Search results for ""University of Minnesota Press""
University of Minnesota Press Noise: The Political Economy of Music
“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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University of Minnesota Press Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics
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University of Minnesota Press The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Internet
Offering a deeper understanding of today’s internet media and the management theory behind itPlatforms are everywhere. From social media to chat, streaming, credit cards, and even bookstores, it seems like almost everything can be described as a platform. In The Platform Economy, Marc Steinberg argues that the “platformization” of capitalism has transformed everything, and it is imperative that we have a historically precise, robust understanding of this widespread concept. Taking Japan as the key site for global platformization, Steinberg delves into that nation’s unique technological and managerial trajectory, in the process systematically examining every facet of the elusive word platform. Among the untold stories revealed here is that of the 1999 iPhone precursor, the i-mode: the world’s first widespread mobile internet platform, which became a blueprint for Apple and Google’s later dominance of the mobile market. Steinberg also charts the rise of social gaming giants GREE and Mobage, chat tools KakaoTalk, WeChat, and LINE, and video streaming site Niconico Video, as well as the development of platform theory in Japan, as part of a wider transformation of managerial theory to account for platforms as mediators of cultural life. Analyzing platforms’ immense impact on contemporary media such as video streaming, music, and gaming, The Platform Economy fills in neglected parts of the platform story. In narrating the rise and fall of Japanese platforms, and the enduring legacy of Japanese platform theory, this book sheds light on contemporary tech titans like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Netflix, and their platform-mediated transformation of contemporary life—it is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand what capitalism is today and where it is headed.
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University of Minnesota Press Modelwork: The Material Culture of Making and Knowing
How making models allows us to recall what was and to discover what still might be Whether looking inward to the intricacies of human anatomy or outward to the furthest recesses of the universe, expanding the boundaries of human inquiry depends to a surprisingly large degree on the making of models. In this wide-ranging volume, scholars from diverse fields examine the interrelationships between a model’s material foundations and the otherwise invisible things it gestures toward, underscoring the pivotal role of models in understanding and shaping the world around us. Whether in the form of reproductions, interpretive processes, or constitutive tools, models may bridge the gap between the tangible and the abstract.By focusing on the material aspects of models, including the digital ones that would seem to displace their analogue forebears, these insightful essays ground modeling as a tactile and emphatically humanistic endeavor. With contributions from scholars in the history of science and technology, visual studies, musicology, literary studies, and material culture, this book demonstrates that models serve as invaluable tools across every field of cultural development, both historically and in the present day.Modelwork is unique in calling attention to modeling’s duality, a dynamic exchange between imagination and matter. This singular publication shows us how models shape our ability to ascertain the surrounding world and to find new ways to transform it. Contributors: Hilary Bryon, Virginia Tech; Johanna Drucker, UCLA; Seher Erdoğan Ford, Temple U; Peter Galison, Harvard U; Lisa Gitelman, New York U; Reed Gochberg, Harvard U; Catherine Newman Howe, Williams College; Christopher J. Lukasik, Purdue U; Martin Scherzinger, New York U; Juliet S. Sperling, U of Washington; Annabel Jane Wharton, Duke U.
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University of Minnesota Press Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties
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University of Minnesota Press The Fourth Eye: Maori Media in Aotearoa New Zealand
From the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between Indigenous and settler cultures to the emergence of the first-ever state-funded Māori television network, New Zealand has been a hotbed of Indigenous concerns. Given its history of colonization, coping with biculturalism is central to New Zealand life. Much of this “bicultural drama” plays out in the media and is molded by an anxiety surrounding the ongoing struggle over citizenship rights that is seated within the politics of recognition. The Fourth Eye brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars to provide a critical and comprehensive account of the intricate and complex relationship between the media and Māori culture. Examining the Indigenous mediascape, The Fourth Eye shows how Māori filmmakers, actors, and media producers have depicted conflicts over citizenship rights and negotiated the representation of Indigenous people. From nineteenth-century Māori-language newspapers to contemporary Māori film and television, the contributors explore a variety of media forms including magazine cover stories, print advertisements, commercial images, and current Māori-language newspapers to illustrate the construction, expression, and production of indigeneity through media.Focusing on New Zealand as a case study, the authors address the broader question: what is Indigenous media? While engaging with distinct themes such as the misrepresentation of Māori people in the media, access of Indigenous communities to media technologies, and the use of media for activism, the essays in this much-needed new collection articulate an Indigenous media landscape that converses with issues that reach far beyond New Zealand. Contributors: Sue Abel, U of Auckland; Joost de Bruin, Victoria U of Wellington; Suzanne Duncan, U of Otago; Kevin Fisher, U of Otago; Allen Meek, Massey U; Lachy Paterson, U of Otago; Chris Prentice, U of Otago; Jay Scherer, U of Alberta; Jo Smith, Victoria U of Wellington; April Strickland; Stephen Turner, U of Auckland.
