective means of modern self-government. He has written foundational opinions that have established Navajo common law and, throughout his legal career, has recognized the benefit of tribal customs and traditions as tools of restorative justice.
In Navajo Courts and Navajo Common Law, Justice Austin considers the history and implications of how the Navajo Nation courts apply foundational Navajo doctrines to modern legal issues. He explains key Navajo foundational concepts like Hózhó (harmony), K'é (peacefulness and solidarity), and K'éí (kinship) both within the Navajo cultural context and, using the case method of legal analysis, as they are adapted and applied by Navajo judges in virtually every important area of legal life in the tribe.
In addition to detailed case studies, Justice Austin provides a broad view of tribal law, documenting the development of tribal courts as important institutions of indigenous self-governance and outlining how other indigenous peoples, both in North America and elsewhere around the world, can draw on traditional precepts to achieve self-determination and self-government, solve community problems, and control their own futures.
Who was responsible for the crimes of the Nazis? Party leaders and members? Rank-and-file soldiers and bureaucrats? Ordinary Germans? This question looms over German disputes about the past like few others. It also looms over the art and architecture of postwar Germany in ways that have been surprisingly neglected. In The Nazi Perpetrator, Paul B. Jaskot fundamentally reevaluates pivotal developments in postwar German art and architecture against the backdrop of contentious contemporary debates over the Nazi past and the difficulty of determining who was or was not a Nazi perpetrator.
Like their fellow Germans, postwar artists and architects grappled with the Nazi past and the problem of defining the Nazi perpetrator—a problem that was thoroughly entangled with contemporary conservative politics and the explosive issue of former Nazis living in postwar Germany. Beginning with the formative connection between Nazi politics and art during the 1930s, The Nazi Perpetrator traces the dilemma of identifying the perpetrator across the entire postwar period. Jaskot examines key works and episodes from West Germany and, after 1989, reunified Germany, showing how the changing perception of the perpetrator deeply impacted art and architecture, even in cases where artworks and buildings seem to have no obvious relation to the Nazi past. The book also reinterprets important periods in the careers of such major figures as Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Daniel Libeskind.
Combining political history with a close analysis of specific works, The Nazi Perpetrator powerfully demonstrates that the ongoing influence of Nazi Germany after 1945 is much more central to understanding a wide range of modern German art and architecture than cultural historians have previously recognized.
How the creative use of pop music in film—think Saturday Night Fever or Apocalypse Now—has shaped and shifted music history since the 1960s
Quick: What movie do you think of when you hear “The Sounds of Silence”? Better yet, what song comes to mind when you think of The Graduate? The link between film and song endures as more than a memory, Nate Patrin suggests with this wide-ranging and energetic book. It is, in fact, a sort of cultural symbiosis that has mutually influenced movies and pop music, a phenomenon Patrin tracks through the past fifty years, revealing the power of music in movies to move the needle in popular culture.
Rock ’n’ roll, reggae, R&B, jazz, techno, and hip-hop: each had its moment—or many—as music deployed in movies emerged as a form of interpretive commentary, making way for the legitimization of pop and rock music as art forms worthy of serious consideration. These commentaries run the gamut from comedic irony to cheap-thrills excitement to deeply felt drama, all of which Patrin examines in pairings such as American Graffiti and “Do You Want to Dance?”; Saturday Night Fever and “Disco Inferno”; Apocalypse Now and “The End”; Wayne’s World and “Bohemian Rhapsody”; and Jackie Brown and “Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time?”.
What gives power to these individual moments, and how have they shaped and shifted music history, recasting source material or even stirring wider interest in previously niche pop genres? As Patrin surveys the scene—musical and cinematic—across the decades, expanding into the deeper origins, wider connections, and echoed histories that come into play, The Needle and the Lens offers a new way of seeing, and hearing, these iconic soundtrack moments.
Uncovering a vast maze of realities in the media theories of Marshall McLuhan
The term “global village”—coined in the 1960s by Marshall McLuhan—has persisted into the twenty-first century as a key trope of techno-humanitarian discourse, casting economic and technical transformations in a utopian light. Against that tendency, this book excavates the violent history, originating with techniques of colonial rule in Africa, that gave rise to the concept of the global village. To some extent, we are all global villagers, but given the imbalances of semiotic power, some belong more thoroughly than others. Reassessing McLuhan’s media theories in light of their entanglement with colonial and neocolonial techniques, Nolan implicates various arch-paradigms of power (including “terra-power”) in the larger prerogative of managing human populations.
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.
Katrina was not just a hurricane. The death, destruction, and misery wreaked on New Orleans cannot be blamed on nature’s fury alone. This volume of essays locates the root causes of the 2005 disaster squarely in neoliberal restructuring and examines how pro-market reforms are reshaping life, politics, economy, and the built environment in New Orleans.
