front cover of Nacho Lopez, Mexican Photographer
Nacho Lopez, Mexican Photographer
John Mraz
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
Reveals the career of an influential but underappreciated photojournalist. Photographer Nacho López was Mexico's Eugene Smith, fusing social commitment with searing imagery to dramatize the plight of the helpless, the poor, and the marginalized in the pages of glossy illustrated magazines. Even today, López's photographs forcefully belie the picturesque exoticism that is invariably presented as the essence of Mexico. In Nacho López, Mexican Photographer, John Mraz offers the first full-length study in English of this influential photojournalist and provides a close visual analysis of more than fifty of López's most important photographs. Mraz first sets López's work in the historical and cultural context of the authoritarian presidentialism that characterized Mexican politics in the 1950s, the cult of wealth and celebrity promoted by Mexico's professional photographers, and the government's attempts to modernize and industrialize Mexico at almost any cost. Mraz skillfully explores the implications of López's imagery in this setting: the extent to which his photographs might constitute further victimization of his downtrodden subjects, the relationship between them and the middle-class readers of the magazines for which López worked, and the success with which his photographs challenged Mexico's economic and political structures. Mraz contrasts the photos López took with those that were selected by his editors for publication. He also compares López's images with his theories about documentary photography, and considers López's photographs alongside the work of Robert Capa, Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Sebastião Salgado. López's imagery is further analyzed in relation to the Mexican Golden Age cinema inspired by Sergei Eisenstein, the pioneering digital imagery of Pedro Meyer, and the work of Manuel �lvarez Bravo, who Mraz provocatively argues was the first Mexican photographer to take an anti-picturesque stance. The definitive English-language assessment of Nacho López's career, this volume also explores such broader topics as the nature of the photographic essay and the role of the media in effecting social change. "John Mraz writes clearly and passionately. His excellent study will elevate López into the pantheon of photographers who have combined social commitment and artistic expression and creativity." Robert M. Levine "If Manuel Alvarez Bravo is Mexico's version of Edward Weston, then Nacho López is probably the equivalent of W. Eugene Smith--that is to say, a photojournalist of international stature. Documentary photographers are all too often static bystanders, but López was a dynamic dissident. To appreciate his work, you have to be in possession of John Mraz's profound knowledge of Mexican social history. This is one of the most important contributions to the history of photography of the last twenty years." Mike Weaver John Mraz is research professor at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades at the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla in Mexico.
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Nakagami, Japan
Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity
Anne McKnight
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
How do you write yourself into a literature that doesn’t know you exist? This was the conundrum confronted by Nakagami Kenji (1946–1992), who counted himself among the buraku-min, Japan’s largest minority. His answer brought the histories and rhetorical traditions of buraku writing into the high culture of Japanese literature for the first time and helped establish him as the most canonical writer born in postwar Japan.

In Nakagami, Japan, Anne McKnight shows how the writer’s exploration of buraku led to a unique blend of fiction and ethnography—which amounted to nothing less than a reimagining of modern Japanese literature. McKnight develops a parallax view of Nakagami’s achievement, allowing us to see him much as he saw himself, as a writer whose accomplishments traversed both buraku literary arts and high literary culture in Japan.

As she considers the ways in which Nakagami and other twentieth-century writers used ethnography to shape Japanese literature, McKnight reveals how ideas about language also imagined a transfigured relation to mainstream culture and politics. Her analysis of the resulting “rhetorical activism” lays bare Nakagami’s unique blending of literature and ethnography within the context of twentieth-century ideas about race, ethnicity, and citizenship—in Japan, but also on an international scale.
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Naked Fieldnotes
A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing
Denielle Elliott
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

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.

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Names Of History
On the Poetics of Knowledge
Jacques Ranciere
University of Minnesota Press, 1994

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Narrative As Communication
Didier Coste
University of Minnesota Press, 1989
The first major treatise on narrative and narrative theory to make use of all the analytic tools developed in the last two decades.
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Narrative Experiments
The Discursive Authority of Science and Technology
Gayle L. Ormiston and Raphael Sassower
University of Minnesota Press, 1989

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.

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Nathanael West - American Writers 21
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Stanley Edgar Hyman
University of Minnesota Press, 1962

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.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne - American Writers 23
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Hyatt H. Waggoner
University of Minnesota Press, 1962

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.

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The Nation and the States, Rivals or Partners
William Anderson
University of Minnesota Press, 1955

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.

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A National Acoustics
Music and Mass Publicity in Weimar and Nazi Germany
Brian Currid
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
A sound track of Germany in the early twentieth century might conjure military music and the voice of Adolf Hitler rising above a cheering crowd. In A National Acoustics, Brian Currid challenges this reductive characterization by investigating the transformations of music in mass culture from the Weimar Republic to the end of the Nazi regime. 

Offering a nuanced analysis of how publicity was constructed through radio programming, print media, popular song, and film, Currid examines how German citizens developed an emotional investment in the nation and other forms of collectivity that were tied to the sonic experience. Reading in detail popular genres of music—the Schlager (or “hit”), so-called gypsy music, and jazz—he offers a complex view of how they played a part in the creation of German culture. 

A National Acoustics contributes to a new understanding of what constitutes the public sphere. In doing so, it illustrates the contradictions between Germany’s social and cultural histories and how the technologies of recording not only were vital to the emergence of a national imaginary but also exposed the fault lines in the contested terrain of mass communication. 