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University of Minnesota Press Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations
In a world increasingly dominated by the digital, the critical response to digital art generally ranges from hype to counterhype. Popular writing about specific artworks seldom goes beyond promoting a given piece and explaining how it operates, while scholars and critics remain unsure about how to interpret and evaluate them. This is where Roberto Simanowski intervenes, demonstrating how such critical work can be done. Digital Art and Meaning offers close readings of varied examples from genres of digital art such as kinetic concrete poetry, computer-generated text, interactive installation, mapping art, and information sculpture. For instance, Simanowski deciphers the complex meaning of words that not only form an image on a screen but also react to the viewer’s behavior; images that are progressively destroyed by the human gaze; text machines generating nonsense sentences out of a Kafka story; and a light show above Mexico City’s historic square, created by Internet users all over the world. Simanowski combines these illuminating explanations with a theoretical discussion that employs art philosophy and history to achieve a deeper understanding of each particular example of digital art and, ultimately, of the genre as a whole.
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University of Minnesota Press The Opposite of Cold: The Northwoods Finnish Sauna Tradition
As many in the north country can attest, one of life's great pleasures resides in the tradition of sauna-sitting in 180-plus-degree heat and throwing cool water on oven-hot stones to create a blast of steam (called löyly), followed by a jump in the lake, standing naked in subzero temperatures (or even a roll in the snow), or just relaxing on the cooling porch. To the uninitiated, there is a strange, alluring mystique to the art of Finnish sauna. But to an ever-increasing number of people-from their small urban saunas to backwoods and lakeside retreats-the culture and practice of Finnish sauna are as much a part of northwoods life as campfires and canoe trips.Beginning with the origins of Finnish sauna and how the practice was first brought to North America, and continuing all the way to contemporary design, The Opposite of Cold is an exquisite commemoration of the history, culture, and practice of Finnish sauna in the northwoods. With stunning photographs of unique and historic saunas of the region-including the oldest sauna in North America, incredible surviving saunas from immigrant farmsteads, and the gorgeous contemporary saunas from noted architects-Michael Nordskog and Aaron Hautala unveil the importance and beauty of sauna culture in modern Midwestern life.Richly illuminated by Aaron Hautala's photographs of distinctive saunas from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario, and Finland, The Opposite of Cold is for people who grew up with Wednesday and Saturday evening saunas (or watched their steaming neighbors running toward the lake) and for those who dream of one day having their own. And through this book we see why Finnish sauna tradition is vital and enduring, from the warmest summer evenings to the coldest winter nights.
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University of Minnesota Press Does Writing Have a Future?
In Does Writing Have a Future?, a remarkably perceptive work first published in German in 1987, Vilém Flusser asks what will happen to thought and communication as written communication gives way, inevitably, to digital expression. In his introduction, Flusser proposes that writing does not, in fact, have a future because everything that is now conveyed in writing—and much that cannot be—can be recorded and transmitted by other means. Confirming Flusser’s status as a theorist of new media in the same rank as Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Friedrich Kittler, the balance of this book teases out the nuances of these developments. To find a common denominator among texts and practices that span millennia, Flusser looks back to the earliest forms of writing and forward to the digitization of texts now under way. For Flusser, writing—despite its limitations when compared to digital media—underpins historical consciousness, the concept of progress, and the nature of critical inquiry. While the text as a cultural form may ultimately become superfluous, he argues, the art of writing will not so much disappear but rather evolve into new kinds of thought and expression.