The authors—a diverse group writing from the disciplines of sociology, political science, education, public policy, and media theory—argue that human agency and public policy choices were more at fault for the devastation and mass suffering experienced along the Gulf Coast than were sheer forces of nature. The harrowing images of flattened homes, citizens stranded on rooftops, patients dying in makeshift hospitals, and dead bodies floating in floodwaters exposed the moral and political contradictions of neoliberalism—the ideological rejection of the planner state and the active promotion of a new order of market rule.
Many of these essays offer critical insights on the saga of postdisaster reconstruction. Challenging triumphal narratives of civic resiliency and universal recovery, the authors bring to the fore pitched battles over labor rights, gender and racial justice, gentrification, the development of city master plans, the demolition of public housing, policing, the privatization of public schools, and roiling tensions between tourism-based economic growth and neighborhood interests. The contributors also expand and deepen more conventional critiques of “disaster capitalism” to consider how the corporate mobilization of philanthropy and public good will are remaking New Orleans in profound and pernicious ways.
Contributors: Barbara L. Allen, Virginia Polytechnic U; John Arena, CUNY College of Staten Island; Adrienne Dixson, Ohio State U; Eric Ishiwata, Colorado State U; Avis Jones-Deweever, National Council of Negro Women; Chad Lavin, Virginia Polytechnic U; Paul Passavant, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Linda Robertson, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Chris Russill, Carleton U; Kanchana Ruwanpura, U of Southampton; Nicole Trujillo-Pagán, Wayne State U; Geoffrey Whitehall, Acadia U.
In The Networked Wilderness, Matt Cohen examines communications systems in early New England and finds that, surprisingly, struggles over information technology were as important as theology, guns, germs, or steel in shaping the early colonization of North America. Colonists in New England have generally been viewed as immersed in a Protestant culture of piety and alphabetic literacy. At the same time, many scholars have insisted that the culture of the indigenous peoples of the region was a predominantly oral culture. But what if, Cohen posits, we thought about media and technology beyond the terms of orality and literacy?
Reconceptualizing aural and inscribed communication as a spectrum, The Networked Wilderness bridges the gap between the history of the book and Native American systems of communication. Cohen reveals that books, paths, recipes, totems, and animals and their sounds all took on new interactive powers as the English negotiated the well-developed informational trails of the Algonquian East Coast and reported their experiences back to Europe. Native and English encounters forced all parties to think of each other as audiences for any event that might become a kind of "publication."
Using sources ranging from Thomas Morton's Maypole festival to the architecture of today's Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Cohen shows that the era before the printing press came to New England was one of extraordinary fertility for communications systems in America.
A critical examination of the figure of the neural network as it mediates neuroscientific and computational discourses and technical practices
Neural Networks proposes to reconstruct situated practices, social histories, mediating techniques, and ontological assumptions that inform the computational project of the same name. If so-called machine learning comprises a statistical approach to pattern extraction, then neural networks can be defined as a biologically inspired model that relies on probabilistically weighted neuron-like units to identify such patterns. Far from signaling the ultimate convergence of human and machine intelligence, however, neural networks highlight the technologization of neurophysiology that characterizes virtually all strands of neuroscientific and AI research of the past century. Taking this traffic as its starting point, this volume explores how cognition came to be constructed as essentially computational in nature, to the point of underwriting a technologized view of human biology, psychology, and sociability, and how countermovements provide resources for thinking otherwise.
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.
A bold philosophical investigation into technology and the limits of the human
A daring, original work of philosophical speculation, Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude mounts a sustained investigation into the possibility that human beings may technologically overcome the transcendental limits of possible experience and envisages what such a transition would look like. Focusing on emergent neurotechnologies, which establish a direct channel of communication between brain and machine, Michael Haworth argues that such technologies intervene at the border between interiority and exteriority, offering the promise of immediacy and the possibility of the mind directly affecting the outside world or even other minds.
Through detailed, targeted readings of Kant, Freud, Heidegger, Croce, Jung, and Derrida, Haworth explores the effect of this transformation on human creativity and our relationships with others. He pursues these questions across four distinct but interrelated spheres: the act of artistic creation and the potential for a technologically enabled coincidence of idea and object; the possibility of humanity achieving the infinite creativity that Kant attributed only to God; the relationship between the psyche and the external world in Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian analytical psychology; and the viability and impact of techno-telepathic communication.
Addressing readers interested in contemporary continental philosophy and philosophy of technology, media and communications, and science and technology studies, Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude critically envisions a plausible posthuman future.