Brian Currid is an independent scholar who lives in Berlin.
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National Camera
Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment
Roberto Tejada
University of Minnesota Press, 2009
In National Camera, Roberto Tejada offers a comprehensive study of Mexican photography from the early twentieth century to today, demonstrating how images have shaped identities in Mexico, the United States, and in the borderlands where the two nations and cultures intersect—a place Tejada calls the shared image environment.

The “problem” of photography in Mexico, Tejada shows, reveals cross-cultural episodes that are rife with contradictions, especially in the complex terms of cultural and sexual difference. Analyzing such topics as territory, sexuality, and social and ethnic relations in image making, Tejada delves into the work of key figures including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Marius de Zayas, and Julien Levy, as well as the Agustín Víctor Casasola Archive, the Boystown photographs, and contemporary Mexican and Latina photo-based artists.

From the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 to the U.S.–Mexico borderlands of today, Tejada traces the connective thread that photography has provided between Mexican and U.S. American intellectual and cultural production and, in doing so, defines both nations.
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National Deconstruction
Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia
David Campbell
University of Minnesota Press, 1998
Book of the Year--Foundation Bosnian-Herzegovinian Book and the Journal Human Rights Review How did Bosnia, once a polity of intersecting and overlapping identities, come to be understood as an intractable ethnic problem? David Campbell pursues this question--and its implications for the politics of community, democracy, justice, and multiculturalism--through readings of media and academic representations of the conflict in Bosnia. National Deconstruction is a rethinking of the meaning of "ethnic/nationalist" violence and a critique of the impoverished discourse of identity politics that crippled the international response to the Bosnian crisis. Rather than assuming the preexistence of an entity called Bosnia, Campbell considers the complex array of historical, statistical, cartographic, and other practices through which the definitions of Bosnia have come to be. These practices traverse a continuum of political spaces, from the bodies of individuals and the corporate body of the former Yugoslavia to the international bodies of the world community. Among the book's many original disclosures, arrived at through a critical reading of international diplomacy, is the shared identity politics of the peacemakers and paramilitaries. Equally significant is Campbell's conclusion that the international response to the Bosnian war was hamstrung by the poverty of Western thought on the politics of heterogeneous communities. Indeed, he contends that Europe and the United States intervened in Bosnia not to save the ideal of multiculturalism abroad but rather to shore up the nationalist imaginary so as to contain the ideal of multiculturalism at home. By bringing to the fore the concern with ethics, politics, and responsibility contained in more traditional accounts of the Bosnian war, this book is a major statement on the inherently ethical and political assumptions of deconstructive thought-and the reworkings of the politics of community it enables. "David Campbell has provided not only the first book-length poststructuralist study of the Bosnian war and the international policy toward it, but also the formulation of a deconstructivist ethics of international relations. National Deconstruction is not only a well-argued formulation of a deconstructivist international ethics, it is also a wide-ranging and relentless critique that will leave few unprovoked." --Ethics & International Affairs David Campbell is professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle, UK, and the author of Writing Security.
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National Growth and Economic Change in the Upper Midwest
James M. Henderson
University of Minnesota Press, 1965

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.

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front cover of Nationalism
Nationalism
Craig Calhoun
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

front cover of Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature
Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature
Terry Eagleton
University of Minnesota Press, 1990

front cover of Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World
Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World
A Derivative Discourse
Partha Chatterjee
University of Minnesota Press, 1993

front cover of Native Agency
Native Agency
Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs
Valerie Lambert
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

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.

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Native Intelligence
Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature
Deepika Bahri
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

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.
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Native To The Nation
Disciplining Landscapes And Bodies In Australia
Allaine Cerwonka
University of Minnesota Press, 2004
In a world increasingly marked by migration and dislocation, the question of displacement, and of establishing a sense of belonging, has become ever more common and ever more urgent. But what of those who stay in place? How do people who remain in their place of origin or ancestral homeland rearticulate a sense of connection, of belonging, when ownership of the territory they occupy is contested? Focusing on Australia, Allaine Cerwonka examines the physical and narrative spatial practices by which people reclaim territory in the wake of postcolonial claims to land by indigenous people and new immigration of “foreigners.” As a multicultural, postcolonial nation whose claims to land until recently were premised on the notion of the continent as “empty” (terra nullius), Australia offers an especially rich lens for understanding the reterritorialization of the nation-state in an era of globalization. To this end, Native to the Nation provides a multisited ethnography of two communities in Melbourne, the Fitzroy Police Station and the East Melbourne Garden Club, allowing us to see how bodies are managed and nations physically constructed in everyday confrontations and cultivations. Allaine Cerwonka is assistant professor of women’s studies and political science at Georgia State University.
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Natives against Nativism
Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France
Olivia C. Harrison
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

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.

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Navajo Courts and Navajo Common Law
A Tradition of Tribal Self-Governance
Raymond D. Austin
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

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.

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Navigating the African Diaspora
The Anthropology of Invisibility
Donald Martin Carter
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Investigating how the fraught political economy of migration impacts people around the world, Donald Martin Carter raises important issues about contemporary African diasporic movements. Developing the notion of the anthropology of invisibility, he explores the trope of navigation in social theory intent on understanding the lived experiences of transnational migrants.
 
Carter examines invisibility in its various forms, from social rejection and residential segregation to war memorials and the inability of some groups to represent themselves through popular culture, scholarship, or art. The pervasiveness of invisibility is not limited to symbolic actions, Carter shows, but may have dramatic and at times catastrophic consequences for people subjected to its force. The geographic span of his analysis is global, encompassing Senegalese Muslims in Italy and the United States and concluding with practical questions about the future of European societies. Carter also considers both contemporary and historical constellations of displacement, from Darfurian refugees to French West African colonial soldiers.
 