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University of Minnesota Press Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema
Fascism and the Second World War left Italy indelibly changed, and cinema was arguably the art that most rigorously confronted the devastated nation. In this examination of four Italian filmmakers, Noa Steimatsky brilliantly maps their forceful negotiation of Italy’s identity and posits that the cinematic forms they employ constitute an imaginary reinhabiting of Italy-one that is inextricably linked with the political, physical, and symbolic predicament of reconstruction. A dynamic intersection of pictorial and photographic, architectural and literary discourses inform Steimatsky’s revisionist interrogation of exemplary works from the 1940s to the mid–1960s. From the earliest documentary work of Michelangelo Antonioni on the River Po to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s re-siting of the Gospel in the arid, peripheral landscape of the Italian south, and from Roberto Rossellini’s tracing of a neorealist project in ruinous Berlin to Luchino Visconti’s wrought grandeur visited upon a humble Sicilian fishing village, Italian Locations probes the historical experience of displacement, anachronism, and a thoroughly contemporary anxiety in the cinematic arena. For Steimatsky, Antonioni’s modernist achievement, informed by his native landscape, Rossellini’s neorealist image of Italy as a nation of ruins, Visconti’s reaching back to the nineteenth century and even more archaic pasts, and Pasolini’s ambivalence about modernity-all partake in a search for a politically and culturally redeemed Italy. Noa Steimatsky is associate professor of the history of art and film studies at Yale University.
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University of Minnesota Press Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism
In Fugitive Empire, Andy Doolen investigates the relationships among race, nation, and empire in colonial and early national America, revealing how whiteness and American identity were conflated to stabilize racial hierarchy and to repulse challenges to national policies of slavery, war, and continental expansion. Fugitive Empire begins not in 1776 but in 1741 with the New York Conspiracy trials. Linking them to the British conflict with the Spanish in the West Indies, Doolen describes how white colonists were led to suspect all foreigners, particularly slaves, as insurgents. He shows how this protonational story resonated later in the suppression of resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. In addition to examining the only extant record of the New York Conspiracy trials, Doolen catalogs the rampant fear of aliens in Charles Brockden Brown’s novels; places James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers in the context of early efforts to relocate African-Americans to Liberia; and considers Pequot writer William Apess, whose writing on Native rights landed him in jail. Bridging the gap between the British Empire and the new United States, Doolen concludes that imperial authority lies at the heart of American republicanism, an unstable mixture of idealism, force, and pragmatism, wielded in the name of freedom even today. Andy Doolen is assistant professor of American literature and American studies at the University of Kentucky.
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University of Minnesota Press Sex Objects: Art And The Dialectics Of Desire
The declaration that a work of art is “about sex” is often announced to the public as a scandal after which there is nothing else to say about the work or the artist-controversy concludes a conversation when instead it should begin a new one. Moving beyond debates about pornography and censorship, Jennifer Doyle shows us that sex in art is as diverse as sex in everyday life: exciting, ordinary, emotional, traumatic, embarrassing, funny, even profoundly boring. Sex Objects examines the reception and frequent misunderstanding of highly sexualized images, words, and performances. In chapters on the “boring parts” of Moby-Dick, the scandals that dogged the painter Thomas Eakins, the role of women in Andy Warhol's Factory films, “bad sex” and Tracey Emin's crudely evocative line drawings, and L.A. artist Vaginal Davis's pornographic parodies of Vanessa Beecroft's performances, Sex Objects challenges simplistic readings of sexualized art and instead investigates what such works can tell us about the nature of desire. In Sex Objects, Doyle offers a creative and original exploration of how and where art and sex connect, arguing that to proclaim a piece of art “about sex” reveals surprisingly little about the work, the artist, or the spectator. Deftly interweaving anecdotal and personal writing with critical, feminist, and queer theory, she reimagines the relationship between sex and art in order to better understand how the two meet-and why it matters. Jennifer Doyle is associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is coeditor, with Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz, of Pop Out: Queer Warhol.
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University of Minnesota Press Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World
It is one thing to comprehend how culture makes its way through the world in those cases where something old is reproduced in the same physical shape-where, for example, a song is sung or a story retold. It is another thing altogether, as Greg Urban demonstrates, to think about cultural motion when something new is created-a new song or a new story. And this, the creating of new culture, is the overarching value of the contemporary world, as well as the guiding principle of the capitalist entrepreneur. From the Declaration of Independence to the movie Babe, from the Amazon River to the film studio, from microscopic studies of the words making up myths and books to the large-scale forces of conquest, conversion, and globalization that drive history, Urban follows the clues to a startling revelation: "metaculture" makes the modern, entrepreneurial form of culture possible. In Urban’s work we see how metaculture, in its relationship to newness, explains the peculiar shape of modern society and its institutions, from the prevalence of taste and choice to the processes of the public sphere, to the centrality of persuasion and hegemony within the nation.