The food-obsessed chronicle of an American’s three years in Italy—now available in paperback
I simply want to live in the place with the best food in the world. This dream led Eric Dregni to Italy, first to Milan and eventually to a small, fog-covered town to the north: Modena, the birthplace of balsamic vinegar, Ferrari, and Luciano Pavarotti. Never Trust a Thin Cook is a classic American abroad tale, brimming with adventures both expected and unexpected, awkward social moments, and most important, very good food.
Parmesan thieves. Tortellini based on the shape of Venus’s navel. Infiltrating the secret world of the balsamic vinegar elite. Life in Modena is a long way from the Leaning Tower of Pizza (the south Minneapolis pizzeria where Eric and his girlfriend and fellow traveler Katy first met), and while some Italians are impressed that “Minnesota” sounds like “minestrone,” they are soon learning what it means to live in a country where the word “safe” doesn’t actually exist—only “less dangerous.” Thankfully, another meal is always waiting, and Dregni revels in uncorking the secrets of Italian cuisine, such as how to guzzle espresso “corrected” with grappa and learning that mold really does make a good salami great.
What begins as a gastronomical quest soon becomes a revealing, authentic portrait of how Italians live and a hilarious demonstration of how American and Italian cultures differ. In Never Trust a Thin Cook, Eric Dregni dishes up the sometimes wild experiences of living abroad alongside the simple pleasures of Italian culture in perfect, complementary portions.
For a half century following the end of World War II, the seemingly permanent cold war provided the United States with an organizing logic that governed nearly every aspect of American society and culture, giving rise to an unwavering belief in the nation's exceptionalism in global affairs and world history. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this cold war paradigm was replaced by a series of new ideological narratives that ultimately resulted in the establishment of another potentially endless war: the global war on terror.
In The New American Exceptionalism, pioneering scholar Donald E. Pease traces the evolution of these state fantasies and shows how they have shaped U.S. national identity since the end of the cold war, uncovering the ideological and cultural work required to convince Americans to surrender their civil liberties in exchange for the illusion of security. His argument follows the chronology of the transitions between paradigms from the inauguration of the New World Order under George H. W. Bush to the homeland security state that George W. Bush's administration installed in the wake of 9/11. Providing clear and convincing arguments about how the concept of American exceptionalism was reformulated and redeployed in this era, Pease examines a wide range of cultural works and political spectacles, including the exorcism of the Vietnam syndrome through victory in the Persian Gulf War and the creation of Islamic extremism as an official state enemy.
At the same time, Pease notes that state fantasies cannot altogether conceal the inconsistencies they mask, showing how such events as the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and the exposure of government incompetence after Hurricane Katrina opened fissures in the myth of exceptionalism, allowing Barack Obama to challenge the homeland security paradigm with an alternative state fantasy that privileges fairness, inclusion, and justice.
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.
The New Apologists for Poetry was first published in 1956. 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 author's purpose is to clear the ground for a systematic aesthetics of poetry consistent with the insights of our most influential contemporary literary critics. The book is concerned with those of the so-called "new critics" who are trying to answer the need, forced on them by historical and cultural pressures, to justify poetry by securing for it a unique function for which modern "scientism" cannot find a substitute.
This volume provides intensive analyses of work by critics of several persuasions: T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks, and, for purposes of contrast, D. G. James, R. S. Crane, Elder Olson, and Max Eastman.
Allen Tate, the poet and critic, writes: "Mr. Krieger's book is the most searching in scholarship and the most profound in critical analysis of the existing books in this field."
Robert B. Heilman, critic and teacher, comments: "The author's knowledge of a complex field and his mastery of the analytical techniques which he is applying to a chosen set of critical positions are very impressive. He not only clarifies the positions of various contemporary critics by examining them in the light of the same set of general principles, but also provides some helpful, at times brilliant, insights into the works of various critics from the Greeks up to the present. He traces the history of concepts and thus establishes relationships among individual critics and critical schools."
Under Jini Kim Watson’s scrutiny, the Asian Tiger metropolises of Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore reveal a surprising residue of the colonial environment. Drawing on a wide array of literary, filmic, and political works, and juxtaposing close readings of the built environment, Watson demonstrates how processes of migration and construction in the hypergrowth urbanscapes of the Pacific Rim crystallize the psychic and political dramas of their colonized past and globalized present.
Examining how newly constructed spaces—including expressways, high-rises, factory zones, department stores, and government buildings—become figured within fictional and political texts uncovers how massive transformations of citizenries and cities were rationalized, perceived, and fictionalized. Watson shows how literature, film, and poetry have described and challenged contemporary Asian metropolises, especially around the formation of gendered and laboring subjects in these new spaces. She suggests that by embracing the postwar growth-at-any-cost imperative, they have buttressed the nationalist enterprise along neocolonial lines.