Whether focusing on historical photographs, television, print media, and graffiti scrawled across urban walls or identifying the critique of colonialism implicit in African films and literature, Carter reveals a protean and peopled world in motion.
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The Nazi Perpetrator
Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right
Paul B. Jaskot
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

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.

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Nazi Psychoanalysis V1
Volume I: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War
Laurence A. Rickels
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
Volume I: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War Volume II: Crypto-Fetishism Volume III: Psy Fi Laurence A. Rickels Foreword by Benjamin Bennett A revolutionary new approach to the place of Nazi ideology in twentieth-century thought. Psychoanalysis was a symptom of everything the Nazis reviled: an intellectual assault on Kultur largely perpetrated by Jews. It was also, as this remarkable revisionary work shows, an inescapable symptom of modernity, practiced, transformed, and perpetuated by and within the Nazi regime. A sweeping, magisterial work by one of the most incisive and interesting scholars of modern philosophy, theory, and culture, Nazi Psychoanalysis studies the breadth of this phenomenon in order to clarify and deepen our understanding not only of psychoanalysis but of the twentieth century itself. Tracing the intersections of psychoanalysis and Nazism, Laurence A. Rickels discovers startling conjunctions and continuities in writers as diverse as Adler and Adorno, Kafka and Goethe, Lacan, H. Rider Haggard, and Heidegger, and in works as different as Der Golem, Civilization and Its Discontents, Frankenstein, Faust, and Brave New World. In a richly allusive style, he writes of psychoanalysis in multifarious incarnations, of the concept and actual history of "insurance," of propaganda in theory and practice, of psychological warfare, Walt Disney, and the Frankfurt School debates-a dizzying tour of the twentieth century that helps us see how the "corridor wars" that arise in the course of theoretical, clinical, social, political, and cultural attempts to describe the human psyche are related to the world wars of the century in an intimate and infinitely complicated manner. Though some have used its appropriation by the Nazis to brand psychoanalysis with the political odium of fascism, Rickels instead finds an uncanny convergence-one that suggests far-reaching possibilities for both psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism. His work, with its enormous intellectual and historical span, makes a persuasive argument that no element of modernity-not psychoanalysis any more than Marxism or deconstruction, cultural revolutions or technological advances-can be adequately understood without a thorough consideration of its Nazi component. Laurence A. Rickels is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His books include The Vampire Lectures (1999), The Case of California (2001), and the edited volume Acting Out in Groups (1999).
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front cover of Nazi Psychoanalysis V2
Nazi Psychoanalysis V2
Volume II: Crypto-Fetishism
Laurence A. Rickels
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
Volume I: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War Volume II: Crypto-Fetishism Volume III: Psy Fi Laurence A. Rickels Foreword by Benjamin Bennett A revolutionary new approach to the place of Nazi ideology in twentieth-century thought. Psychoanalysis was a symptom of everything the Nazis reviled: an intellectual assault on Kultur largely perpetrated by Jews. It was also, as this remarkable revisionary work shows, an inescapable symptom of modernity, practiced, transformed, and perpetuated by and within the Nazi regime. A sweeping, magisterial work by one of the most incisive and interesting scholars of modern philosophy, theory, and culture, Nazi Psychoanalysis studies the breadth of this phenomenon in order to clarify and deepen our understanding not only of psychoanalysis but of the twentieth century itself. Tracing the intersections of psychoanalysis and Nazism, Laurence A. Rickels discovers startling conjunctions and continuities in writers as diverse as Adler and Adorno, Kafka and Goethe, Lacan, H. Rider Haggard, and Heidegger, and in works as different as Der Golem, Civilization and Its Discontents, Frankenstein, Faust, and Brave New World. In a richly allusive style, he writes of psychoanalysis in multifarious incarnations, of the concept and actual history of "insurance," of propaganda in theory and practice, of psychological warfare, Walt Disney, and the Frankfurt School debates-a dizzying tour of the twentieth century that helps us see how the "corridor wars" that arise in the course of theoretical, clinical, social, political, and cultural attempts to describe the human psyche are related to the world wars of the century in an intimate and infinitely complicated manner. Though some have used its appropriation by the Nazis to brand psychoanalysis with the political odium of fascism, Rickels instead finds an uncanny convergence-one that suggests far-reaching possibilities for both psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism. His work, with its enormous intellectual and historical span, makes a persuasive argument that no element of modernity-not psychoanalysis any more than Marxism or deconstruction, cultural revolutions or technological advances-can be adequately understood without a thorough consideration of its Nazi component. Laurence A. Rickels is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His books include The Vampire Lectures (1999), The Case of California (2001), and the edited volume Acting Out in Groups (1999).
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front cover of Nazi Psychoanalysis V3
Nazi Psychoanalysis V3
Volume III: Psy Fi
Laurence A. Rickels
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
Volume I: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War Volume II: Crypto-Fetishism Volume III: Psy Fi Laurence A. Rickels Foreword by Benjamin Bennett A revolutionary new approach to the place of Nazi ideology in twentieth-century thought. Psychoanalysis was a symptom of everything the Nazis reviled: an intellectual assault on Kultur largely perpetrated by Jews. It was also, as this remarkable revisionary work shows, an inescapable symptom of modernity, practiced, transformed, and perpetuated by and within the Nazi regime. A sweeping, magisterial work by one of the most incisive and interesting scholars of modern philosophy, theory, and culture, Nazi Psychoanalysis studies the breadth of this phenomenon in order to clarify and deepen our understanding not only of psychoanalysis but of the twentieth century itself. Tracing the intersections of psychoanalysis and Nazism, Laurence A. Rickels discovers startling conjunctions and continuities in writers as diverse as Adler and Adorno, Kafka and Goethe, Lacan, H. Rider Haggard, and Heidegger, and in works as different as Der Golem, Civilization and Its Discontents, Frankenstein, Faust, and Brave New World. In a richly allusive style, he writes of psychoanalysis in multifarious incarnations, of the concept and actual history of "insurance," of propaganda in theory and practice, of psychological warfare, Walt Disney, and the Frankfurt School debates-a dizzying tour of the twentieth century that helps us see how the "corridor wars" that arise in the course of theoretical, clinical, social, political, and cultural attempts to describe the human psyche are related to the world wars of the century in an intimate and infinitely complicated manner. Though some have used its appropriation by the Nazis to brand psychoanalysis with the political odium of fascism, Rickels instead finds an uncanny convergence-one that suggests far-reaching possibilities for both psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism. His work, with its enormous intellectual and historical span, makes a persuasive argument that no element of modernity-not psychoanalysis any more than Marxism or deconstruction, cultural revolutions or technological advances-can be adequately understood without a thorough consideration of its Nazi component. Laurence A. Rickels is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His books include The Vampire Lectures (1999), The Case of California (2001), and the edited volume Acting Out in Groups (1999). In volume I, Rickels uses hundreds of political and scientific articles and books to show the emergence of the concept of psychological warfare beginning in World War I.
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Neatness Counts
Essays on the Writer’s Desk
Kevin Kopelson Kopelson
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
In Neatness Counts, Kevin Kopelson reflects on the poetics of the desk—rolltop or bureau-plat, cluttered or bare, the nestlike desk, the schematic desk, the dramatic desk, the dramatic lack of any such furniture. Exploring the topography of literary creation by way of the topography of work space, Kopelson, one of today’s most important critics, offers a series of meditations on how orderliness, chaos, and other physical states correspond with both the exhilaration of production and the desperation of writer's block.Focusing on the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the novelist Marcel Proust, the critic Roland Barthes, the playwright Tom Stoppard, and the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, Neatness Counts is at once critical and creative, examining how various writers' work habits relate to their published work. Kopelson also considers desks of his own—one that had belonged to an older brother, one he borrowed from a messy friend, one now shared with a partner. And by pursuing these two lines of inquiry to their unlikely but enlightening conclusions, Kopelson both fabricates a virtual library of literary insight and commemorates an era in which the term “desktop” didn’t denote one’s computer screen.Kevin Kopelson is professor of English at the University of Iowa. His books include, most recently, The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky.
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The Needle and the Lens
Pop Goes to the Movies from Rock 'n' Roll to Synthwave
Nate Patrin
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