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University of Minnesota Press Everything is Police
How institutional and interpersonal policing have been central to worldmaking Policing is constitutive of colonial modernity: normalizing, internalizing, and legalizing anti-Black violence as the ongoing condition for white life and freedom. The result, Tia Trafford argues here, is a situation where we cannot practically experience or even imagine worlds free from policing. From the plantation to the prison, global apartheid, and pandemic control, this book examines why and how policing has become the most ingrained, commonsense—and insidious—way of managing our world.
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University of Minnesota Press Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change
A groundbreaking book that combines the environmental humanities and social sciences to study the impact of environmental stories There is a growing consensus that environmental narratives can help catalyze the social change necessary to address today’s environmental crises; however, surprisingly little is known about their impact and effectiveness. In Empirical Ecocriticism, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, W. P. Malecki, and Frank Hakemulder combine an environmental humanities perspective with empirical methods derived from the social sciences to study the influence of environmental stories on our affects, attitudes, and actions. Empirical Ecocriticism provides an approachable introduction to this growing field’s main methods and demonstrates their potential through case studies on topics ranging from the impact of climate fiction on readers’ willingness to engage in activism to the political empowerment that results from participating in environmental theater. Part manifesto, part toolkit, part proof of concept, and part dialogue, this introductory volume is divided into three sections: methods, case studies, and reflections. International in scope, it points toward a novel and fruitful synthesis of the environmental humanities and social sciences. Contributors: Matthew Ballew, Yale U; Helena Bilandzic, U of Augsburg; Rebecca Dirksen, Indiana U; Greg Garrard, UBC Okanagan; Matthew H. Goldberg, Yale U; Abel Gustafson, U of Cincinnati; David I. Hanauer, Indiana U of Pennsylvania; Ursula K. Heise, UCLA; Jeremy Jimenez, SUNY Cortland; Anthony Leiserowitz, Yale U; David M. Markowitz, U of Oregon; Marcus Mayorga; Jessica Gall Myrick, Penn State U; Mary Beth Oliver, Penn State U; Yan Pang, Point Park U; Mark Pedelty, U of Minnesota; Seth A. Rosenthal, Yale U; Elja Roy, U of Memphis; Nicolai Skiveren, Aarhus U; Paul Slovic, U of Oregon; Scott Slovic, U of Idaho; Nicolette Sopcak, U of Alberta; Paul Sopcak, MacEwan U; Sara Warner, Cornell U.
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University of Minnesota Press Young-Girls in Echoland: #Theorizing Tiqqun
Who’s worse, the Young-Girl or the Man-Child? Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl is a controversial work of anticapitalist philosophy that has attracted musicians, playwrights, feminist theorists, and men's-rights activists since its publication in 1999. More than twenty years after its publication the international reverberation of Young-Girls shows no signs of weakening. Young-Girls in Echoland: #Theorizing Tiqqun is a guide to this ongoing postdigital conversation, engaging with artworks and textual criticism provoked by Tiqqun’s audacious, arguably misogynistic textual voice. Heather Warren-Crow and Andrea Jonsson show how Tiqqun’s polarizing figure has grown and matured but also stayed unapologetically girly in the works of artists and scholars discussed here. Rethinking the myth of Echo and Narcissus by performing a different kind of listening, they take us on a journey from VSCO girls to basic bitches to vampires.With an ear for the sound of Tiqqun’s polemic and its ensemble of Anglophone and Francophone rejoinders, Young-Girls in Echoland offers a model for analyzing the call-and-response of pop philosophy and for hearing the affective rhythms of communicative capitalism.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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University of Minnesota Press Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity
How care can resist the stifling force of the neoliberal paradigm In a world brimming with tremendous wealth and resources, too many are suffering the oppression of precarious existences—and with no adequate relief from free market–driven institutions. Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity assembles an international group of interdisciplinary scholars to explore the question of care theory as a response to market-driven capitalism, addressing the relationship of three of the most compelling social and political subjects today: care, precarity, and neoliberalism. While care theory often centers on questions of individual actions and choices, this collection instead connects theory to the contemporary political moment and public sphere. The contributors address the link between neoliberal values—such as individualism, productive exchange, and the free market—and the pervasive state of precarity and vulnerability in which so many find themselves. From disability studies and medical ethics to natural-disaster responses and the posthuman, examples from Māori, Dutch, and Japanese politics to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, this collection presents illuminating new ways of considering precarity in our world. Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity offers a hopeful tone in the growing valorization of care, demonstrating the need for an innovative approach to precarity within entrenched systems of oppression and a change in priorities around the basic needs of humanity.Contributors: Andries Baart, U Medical Center Utrecht, Tilburg U, and Catholic Theological U Utrecht, the Netherlands; Vrinda Dalmiya, U of Hawaii, Mānoa; Emilie Dionne, U Laval; Maggie FitzGerald, U of Saskatchewan; Sacha Ghandeharian, Carleton U; Eva Feder Kittay, Stony Brook U/SUNY; Carlo Leget, U of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands; Sarah Clark Miller, Penn State U; Luigina Mortari, U of Verona; Yayo Okano, Doshisha U, Kyoto, Japan; Elena Pulcini, U of Florence.