The New Asian City provides an innovative approach to how we might better understand the gleaming metropolises of the Pacific Rim. In doing so, it demonstrates how reading cultural production in conjunction with built environments can enrich our knowledge of the lived consequences of rapid economic and urban development.
“The New Berlin is a notable contribution to human geography and to the interdisciplinary literature on social memory and place making. Till’s methods and scholarship have provided the conceptual groundwork for the exploration and development of place making, social memory, and spatial haunting through the particular practices and politics of the new Berlin. Her readable style is marked by a narrative economy in which every word and sentence serves the larger purposes of the book. I recommend this book to anyone—student, scholar, or practitioner—who is interested in the social dynamics of memory formation and place making.” —The Professional Geographer
“This book is a well-written ‘first-hand’ account, though it also thoroughly covers academic literature, contemporary news accounts, and archival records.” —German Studies Review
“Karen E. Till's The New Berlin describes the modern metropolis and the ghosts of the past that it has to deal with.” —German World
“Well illustrated and copiously footnoted, this is a cutting-edge study of the power of identity-construction/analysis. Highly recommended.” —CHOICE
New Lines takes the pulse of a society increasingly drawn to the power of the digital map, examining the conceptual and technical developments of the field of geographic information science as this work is refracted through a pervasive digital culture. Matthew W. Wilson draws together archival research on the birth of the digital map with a reconsideration of the critical turn in mapping and cartographic thought.
Seeking to bridge a foundational divide within the discipline of geography—between cultural and human geographers and practitioners of Geographic Information Systems (GIS)—Wilson suggests that GIS practitioners may operate within a critical vacuum and may not fully contend with their placement within broader networks, the politics of mapping, the rise of the digital humanities, the activist possibilities of appropriating GIS technologies, and more.
Employing the concept of the drawn and traced line, Wilson treads the theoretical terrain of Deleuze, Guattari, and Gunnar Olsson while grounding their thoughts with the hybrid impulse of the more-than-human thought of Donna Haraway. What results is a series of interventions—fractures in the lines directing everyday life—that provide the reader with an opportunity to consider the renewed urgency of forceful geographic representation. These five fractures are criticality, digitality, movement, attention, and quantification. New Lines examines their traces to find their potential and their necessity in the face of our frenetic digital life.
Unlocking a vital understanding of how literary studies and media studies overlap and are bound together
A synthetic history of new media reception in modern and contemporary Japan, The New Real positions mimesis at the heart of the media concept. Considering both mimicry and representation as the core functions of mediation and remediation, Jonathan E. Abel offers a new model for media studies while explaining the deep and ongoing imbrication of Japan in the history of new media.
From stereoscopy in the late nineteenth century to emoji at the dawn of the twenty-first, Abel presents a pioneering history of new media reception in Japan across the analog and digital divide. He argues that there are two realities created by new media: one marketed to us through advertising that proclaims better, faster, and higher-resolution connections to the real; and the other experienced by users whose daily lives and behaviors are subtly transformed by the presence and penetration of the content carried through new media. Intervening in contemporary conversations about virtuality, copyright, copycat violence, and social media, each chapter unfolds with a focus on a single medium or technology, including 3D photographs, the phonograph, television, videogames, and emoji.
By highlighting the tendency of the mediated to copy the world and the world to copy the mediated, The New Real provides a new path for analysis of media, culture, and their function in the world.
The New World of Southeast Asia was first published in 1949. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
A fascinating look at the United States’ conflicted relationship with news and the media, through the lens of the newsreel
When weekly newsreels launched in the early twentieth century, they offered the U.S. public the first weekly record of events that symbolized “indisputable evidence” of the news. In News Parade, Joseph Clark examines the history of the newsreel and how it changed the way Americans saw the world. He combines an examination of the newsreel’s methods of production, distribution, and reception with an analysis of its representational strategies to understand the newsreel’s place in the history of twentieth-century American culture and film history.
Clark focuses on the sound newsreel of the 1930s and 1940s, arguing that it represents a crucial moment in the development of a spectacular society where media representations of reality became more fully integrated into commodity culture. Using several case studies, including the newsreel’s coverage of Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and the Sino–Japanese War, News Parade shows how news film transformed the relationship between its audience and current events, as well as the social and political consequences of these changes. It pays particular attention to how discourses of race and gender worked together with the rhetoric of speed, mobility, and authority to establish the power and privilege of newsreel spectatorship.
In the age of fake news and the profound changes to journalism brought on by the internet, News Parade demonstrates how new technologies and media reshaped the American public’s relationship with the news in the 1930s—a history that can help us to better understand the transformations happening today.