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.

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Negritude Women
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

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Neither God nor Master
Robert Bresson and Radical Politics
Brian Price
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
The French auteur Robert Bresson, director of such classics as Diary of a Country Priest (1951), The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), The Devil, Probably (1977), and L’Argent (1983), has long been thought of as a transcendental filmmaker preoccupied with questions of grace and predestination and little interested in the problems of the social world. This book is the first to view Bresson’s work in an altogether different context. Rather than a religious—or spiritual—filmmaker, Bresson is revealed as an artist steeped in radical, revolutionary politics.

Situating Bresson in radical and aesthetic political contexts, from surrealism to situationism, Neither God nor Master shows how his early style was a model for social resistance. We then see how, after May 1968, his films were in fact a series of reflections on the failure of revolution in France—especially as “failure” is understood in relation to Bresson’s chosen literary precursors, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and Russian revolutionary culture of the nineteenth century.

Restoring Bresson to the radical political culture from which he emerged—and to which he remained faithful—Price offers a major revision of the reputation of one of the most celebrated figures in the history of French film. In doing so, he raises larger philosophical questions about the efficacy of revolutionary practices and questions about interpretation and metaphysical tendencies of film historical research that have, until now, gone largely untested.
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The Neocolonialism of the Global Village
Ginger Nolan
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

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.

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The Neoliberal Deluge
Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans
Cedric Johnson
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

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.
 

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Networked Art
Craig J. Saper
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

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The Networked Wilderness
Communicating in Early New England
Matt Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

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.

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Networking the World, 1794-2000
Armand Mattelart
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

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Neural Networks
Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

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.

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Neurofilaments
Charles A. Marotta
University of Minnesota Press, 1983

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.