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University of Minnesota Press Troll Magic: Hidden Folk from the Mountains and Forests of Norway
A collection of macabre and magical folklore from the “godfather” of the Norwegian troll Across the stillness of the sprawling mountain heath, the shadow of the mighty forest falls, its wildness calling to the child in all of us. Here the Hidden Folk assemble: the stalwart little nisse, farmyard spirit and irrepressible prankster; the seductive hulder, with her crown of flowers and cow’s tail; the fiddling fossegrim, summoning the music of wind and water; and most fearsome and enchanting of all, the one-eyed troll, head high above the treetops. A veritable bestiary of Nordic folk creatures was conjured by artist Theodor Kittelsen, whose late nineteenth-century paintings and illustrations gave these macabre and magical figures their enduring forms.In this book, first published as Troldskab in 1892, Kittelsen spins tales of wonder around creatures rumored to haunt the fields, forests, and waterfalls of Norway. Striding, gamboling, and slithering across these pages are witches and gnomes and sea monsters, fiery dragons waking from their stiff-winged slumber, mermaids rising from the deep, and the sly, shapeshifting nøkk. But first and foremost are the trolls, hapless, horrible, or just plain silly, working their spells and making their mischief to the terror and delight of the presumably human reader.Tailoring his whimsical artistic style to each tale, Kittelsen’s stories, in Tiina Nunnally’s nimble translation, reveal a Nordic world of wonder, myth, and magic as real as the imagination allows.
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University of Minnesota Press The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China
How China’s expansive new era of urbanization threatens to undermine the foundations of rural life Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, China has vastly expanded its urbanization processes in an effort to reduce the inequalities between urban and rural areas. Centered on the mountainous region of Chongqing, which serves as an experimental site for the country’s new urban development policies, The End of the Village analyzes the radical expansion of urbanization and its consequences for China’s villagers. It reveals a fundamental rewriting of the nation’s social contract, as villages that once organized rural life and guaranteed rural livelihoods are replaced by an increasingly urbanized landscape dominated by state institutions. Throughout this comprehensive study of China’s “urban–rural coordination” policy, Nick R. Smith traces the diminishing autonomy of the country’s rural populations and their subordination to larger urban networks and shared administrative structures. Outside Chongqing’s urban centers, competing forces are at work in reshaping the social, political, and spatial organization of its villages. While municipal planners and policy makers seek to extend state power structures beyond the boundaries of the city, village leaders and inhabitants try to maintain control over their communities’ uncertain futures through strategies such as collectivization, shareholding, real estate development, and migration.As China seeks to rectify the development crises of previous decades through rapid urban growth, such drastic transformations threaten to displace existing ways of life for more than 600 million residents. Offering an unprecedented look at the country’s contentious shift in urban planning and policy, The End of the Village exposes the precarious future of rural life in China and suggests a critical reappraisal of how we think about urbanization.
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University of Minnesota Press Sound, Image, Silence: Art and the Aural Imagination in the Atlantic World
A visionary new approach to the Americas during the age of colonization, made by engaging with the aural aspects of supposedly “silent” images Colonial depictions of the North and South American landscape and its indigenous inhabitants fundamentally transformed the European imagination—but how did those images reach Europe, and how did they make their impact? In Sound, Image, Silence, noted art historian Michael Gaudio provides a groundbreaking examination of the colonial Americas by exploring the special role that aural imagination played in visible representations of the New World.Considering a diverse body of images that cover four hundred years of Atlantic history, Sound, Image, Silence addresses an important need within art history: to give hearing its due as a sense that can inform our understanding of images. Gaudio locates the noise of the pagan dance, the discord of battle, the din of revivalist religion, and the sublime sounds of nature in the Americas, such as lightning, thunder, and the waterfall. He invites readers to listen to visual media that seem deceptively couched in silence, offering bold new ideas on how art historians can engage with sound in inherently “mute” media.Sound, Image, Silence includes readings of Brazilian landscapes by the Dutch painter Frans Post, a London portrait of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison’s early Kinetoscope film Sioux Ghost Dance, and the work of Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of American landscape painting. It masterfully fuses a diversity of work across vast social, cultural, and spatial distances, giving us both a new way of understanding sound in art and a powerful new vision of the New World.