Newspaper Reference Methods 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.
A timely and trenchant commentary on the centrality of Nietzsche’s thought for our time
While many posthumanists claim Nietzsche as one of their own, rarely do they engage his philosophy in any real depth. Nietzsche’s Posthumanism addresses this need by exploring the continuities and disagreements between Nietzsche’s philosophy and contemporary posthumanism. Focusing specifically on Nietzsche’s reception of the life sciences of his day and his reflections on technology—research areas as central to Nietzsche’s work as they are to posthumanism—Edgar Landgraf provides fresh readings of Nietzsche and a critique of post- and transhumanist philosophies.
Through Landgraf’s inquiry, lesser-known aspects of Nietzsche’s writings emerge, including the neurophysiological basis of his epistemology (which anticipates contemporary debates on embodiment), his concerns with insects and the emergent social properties they exhibit, and his reflections on the hominization and cultivation effects of technology. In the process, Landgraf challenges major commonplaces about Nietzsche’s philosophy, including the idea that his social theory asserts the rights of “the strong” over “the weak.” The ethos of critical posthumanism also offers a new perspective on key ethical and political contentions of Nietzsche’s writings.
Nietzsche’s Posthumanism presents a uniquely framed introduction to tenets of Nietzsche’s thought and major trends in posthumanism, making it an essential exploration for anyone invested in Nietzsche and his contemporary relevance, and in posthumanism and its genealogy.
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Explores ecological impasses and opportunities of our fossil-fueled civilization
It is more and more obvious that our fossilized civilization has no sustainable future. It is an ecological Ponzi scheme stealing away the lives of countless species and the wellbeing of future generations in exchange for contemporary conveniences and the luxuries of a small subset of the human population. Yet a civilization wholly beyond fossils still seems difficult to grasp.
In No More Fossils, Dominic Boyer tells the story of the rise of fossil civilization through successive phases of sucropolitics (plantation sugar), carbopolitics (industrial coal), and petropolitics (oily automobility and plasticity), showing what tethers us to the ecocidal trajectory of petroculture today and what it will take to overcome the forces that mire us in place. He also looks ahead toward the world that the rapid electrification of vehicles, buildings, and power is creating. What can we do to make electroculture more just and sustainable than the petroculture we are leaving behind?
With characteristic intelligence, wit, and feminist insight, Ellen Willis addresses democracy as she sees it: “a commitment to individual freedom and egalitarian self-government in every area of social, economic, and cultural life.” Moving between scholarly and down-to-earth activist writing styles, Willis confronts the conservative backlash that has slowly eroded democratic ideals and advances of the 1960s as well as the internal debates that have frequently splintered the left.
Accelerationism is the bastard offspring of a furtive liaison between Marxism and science fiction. Its basic premise is that the only way out is the way through: to get beyond capitalism, we need to push its technologies to the point where they explode. This may be dubious as a political strategy, but it works as a powerful artistic program.
Other authors have debated the pros and cons of accelerationist politics; No Speed Limit makes the case for an accelerationist aesthetics. Our present moment is illuminated, both for good and for ill, in the cracked mirror of science-fictional futurity.
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 timely rethinking of the archetypal story of Noah, the great flood, and who was left behind as the waters rose
Most people know the story of Noah from a children’s bible or a play set with a colorful ship, bearded Noah, pairs of animals, and an uncomplicated vision of survival. Noah’s ark, however, will forever be haunted by what it leaves to the rising waters so that the world can begin again.
In Noah’s Arkive, Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates examine the long history of imagining endurance against climate catastrophe—as well as alternative ways of creating refuge. They trace how the elements of the flood narrative were elaborated in medieval and early modern art, text, and music, and now shape writing and thinking during the current age of anthropogenic climate change. Arguing that the biblical ark may well be the worst possible exemplar of human behavior, the chapters draw on a range of sources, from the Epic of Gilgamesh and Ovid’s tale of Deucalion and Pyrrah, to speculative fiction, climate fiction, and stories and art dwelling with environmental catastrophe. Noah’s Arkive uncovers the startling afterlife of the Genesis narrative written from the perspective of Noah’s wife and family, the animals on the ark, and those excluded and so left behind to die. This book of recovered stories speaks eloquently to the ethical and political burdens of living through the Anthropocene.
Following a climate change narrative across the millennia, Noah’s Arkive surveys the long history of dwelling with the consequences of choosing only a few to survive in order to start the world over. It is an intriguing meditation on how the story of the ark can frame how we think about environmental catastrophe and refuge, conservation and exclusion, offering hope for a better future by heeding what we know from the past.