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Neuropolitics
Thinking, Culture, Speed
William E. Connolly
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
A surprising exploration of connections between culture, neuroscience, and our experience of time. Why would a political theorist venture into the nexus between neuroscience and film? According to William Connolly--whose new book is itself an eloquent answer--the combination exposes the ubiquitous role that technique plays in thinking, ethics, and politics. By taking up recent research in neuroscience to explore the way brain activity is influenced by cultural conditions and stimuli such as film technique, Connolly is able to fashion a new perspective on our attempts to negotiate-and thrive-within a deeply pluralized society whose culture and economy continue to quicken. In Neuropolitics Connolly draws upon recent brain/body research to explore the creative potential of thinking, the layered character of culture, the cultivation of ethical sensibilities, and the critical role of technique in all three. He then shows how a series of films--including Vertigo, Five Easy Pieces, and Citizen Kane--enhances our appreciation of technique and contests the linear image of time now prevalent in cultural theory. Connolly deftly brings these themes together to support an ethos of deep pluralism within the democratic state and a politics of citizen activism across states. His book is an original and rigorous study that attends to the creative possibilities of thinking in identity, culture, and ethics. William E. Connolly is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University. His most recent books are Why I Am Not a Secularist (1999) and The Ethos of Pluralization (1995), and IdentityDifference (2002). His work The Terms of Political Discourse won the 1999 Benjamin Lippincott Award. Why would a political theorist venture into the nexus between neuroscience and film? According to William Connolly--whose new book is itself an eloquent answer--the combination exposes the ubiquitous role that technique plays in thinking, ethics, and politics. By taking up recent research in neuroscience to explore the way brain activity is influenced by cultural conditions and stimuli such as film technique, Connolly is able to fashion a new perspective on our attempts to negotiate-and thrive-within a deeply pluralized society whose culture and economy continue to quicken. In Neuropolitics Connolly draws upon recent brain/body research to explore the creative potential of thinking, the layered character of culture, the cultivation of ethical sensibilities, and the critical role of technique in all three. He then shows how a series of films--including Vertigo, Five Easy Pieces, and Citizen Kane--enhances our appreciation of technique and contests the linear image of time now prevalent in cultural theory. Connolly deftly brings these themes together to support an ethos of deep pluralism within the democratic state and a politics of citizen activism across states. His book is an original and rigorous study that attends to the creative possibilities of thinking in identity, culture, and ethics. William E. Connolly is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University. His most recent books are Why I Am Not a Secularist (1999) and The Ethos of Pluralization (1995), and IdentityDifference (2002). His work The Terms of Political Discourse won the 1999 Benjamin Lippincott Award.
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Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude
Michael Haworth
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

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.

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Never One Nation
Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850-1877
Linda Frost
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
In Never One Nation, Linda Frost argues that during the eventful decades surrounding the Civil War, American identity was constructed not only nationally but also locally. Depictions of race, class, and sexuality seen in P. T. Barnum's museums, in the image of the Circassian Beauty, and in popular periodicals like Harper's Weekly, the Southern Illustrated News, and the San Francisco Golden Era further illustrated who was - and who was not - an American. Local coverage of Native Americans and Chinese in the West, African Americans and recent Irish immigrants in New York, and slaves and Yankees in the South played a major role in conflating Americanness with whiteness. These ideas were shaped by reactions to events such as the 1863 Draft Riots and the Dakota uprising in Minnesota in 1862, and laid bare through the demonization of Northern whites in Confederate newspapers and anxieties expressed in California newspapers about the possibility of Chinese immigrants gaining U.S. citizenship. Through close readings of specific articles published in regional periodicals, mostly unexamined by literary scholars, Frost shows how Americanness came to be defined in the mid-nineteenth century by the mainstream popular culture. The era's many social upheavals - Emancipation, Reconstruction, the start of the Indian wars in the West, immigration, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad - sharpened the desire of Americans to feel part of a national community, even as they made this search for an American identity extremely contentious and necessarily fragmented. Never One Nation provocatively reframes the discourse on racial formation and reveals how local cultures and prejudices can recast the identity of a nation.
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Never Trust a Thin Cook and Other Lessons from Italy’s Culinary Capital
Eric Dregni
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

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.

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The New American Exceptionalism
Donald E. Pease
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

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.

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New American Studies
John Carlos Rowe
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
A clarion call for a more theoretically and politically informed approach to American Studies. John Carlos Rowe, a leading American Studies scholar, has examined his field of study and declared it not ready for the twenty-first century. In The New American Studies, Rowe demands a reinvention of the discipline that includes a commitment to making it more theoretically informed, and he draws on the work of cultural critics, postmodernist theorists, and scholars in ethnic, gender, gay, and media studies. Rowe asserts that with American Studies' strong history of social criticism and practical pedagogy it is an easy leap to the type of progressive commitments characteristic of these areas of scholarship. The New American Studies is a compelling combination of theory and application, synthesis and polemic. Rowe traces the evolution of American Studies over the last quarter century and looks to the future, placing the field in a postnationalist context that encompasses all of the Americas and the disparate cultural zones within. He then demonstrates the kind of literary and cultural interpretation he calls for, examining subjects ranging from Hawthorne's and James's responses to nineteenth-century sexual mores, to the ways television legitimated itself in its first few decades, to the Elián González custody case. John Carlos Rowe is professor of English at the University of California, Irvine.
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The New American War Film
Robert Burgoyne
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

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

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

 

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

 

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

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The New Apologists for Poetry
Murray Krieger
University of Minnesota Press, 1956

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."

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The New Asian City
Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form
Jini Kim Watson
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

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.