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University of Minnesota Press The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s
How new conceptions of human–environment interaction became central to design theories and practices in the 1970s At the end of the 1960s, new models of responsiveness between humans and their environments had a profound impact on theories and practices in architecture, design, art, technology, media, and the sciences. The resulting initiatives—design philosophies, art installations, architectural projects, exhibitions, publications, and symposia—sought to bring together insights from biology, systems theory, psychology, and anthropology with modernist legacies of total design.In The Responsive Environment, Larry D. Busbea takes up this concept of environment as an object and method of design at the height of its aesthetic, technical, and discursive elaboration. Exploring emerging paradigms of environmental perception, patterning, and control as developed by Gregory Bateson, Edward T. Hall, Wolf Hilbertz, György Kepes, Marshall McLuhan, Nicholas Negroponte, Paolo Soleri, and others, he shows how living space itself was reimagined as a domain capable of modification through input from its newly sensitized inhabitants.The Responsive Environment intercuts the development of new ideas about environmental awareness with case studies of specific architecture and design projects for responsive environments. Throughout, Busbea connects these theories and practices to the contemporary obsession with “smart” things: responsive technologies, intelligent environments, biomimetic materials, and digital atmospherics.
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University of Minnesota Press Asemic: The Art of Writing
The first critical study of writing without language In recent years, asemic writing—writing without language—has exploded in popularity, with anthologies, a large-scale art exhibition, and flourishing interest on sites like tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram. Yet this burgeoning, fascinating field has never received a dedicated critical study. Asemic fills that gap, proposing new ways of rethinking the nature of writing.Pioneered in the work of creators such as Henri Michaux, Roland Barthes, and Cy Twombly, asemic writing consolidated as a movement in the 1990s. Author Peter Schwenger first covers these “asemic ancestors” before moving to current practitioners such as Michael Jacobson, Rosaire Appel, and Christopher Skinner, exploring how asemic writing has evolved and gained importance in the contemporary era.Asemic includes intriguing revelations about the relation of asemic writing to Chinese characters, the possibility of asemic writing in nature, and explanations of how we can read without language. Written in a lively style, this book will engage scholars of contemporary art and literary theory, as well as anyone interested in what writing was and what it is now in the process of becoming.
£21.99
University of Minnesota Press Metaphysical Experiments: Physics and the Invention of the Universe
An engaging critique of the science and metaphysics behind our understanding of the universe The James Webb Space Telescope, when launched in 2021, will be the premier orbital observatory, capable of studying every phase of the history of the universe, from the afterglow of the Big Bang to the formation of our solar system. Examining the theoretical basis for key experiments that have made this latest venture in astrophysics possible, Bjørn Ekeberg reveals that scientific cosmology actually operates in a twilight zone between the physical and metaphysical. Metaphysical Experiments explains how our current framework for understanding the universe, the Big Bang theory, is more determined by a deep faith in mathematical universality than empirical observation. Ekeberg draws on philosophical insights by Spinoza, Bergson, Heidegger, and Arendt; on the critical perspectives of Latour, Stengers, and Serres; and on cutting-edge physics research at the Large Hadron Collider, to show how the universe of modern physics was invented to reconcile a Christian metaphysical premise with a claim to the theoretical unification of nature.By focusing on the nonmathematical assumptions underlying some of the most significant events in modern science, Metaphysical Experiments offers a critical history of contemporary physics that demystifies such concepts as the universe, particles, singularity, gravity, blackbody radiation, the speed of light, wave/particle duality, natural constants, black holes, dark matter, and dark energy. Ekeberg’s incisive reading of the metaphysical underpinnings of scientific cosmology offers an innovative account of how we understand our place in the universe.