Since the early 2000s, the phenomenon of the “down low”—black men who have sex with men as well as women and do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual—has exploded in news media and popular culture, from the Oprah Winfrey Show to R & B singer R. Kelly’s hip hopera Trapped in the Closet. Most down-low stories are morality tales in which black men are either predators who risk infecting their unsuspecting female partners with HIV or victims of a pathological black culture that repudiates openly gay identities. In both cases, down-low narratives depict black men as sexually dangerous, duplicitous, promiscuous, and contaminated.
In Nobody Is Supposed to Know, C. Riley Snorton traces the emergence and circulation of the down low in contemporary media and popular culture to show how these portrayals reinforce troubling perceptions of black sexuality. Reworking Eve Sedgwick’s notion of the “glass closet,” Snorton advances a new theory of such representations in which black sexuality is marked by hypervisibility and confinement, spectacle and speculation. Through close readings of news, music, movies, television, and gossip blogs, Nobody Is Supposed to Know explores the contemporary genealogy, meaning, and functions of the down low.
Snorton examines how the down low links blackness and queerness in the popular imagination and how the down low is just one example of how media and popular culture surveil and police black sexuality. Looking at figures such as Ma Rainey, Bishop Eddie L. Long, J. L. King, and Will Smith, he ultimately contends that down-low narratives reveal the limits of current understandings of black sexuality.
To err is human; to err in digital culture is design. In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, Peter Krapp identifies creative reservoirs of computer-mediated interaction. Throughout new media cultures, he traces a resistance to the heritage of motion studies, ergonomics, and efficiency; in doing so, he shows how creativity is stirred within the networks of digital culture.
Noise Channels offers a fresh look at hypertext and tactical media, tunes into laptop music, and situates the emergent forms of computer gaming and machinima in media history. Krapp analyzes text, image, sound, virtual spaces, and gestures in noisy channels of computer-mediated communication that seek to embrace—rather than overcome—the limitations and misfires of computing. Equally at home with online literature, the visual tactics of hacktivism, the recuperation of glitches in sound art, electronica, and videogames, or machinima as an emerging media practice, he explores distinctions between noise and information, and how games pivot on errors at the human–computer interface.
Grounding the digital humanities in the conditions of possibility of computing culture, Krapp puts forth his insight on the critical role of information in the creative process.
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.
Edited by Richard Grusin of the Center for 21st Century Studies, this is the first book to name and characterize—and therefore consolidate—a wide array of current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social sciences under the concept of the nonhuman turn. Each of these approaches is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a concern for the nonhuman, understood by contributors in a variety of ways—in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, materiality, technologies, and organic and geophysical systems.
The nonhuman turn in twenty-first-century studies can be traced to multiple intellectual and theoretical developments from the last decades of the twentieth century: actor-network theory, affect theory, animal studies, assemblage theory, cognitive sciences, new materialism, new media theory, speculative realism, and systems theory. Such varied analytical and theoretical formations obviously diverge and disagree in many of their assumptions, objects, and methodologies. However, they all take up aspects of the nonhuman as critical to the future of twenty-first-century studies in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Unlike the posthuman turn, the nonhuman turn does not make a claim about teleology or progress in which we begin with the human and see a transformation from the human to the posthuman. Rather, the nonhuman turn insists (paraphrasing Bruno Latour) that “we have never been human,” that the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman—and that the human is identified precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman.
Contributors: Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins U; Ian Bogost, Georgia Institute of Technology; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown U; Mark B. N. Hansen, Duke U; Erin Manning, Concordia U, Montreal; Brian Massumi, U of Montreal; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Rebekah Sheldon, Indiana U.
Normal and Abnormal International Capital Transfers was first published in 1939. 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.
Norman Mailer - American Writers 73 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.
This pamphlet series has been hailed by critics, teachers, and librarians as an ideals means of introducing both students and general readers to American writers of all periods. Choice has commented: "For the small library this series offers at small cost introductions by reputable critics o dozens of significant authors, and the larger the library the greater the number of undergraduate students looking for a place to start on some writer." The New York Times Book Review has called the pamphlets "extraordinarily good," pointing out that "they are just long enough (forty-eight pages) to permit a real survey of an author's work and short enough to attract the casual reader, the anxiety-ridden student, and the professor desperate for the straight word on an unfamiliar writer."
The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century 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.
In his preface the author writes: "Europe's style was both courageous and ignoble, Europe's achievement both magnificent and appalling. There is less need now that Europe's hegemony is over, for pride or shame to color historical judgments." In that candid vein Mr. Davies provides a balanced and impartial history of British, French, and Dutch beginnings in North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa to the end of the seventeenth century. He contrasts two styles of empire: the planting of trading posts in order to gather fur, fish, and slaves; and the planting of people in colonies of settlement to grow tobacco and sugar. He shows that the first style, involving little outlay of capital, was favored by European merchants; the second, by rulers and landlords. In his conclusion he examines the impact made by the Europeans on the people they traded with and expropriated, and assesses the diplomatic, economic, and cultural repercussions of the North Atlantic on Europe itself.