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The New Berlin
Memory, Politics, Place
Karen E. Till
University of Minnesota Press, 2005

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

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New Downtown Now
An Anthology Of New Theater From Downtown New York
Mac Wellman
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
At a time when most serious drama being written and produced for the American stage aspires only to mainstream acceptance and high-toned mediocrity, an innovative new generation of playwrights based in New York City has emerged, crafting works that challenge and undermine the conventional structure, language, and characterization of commercial theater while rejecting outdated notions of the avant-garde. New Downtown Now brings together ten new works that exemplify the playfulness, excitement, and possibilities of the theater. Characterized by fragmenting structure, hypnotic rhythms, kaleido-scopic imagery, unpredictable characters, and lyrical language, these plays resemble puzzles from which the writers are teasing revelations. Though disparate in subject matter and style, with characters ranging from a sushi chef to a soldier and settings from a taxicab to a live television broadcast, these highly original plays share a commitment to formal experimentation that places them beyond the psychological clichés of the majority and the cold condescension of postmodernism. The anthology includes Interim by Barbara Cassidy; Tragedy: a tragedy by Will Eno; Nine Come by Elana Greenfield; Shufu-Sachiko and Enoshima Island by Madelyn Kent; The Appeal by Young Jean Lee; The Vomit Talk of Ghosts by Kevin Oakes; Ajax (por nobody) by Alice Tuan; Apparition, an uneasy play of the underknown by Anne Washburn; Demon Baby by Erin Courtney.Mac Wellman is the author of numerous plays and the recipient of three Obie awards, most recently in 2003 for lifetime achievement. He is professor of playwriting at Brooklyn College. Young Jean Lee is a playwright and director, and member of the Obie award-winning company 13P. Jeffrey M. Jones is a playwright and curator of the Obie award-winning Little Theater at Tonic in New York.
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New Lines
Critical GIS and the Trouble of the Map
Matthew W. Wilson
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

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.

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The New Real
Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji
Jonathan E. Abel
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

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.

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The New Spinoza
Warren Montag
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

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New Troy
Fantasies Of Empire In The Late Middle Ages
Sylvia Federico
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
Examines the political and literary uses of the Trojan legend in the medieval period. England in the late fourteenth century witnessed a large-scale social revolt, a lingering and seemingly hopeless war with France, and fierce factional conflicts in royal politics and London civic government--struggles in which all parties sought to justify their actions by claiming historical precedent. How the Trojan legend figured in these claims--and in competing assertions of authorial legitimacy, nationhood, and rule in the later Middle Ages--is the complex nexus of history, myth, literature, and identity that Sylvia Federico explores in this ambitious book. During the late medieval period, many European political and social groups took great pains to associate themselves with the ancient city; the claim on Troy, Federico asserts, was crucial to nationhood and was always a political act. Her book examines the poetry and prose of several late medieval authors, focusing particularly on how Chaucer's use of the Trojan legend helped to set the terms by which the Ricardian and Lancastrian periods were distinguished, and further helped to establish English literary history as a noble precedent in its own right. Federico's book affords remarkable insight into the workings of the medieval historical imagination. Sylvia Federico has taught at Washington State University and the University of Leeds. She currently lives in Maine.
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New Way Of The Wilderness
The Classic Guide to Survival in the Wild
Calvin Rutstrum
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

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The New World of Southeast Asia
Lennox A. Mills
University of Minnesota Press, 1949

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.