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University of Minnesota Press Architectures of the Unforeseen: Essays in the Occurrent Arts
A beautifully written study of three pioneering artists, entwining their work and our understanding of creativity Bringing the creative process of three contemporary artists into conversation, Architectures of the Unforeseen stages an encounter between philosophy and art and design. Its gorgeous prose invites the reader to think along with Brian Massumi as he thoroughly embodies the work of these artists, walking the line that separates theory from art and providing equally nurturing sustenance for practicing artists and working philosophers.Based on Massumi’s lengthy—and in two cases decades-long—relationships with digital architect Greg Lynn, interactive media artist Rafael-Lozano Hemmer, and mixed-media installation creator Simryn Gill, Architectures of the Unforeseen delves into their processes of creating art. The book’s primary interest is in what motivates each artist’s practice—the generative knots that inspire creativity—and in how their pieces work to give off their unique effects. More than a series of profiles or critical pieces, Massumi’s essays are creative, developing new philosophical concepts and offering rigorous sentiments about art and creativity.Asking fundamental questions about nature, culture, and the emergence of the new, Architectures of the Unforeseen is important original research on artists that are pioneers in their field. Equally valuable to the everyday reader and those engaged in scholarly work, it is destined to become an important book not only for the fields of digital architecture, interactive media, and installation art, but also more basically for our knowledge of art and creativity.
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University of Minnesota Press Star Wars after Lucas: A Critical Guide to the Future of the Galaxy
Politics, craft, and cultural nostalgia in the remaking of Star Wars for a new ageA long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away—way back in the twenty-first century’s first decade—Star Wars seemed finished. Then in 2012 George Lucas shocked the entertainment world by selling the franchise, along with Lucasfilm, to Disney. This is the story of how, over the next five years, Star Wars went from near-certain extinction to what Wired magazine would call “the forever franchise,” with more films in the works than its first four decades had produced. Focusing on The Force Awakens (2015), Rogue One (2016), The Last Jedi (2017), and the television series Rebels (2014–18), Dan Golding explores the significance of pop culture nostalgia in overcoming the skepticism, if not downright hostility, that greeted the Star Wars relaunch. At the same time he shows how Disney, even as it tapped a backward-looking obsession, was nonetheless creating genuinely new and contemporary entries in the Star Wars universe.A host of cultural factors and forces propelled the Disney-engineered Star Wars renaissance, and all figure in Golding’s deeply informed analysis: from John Williams’s music in The Force Awakens to Peter Cushing’s CGI face in Rogue One, to Carrie Fisher’s passing, to the rapidly changing audience demographic. Star Wars after Lucas delves into the various responses and political uses of the new Star Wars in a wider context, as in reaction videos on YouTube and hate-filled, misogynistic online rants. In its granular textual readings, broad cultural scope, and insights into the complexities of the multimedia galaxy, this book is as entertaining as it is enlightening, an apt reflection of the enduring power of the Star Wars franchise.
£16.99
University of Minnesota Press Shareveillance: The Dangers of Openly Sharing and Covertly Collecting Data
Cracking open the politics of transparency and secrecy In an era of open data and ubiquitous dataveillance, what does it mean to “share”? This book argues that we are all “shareveillant” subjects, called upon to be transparent and render data open at the same time as the security state invests in practices to keep data closed. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible,” Clare Birchall reimagines sharing in terms of a collective political relationality beyond the veillant expectations of the state.
£9.81
University of Minnesota Press Histories of the Transgender Child
A groundbreaking twentieth-century history of transgender children With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today’s transgender children are a brand new generation—pioneers in a field of new obstacles and hurdles. Histories of the Transgender Child shatters this myth, uncovering a previously unknown twentieth-century history when transgender children not only existed but preexisted the term transgender and its predecessors, playing a central role in the medicalization of trans people, and all sex and gender.Beginning with the early 1900s when children with “ambiguous” sex first sought medical attention, to the 1930s when transgender people began to seek out doctors involved in altering children’s sex, to the invention of the category gender, and finally the 1960s and ’70s when, as the field institutionalized, transgender children began to take hormones, change their names, and even access gender confirmation, Julian Gill-Peterson reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children’s bodies. Throughout, they foreground the racial history of medicine that excludes black and trans of color children through the concept of gender’s plasticity, placing race at the center of their analysis and at the center of transgender studies.Until now, little has been known about early transgender history and life and its relevance to children. Using a wealth of archival research from hospitals and clinics, including incredible personal letters from children to doctors, as well as scientific and medical literature, this book reaches back to the first half of the twentieth century—a time when the category transgender was not available but surely existed, in the lives of children and parents.