"Should provide valuable supplementary reading in courses in British imperial and American colonial history, as well as a source of information for those who teach them." –History.
The North Shore leads you along the wild and beautiful 150-mile inland coast that stretches from Duluth to the Canadian border. It guides you through historic sites, wilderness trails, and the seven state parks you’ll find along the way.
Read The North Shore as you plan your trip; then take it along and enjoy the milepost-by-milepost descriptions of Lake Superior’s scenic splendor. Fascinating details of the history, the people, and the events on the Shore offer you a multitude of options for making your trip more enjoyable.
The North Shore guides you to breathtaking vistas and exciting adventures. Explore river gorges and cascading waterfalls. Hike scenic wilderness trails. Experience four seasons of color and light. Ski miles of freshly groomed tracks. Fish Lake Superior and the tumbling streams that feed it. Explore pathways of early settlers.
The North Shore will help you plan adventures for all the seasons-from one-day excursions to two-week vacations. It’s a great gift for everyone who loves Minnesota’s favorite destination.
Shawn Perich is a free-lance writer who lives on the North Shore. His writing has been featured in numerous regional and national publications. He served as editor of the Cook County News-Herald in Grand Marais and as editor for Fins and Feathers magazine. Shawn and Vikki live in Hovland, Minnesota, on the edge of Lake Superior, with their yellow labrador, Casey.
Northern Fishes 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.
With the greatly increased interest in fishes and fishing since the earlier editions of this work were published, there has been need for a revised version of this indispensable book on the fishes of the Upper Mississippi Valley. This, the third edition, revised, of Northern Fishes by Samuel Eddy and Thaddeus Surber, contains much new material and up-to-date information based on current knowledge about fishes, their environment, and fishing techniques.
The book covers more than 160 species with descriptions and line drawings to illustrate almost all of them. The authors discuss recently introduced species and their importance to sportsmen and provide current data on the distribution of northern fishes. There are keys for the identification of the species and information about where they are found and their habits. This edition also contains a number of additions to the species list which result from rather extensive collecting of specimens since the earlier editions were compiled.
Before presenting the data on individual species, the authors provide basic information about fishes in general—their structure, classification and origin, their food, and their parasites. The revised, updated section on fishing techniques includes information about spin casting. There are important chapters on lake dynamics, fish population dynamics, management of Minnesota and northern waters for fish production, and improvement of lakes and streams. The detailed information about species is arranged according to families. For further reading or reference there is a bibliography.
The Northern Garden was first published in 1938. 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 mystery of how an ordinary Minnesota girl came to be, briefly, one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States
Behind every act of domestic terrorism there is someone’s child, an average American whose life took a radical turn for reasons that often remain mysterious. Camilla Hall is a case in point: a pastor’s daughter from small-town Minnesota who eventually joined the ranks of radicals like Sara Jane Olson (aka Kathleen Soliah) in the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army before dying in a shootout with Los Angeles Police in May 1974. How could a “good girl” like Camilla become one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States? Rachael Hanel tells her story here, revealing both the deep humanity and the extraordinary circumstances of Camilla Hall’s life.
Camilla’s childhood in a tight-knit religious family was marred by loss and grief as, one after another, her three siblings died. Her path from her Minnesota home to her final, radical SLA family featured years as an artist and activist—in welfare offices, political campaigns, union organizing, culminating in a love affair that would be her introduction to the SLA. Through in-depth research and extensive interviews, Hanel pieces together Camilla’s bewildering transformation from a “gentle, zaftig, arty, otherworldy” young woman (as one observer remarked), working for social change within the system, into a gun-wielding criminal involved in the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.
During this time of mounting unrest and violence, Camilla Hall’s story is of urgent interest for what it reveals about the forces of radicalization. But as Hanel ventures ever further into Camilla’s past, searching out the critical points where character and cause might intersect, her book becomes an intriguing, disturbing, and ultimately deeply moving journey into the dark side of America’s promise.
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.
How Western nations have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim in the post-9/11 world
While much has been written about post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism (often termed Islamophobia), insufficient attention has been given to how anti-Muslim racism operates through law and is a vital part of law’s protection of whiteness. This book fills this gap while also providing a unique new global perspective on white supremacy. Sherene H. Razack, a leading critical race and feminist scholar, takes an innovative approach by situating law within media discourses and historical and contemporary realities. We may think of law as logical, but, argues Razack, its logic breaks down when the subject is Muslim.