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New York, Chicago, Los Angeles
America’s Global Cities
Janet Abu-Lughod
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
A renowned scholar compares America's three global cities. "Abu-Lughod nicely characterizes the distinctive feel and experience of the three cities. She works her way through the history, the statistics, and the economic forces, but she ends up on the sidewalk, marveling at the complexity that has been created by an extraordinary history, and enamored of it. What is most urgent about her book is not so much her analysis of the urban condition as her devotion to cities. The city has been under attack by theorists and sprawlers for a long time now, but this fine book provides necessary examples of how the city may be intelligently loved." --Nathan Glazer in The New Republic "In a pathbreaking analysis, Abu-Lughod demonstrates the historical roots of what is usually described as a contemporary phenomenon." --MultiCultural Review "Substantial, in-depth comparison of more than one large city by a single urban scholar, while not unprecedented, is a difficult project to execute competently. Abu-Lughod has done a commendable job. One can only hope that others will follow her pioneering work and provide comparative and historical analyses of other global cities." --Urban Geography "For those of us who are interested in historical-geographical approaches to comparative urbanization, Janet Abu-Lughod's new work, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities, comes as a welcome relief. This impressive volume provides a comprehensive, readable, and lively interpretation of the three leading U.S. metropolitan areas. Although Abu-Lughod is a trained urban sociologist, she has a keen sensitivity to historical, spatial, economic, political, and cultural considerationsits real strengths lie in an exhaustive review of empirical evidence from the three metropolises and a rich illustration of points with abundant maps, tables, and figures. Abu-Lughod excels in profiling the trajectories of America's three largest city-regions. I find the book to be a tour de force, the worthwhile result of many years of study and observation. Happily, the book presents the material in a straightforward way and is remarkably free of the jargon that sometimes plagues global-city studies. I hope the book receives wide circulation. Abu-Lughod, after a long scholarly career in urban studies, may have achieved her magnum opus in this ambitious study of America's three preeminent global cities." --Geographical Review "Janet Abu-Lughod's book is both a fascinating history of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and a history of the United States from a new perspective. The stories of the three cities are beautifully overlapped but consistent in themselves, related to one another but self-sufficient. This is a very American book-despite the author's wealth of experience abroad. Her forte is the new narrative she weaves from existing research. The book provides a remarkably systematic and organized narrative of urbanization in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is also replete with a collection of individual anecdotal evidence and an impressive multitude of single conceptual and metaphorical observations that are often hidden in the empirical material presented throughout the book. This book represents an outstanding achievement. It will be-and deserves to be-an instant classic. Abu-Lughod's major opus is expressive of a life's work among the great American urbanists and planners of the 20th century. Abu-Lughod is a living example of what the best of urbanism can produce in a largely suburban America. In this sense, the book gives planners a giant source of inspiration: the big picture in long waves. The city lives despite itself." --Roger Keil, Journal of the American Planning Association "Janet L. Abu-Lughod's book is the first to compare these cities in an ambitious in-depth study that takes into account each city's unique history, following their development from their earliest days to their current status as players on the global state." --Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles--for all their differences, they are quintessentially American cities. They are also among the handful of cities in the world that can truly be called "global." Janet L. Abu-Lughod's book is the first to compare them in an ambitious in-depth study that takes into account each city's unique history, following their development from their earliest days to their current status as players on the global stage. Unlike most other global cities, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles all quickly grew from the nearly blank slate of the American landscape to become important beyond the nation's borders early in their histories. As a result, Abu-Lughod is able to show the effect of globalization on each city's development from its beginnings. While all three are critical to global economics and the spread of American culture to the farthest reaches of an increasingly interlinked world, their influence reflects their individual histories and personalities. In a masterful synthesis of historical and economic information, Abu-Lughod clarifies how each city's global role is--and will be--affected by geography, ethnicity of population, political institutions, and tradition of governance. New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are more than global players: they are also home to forty million people. Abu-Lughod closes the book with a set of vignettes that captures the cities' differences as perceived by one who has lived in them. Bringing together the local and the global in thoroughly unexpected and enlightening ways, this important volume offers fascinating insight into these vital urban centers. "Comparative urbanism has few practitioners as distinguished as Janet L. Abu-Lughod. In this monumental study, Professor Abu-Lughod rescues Los Angeles from eccentricity by placing it in comparative context alongside the two most accepted urban paradigms of the United States: New York and Chicago. In doing so, she has added a new city--the City of Angels--to the front ranks of American cities and has significantly enhanced our understanding of New York and Chicago as well." --Kevin Starr, State Librarian of California "This breathtaking tour through the history of the three largest cities of the United States synthesizes the essentials of their varied history in a readable, lively form. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles is the first book I have seen by a single author who has lived in and become intimately knowledgeable about each of the cities, has plumbed their history, examined statistics, and pulled together a comparison that places the data and accounts in the context of personal experience. Abu-Lughod concludes the book with a set of human vignettes that captures differences and similarities among the cities, in the lived experience of a user and employer of each of the cities." --Peter Marcuse, Columbia University "A masterful comparative history of the three cities. Abu-Lughod's scholarship is impeccable and her book extremely well written." --John Friedmann, Professor Emeritus, UCLA, author of Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression and California and The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, professor emerita of sociology of Northwestern University and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, has been writing about and studying cities for more than fifty years. Her books include From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York's Lower East Side; Changing Cities: Urban Sociology; Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350; Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco; and Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious, among many other publications. In 1999 she received the Robert and Helen Lynd Award (American Sociological Association, Section on Community and Urban Sociology) for distinguished lifetime contributions to the study of cities.
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Newly Born Woman
Helene Cixous
University of Minnesota Press, 1986
Published in France as La jeune née in 1975, and found here in its first English translation, The Newly Born Woman is a landmark text of the modern feminist movement. In it, Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément put forward the concept of écriture feminine, exploring the ways women’s sexuality and unconscious shape their imaginary, their language, and their writing. Through their readings of historical, literary, and psychoanalytic accounts, Cixous and Clément explore what is hidden and repressed in culture, revealing the unconscious of history.
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News Parade
The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle
Joseph Clark
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

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.

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Newspaper Reference Methods
Robert W. Desmond
University of Minnesota Press, 1933

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.

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Next to the Color Line
Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois
Susan Gillman
University of Minnesota Press, 2007
Although W. E. B. Du Bois did not often pursue the connections between the “Negro question” that defined so much of his intellectual life and the “woman question” that engaged writers and feminist activists around him, Next to the Color Line argues that within Du Bois’s work is a politics of juxtaposition that connects race, gender, sexuality, and justice.This provocative collection investigates a set of political formulations and rhetorical strategies by which Du Bois approached, used, and repressed issues of gender and sexuality. The essays in Next to the Color Line propose a return to Du Bois, not only to reassess his politics but also to demonstrate his relevance for today’s scholarly and political concerns.Contributors: Hazel V. Carby, Yale U; Vilashini Cooppan, U of California, Santa Cruz; Brent Hayes Edwards, Rutgers U; Michele Elam, Stanford U; Roderick A. Ferguson, U of Minnesota; Joy James, Williams College; Fred Moten, U of Southern California; Shawn Michelle Smith, St. Louis U; Mason Stokes, Skidmore College; Claudia Tate, Princeton U; Paul C. Taylor, Temple U.Susan Gillman is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Alys Eve Weinbaum is associate professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle.
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Nietzsche's Posthumanism
Edgar Landgraf
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

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.

 

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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No More Fossils
Dominic Boyer
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

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?

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No More Nice Girls
Countercultural Essays
Ellen Willis
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

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.

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No More, No More
Slavery And Cultural Resistance In Havana And New Orleans
Daniel E. Walker
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

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No Speed Limit
Three Essays on Accelerationism
Steven Shaviro
University of Minnesota Press, 2015

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.


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Noah's Arkive
Jeffrey J. Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

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.

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Nobody Is Supposed to Know
Black Sexuality on the Down Low
C. Riley Snorton
University of Minnesota Press, 2014


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.

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Noir Anxiety
Kelly Oliver
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
Investigates the fears and desires about sexuality and racial identity that shape film noir. Among the elements that define the classic film noir-chiaroscuro lighting, voice-over narration, and such archetypal characters as the world-weary private eye and the femme fatale-perhaps no element is more responsible for the genre's continued popularity among movie buffs, filmmakers, and critics than the palpable sense of anxiety that emanates from the screen. Because the genre emerged in the shadow of the Second World War, this profound psychological and philosophical unease is usually ascribed either to postwar fears about the atomic bomb or to the reactions of returning soldiers to a new social landscape. In Noir Anxiety, however, Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo interpret what has been called the "free-floating anxiety" of film noir as concrete apprehensions about race and sexuality. Applying feminist and postcolonial psychoanalytic theory to traditional noir films (Murder, My Sweet; The Lady from Shanghai; Vertigo; and Touch of Evil) and the "neo-noirs" of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (Chinatown, Devil in a Blue Dress, and Bound), the authors uncover a rich array of unconscious worries and desires about ambiguous sexual, racial, and national identities, often displaced onto these films' narrative and stylistic components. In particular, Oliver and Trigo focus on the looming absence of the mother figure within the genre and fears about maternal sexuality and miscegenation. Drawing on the work of Freud and Julia Kristeva, Noir Anxiety locates film noir's studied ambivalence toward these critical themes within the genre's social, historical, and cinematic context. Kelly Oliver is professor of philosophy and women's studies and Benigno Trigo is associate professor of Hispanic languages and literature, both at Stony Brook University. Oliver is the author of five books, including Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (2001) and The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (2004). Trigo is author of Subjects of Crisis: Race and Gender as Disease in Latin America (1999).
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Noise Channels
Glitch and Error in Digital Culture
Peter Krapp
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

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.

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Noise
The Political Economy of Music
Jacques Attali
University of Minnesota Press, 1985
“Noise is a model of cultural historiography. . . . In its general theoretical argument on the relations of culture to economy, but also in its specialized concentration, Noise has much that is of importance to critical theory today.” SubStance“For Attali, music is not simply a reflection of culture, but a harbinger of change, an anticipatory abstraction of the shape of things to come. The book’s title refers specifically to the reception of musics that sonically rival normative social orders. Noise is Attali’s metaphor for a broad, historical vanguardism, for the radical soundscapes of the western continuum that express structurally the course of social development.” EthnomusicologyJacques Attali is the author of numerous books, including Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order and Labyrinth in Culture and Society.
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Nomadic Identities
The Performance Of Citizenship
May Joseph
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

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Nonhuman Humanitarians
Animal Interventions in Global Politics
Benjamin Meiches
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

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.

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The Nonhuman Turn
Richard Grusin
University of Minnesota Press, 2015

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.

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Normal and Abnormal International Capital Transfers
Marco Fanno
University of Minnesota Press, 1939

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.

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Norman Mailer - American Writers 73
University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers
Richard Foster
University of Minnesota Press, 1968

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."

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North American Canoe Country
The Classic Guide to Canoe Technique
Calvin Rutstrum
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

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The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century
K.G. Davies
University of Minnesota Press, 1976

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.

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North Shore
A Four-Season Guide to Minnesota’s Favorite Destination
Shawn Perich
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

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.


 
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North Star Country
Meridel Le Sueur
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

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North Writers II
Our Place in the Woods
John Henricksson
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

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Northern Fishes
With special reference to the upper Mississippi valley
Samuel Eddy and Thaddeus Surber
University of Minnesota Press, 1974

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.

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The Northern Garden
Daisy T. Abbott
University of Minnesota Press, 1938

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.

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Norway To America
A History of the Migration
Ingrid Semmingsen
University of Minnesota Press, 1980

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Norwegian Emigrant Songs and Ballads
Theodore Blegen
University of Minnesota Press, 1936
Norwegian Emigrant Songs and Ballads was first published in 1936. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This book, presenting the English and Norwegian texts of more than fifty emigrant songs and ballads, forms a unique contribution to folk literature and social history. Here is collected for the first time a group of songs born of the European folk movement to America during the nineteenth century.Many of the ballads are human stories of gripping interest. They cover a wide range of emotions, from pathos and nostalgia to anger and satire. Some are gay and humorous skits. The most popular of the ballads is the rollicking “Oleana.” Some of the others are: “Farewell to the Spinning Wheel,” “Sigrid’s Song,” “Let Us Away and over the Sea,” “El Dorado,” “A Pestilence is Loose in the Mountains,” “Brothers, the Day of Norway’s Freedom,” and “A Song Concerning the Emigration to America.”A general historical sketch precedes the ballads, and each song in turn is placed in its special setting by a brief preface. Music, harmonized for the piano, is provided for a dozen of the ballads.
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Not the Camilla We Knew
One Woman's Life from Small-town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army
Rachael Hanel
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

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.

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Not the Triumph But the Struggle
The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete
Amy Bass
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

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Notes on Nowhere
Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation
Jennifer Burwell
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

Notes on Nowhere was first published in 1997. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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

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

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

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

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

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Nothing Has to Make Sense
Upholding White Supremacy through Anti-Muslim Racism
Sherene H. Razack
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

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. 

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Nothing Permanent
Modern Architecture in California
Todd Cronan
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

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.

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Notorious H.I.V.
The Media Spectacle Of Nushawn Williams
Thomas Shevory
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

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The Novels of Theodore Dreiser
A Critical Study
Donald Pizer
University of Minnesota Press, 1976

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.

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Nuclear Suburbs
Cold War Technoscience and the Pittsburgh Renaissance
Patrick Vitale
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

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. 

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Nursing Procedures
Marion Vannier
University of Minnesota Press, 1929

"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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