Tracing how white subjects and majority-white nations in the post-9/11 era have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim, Razack examines four sites of anti-Muslim racism: efforts by American evangelical Christians to ban Islam in the school curriculum; Canadian and European bans on Muslim women’s clothing; racial science and the sentencing of Muslims as terrorists; and American national memory of the torture of Muslims during wars and occupations. Arguing that nothing has to make sense when the subject is Muslim, she maintains that these legal and cultural sites reveal the dread, phobia, hysteria, and desire that mark the encounter between Muslims and the West.
Through the prism of racism, Nothing Has to Make Sense argues that the figure of the Muslim reveals a world divided between the deserving and the disposable, where people of European origin are the former and all others are confined in various ways to regimes of disposability. Emerging from critical race theory, and bridging with Islamophobia/critical religious studies, it demonstrates that anti-Muslim racism is a revelatory window into the operation of white supremacy as a global force.
A critical look at the competing motivations behind one of modern architecture’s most widely known and misunderstood movements
Although “mid-century modern” has evolved into a highly popular and ubiquitous architectural style, this term obscures the varied perspectives and approaches of its original practitioners. In Nothing Permanent, Todd Cronan displaces generalizations with a nuanced intellectual history of architectural innovation in California between 1920 and 1970, uncovering the conflicting intentions that would go on to reshape the future of American domestic life.
Focusing on four primary figures—R. M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Charles and Ray Eames—Nothing Permanent demonstrates how this prolific era of modern architecture in California, rather than constituting a homogenous movement, was propelled by disparate approaches and aims. Exemplified by the twin pillars of Schindler and Neutra and their respective ideological factions, these two groups of architects represent opposing poles of architectural intentionality, embodying divergent views about the dynamic between interior and exterior, the idea of permanence, and the extent to which architects could exercise control over the inhabitants of their structures.
Looking past California modernism’s surface-level idealization in present-day style guides, home decor publications, films, and television shows, Nothing Permanent details the intellectual, aesthetic, and practical debates that lie at the roots of this complex architectural moment. Extracting this period from its diffusion into visual culture, Cronan argues that mid-century architecture in California raised questions about the meaning of architecture and design that remain urgent today.
The Novels of Theodore Dreiser was first published in 1976. 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.
Relying heavily on the manuscripts and letters in the Dreiser Collection of the University of Pennsylvania Library, Professor Pizer seeks to establish the facts of the sources and composition of each of Dreiser's eight novels and to study the themes and form of the completed works. In this study he relates what can be discovered about the factual reality of a novel to its imaginative reality. His interpretation of the novels avoids the suggestion that there is a single overriding theme or direction in Dreiser's work and emphasizes that Dreiser deserves examination primarily on the basis of the individuality and worth of each of his novels. A separate chapter is devoted to each of the novels: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The "Genius," The Financier, The Titan, An American Tragedy, The Bulwark, and The Stoic.
From submarines to the suburbs—the remaking of Pittsburgh during the Cold War
During the early Cold War, research facilities became ubiquitous features of suburbs across the United States. Pittsburgh’s eastern and southern suburbs hosted a constellation of such facilities that became the world’s leading center for the development of nuclear reactors for naval vessels and power plants. The segregated communities that surrounded these laboratories housed one of the largest concentrations of nuclear engineers and scientists on earth. In Nuclear Suburbs, Patrick Vitale uncovers how the suburbs shaped the everyday lives of these technology workers.
Using oral histories, Vitale follows nuclear engineers and scientists throughout and beyond the Pittsburgh region to understand how the politics of technoscience and the Cold War were embedded in daily life. At the same time that research facilities moved to Pittsburgh’s suburbs, a coalition of business and political elites began an aggressive effort, called the Pittsburgh Renaissance, to renew the region. For Pittsburgh’s elite, laboratories and researchers became important symbols of the new Pittsburgh and its postindustrial economy. Nuclear Suburbs exposes how this coalition enrolled technology workers as allies in their remaking of the city.
Offering lessons for the present day, Nuclear Suburbs shows how race, class, gender, and the production of urban and suburban space are fundamental to technoscientific networks, and explains how the “renewal” of industrial regions into centers of the tech economy is rooted in violence and injustice.
"This book is a manual of nursing procedures originally prepared for the students of the University of Minnesota School of Nursing, written to obviate the necessity of note-taking by the students during the presentation of demonstration by the instructor . . . On the whole the manual is excellent. An instructor would find it of great value in planning her demonstration. It would be difficult to improve upon the simplicity and clarity with which the steps of the procedures are given." —Pacific Coast Journal of Nursing
Nursing Procedures 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.
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