£21.99
University of Minnesota Press The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure
Wide-ranging essays and experimental prose forcefully demonstrate how digital media and computational technologies have redefined what it is to be human Over the past decade, digital media has expanded exponentially, becoming an essential part of daily life. The stimulating essays and experimental compositions in The User Unconscious delve into the ways digital media and computational technologies fundamentally affect our sense of self and the world we live in, from both human and other-than-human perspectives.Critical theorist Patricia Ticineto Clough’s provocative essays center around the motif of the “user unconscious” to advance the challenging thesis that that we are both human and other-than-human: we now live, think, and dream within multiple layers of computational networks that are constantly present, radically transforming subjectivity, sociality, and unconscious processes.Drawing together rising strains of philosophy, critical theory, and media studies, as well as the political, social, and economic transformations that are shaping the twenty-first-century world, The User Unconscious points toward emergent crises and potentialities in both human subjectivity and sociality. Moving from affect to data, Clough forces us to see that digital media and computational technologies are not merely controlling us—they have already altered what it means to be human.
£23.99
University of Minnesota Press Cyclescapes of the Unequal City: Bicycle Infrastructure and Uneven Development
A critical look at the political economy of urban bicycle infrastructure in the United StatesNot long ago, bicycling in the city was considered a radical statement or a last resort, and few cyclists braved the inhospitable streets of most American cities. Today, however, the urban cyclist represents progress and the urban “renaissance.” City leaders now undertake ambitious new bicycle infrastructure plans and bike share schemes to promote the environmental, social, and economic health of the city and its residents. Cyclescapes of the Unequal City contextualizes and critically examines this new wave of bicycling in American cities, exploring how bicycle infrastructure planning has become a key symbol of—and site of conflict over—uneven urban development. John G. Stehlin traces bicycling’s rise in popularity as a key policy solution for American cities facing the environmental, economic, and social contradictions of the previous century of sprawl. Using in-depth case studies from San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Detroit, he argues that the mission of bicycle advocacy has converged with, and reshaped, the urban growth machine around a model of livable, environmentally friendly, and innovation-based urban capitalism. While advocates envision a more sustainable city for all, the deployment of bicycle infrastructure within the framework of the neoliberal city in many ways intensifies divisions along lines of race, class, and space.Cyclescapes of the Unequal City speaks to a growing interest in bicycling as an urban economic and environmental strategy, its role in the politics of gentrification, and efforts to build more diverse coalitions of bicycle advocates. Grounding its analysis in both regional political economy and neighborhood-based ethnography, this book ultimately uses the bicycle as a lens to view major shifts in today’s American city.
£22.99
University of Minnesota Press Dark Deleuze
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is known as a thinker of creation, joyous affirmation, and rhizomatic assemblages. In this short book, Andrew Culp polemically argues that this once-radical canon of joy has lost its resistance to the present. Concepts created to defeat capitalism have been recycled into business mantras that joyously affirm “Power is vertical; potential is horizontal!” Culp recovers the Deleuze’s forgotten negativity. He unsettles the prevailing interpretation through an underground network of references to conspiracy, cruelty, the terror of the outside, and the shame of being human. Ultimately, he rekindles opposition to what is intolerable about this world. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
£9.81
University of Minnesota Press The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous
An unconventional take on the corpse challenges traditional conceptions of who—and what—counts as human, while offering bold insights into the modernist project Too often regarded as the macabre endpoint of life, the corpse is rarely discussed and largely kept out of the public eye. In The Modernist Corpse, Erin E. Edwards unearths the critically important but previously buried life of the corpse, which occupies a unique place between biology and technology, the living and the dead. Exploring the posthumous as the posthuman, Edwards argues that the corpse is central to understanding relations between the human and its “others,” including the animal, the machine, and the thing.From photographs of lynchings to documentation of World War I casualties, the corpse is also central to the modernist project. Edwards turns critical attention to the corpse through innovative, posthumanist readings of canonical thinkers such as William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, offering new insights into the intersections among race, gender, technical media, and matter presumed to be dead. Edwards’s expansive approach to modernism includes diverse materials such as Hollywood film, experimental photography, autopsy discourses, and the comic strip Krazy Kat, producing a provocatively broad understanding of the modernist corpse and its various “lives.”The Modernist Corpse both establishes important new directions for modernist inquiry and overturns common thought about the relationship between living and dead matter.
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University of Minnesota Press A Capsule Aesthetic: Feminist Materialisms in New Media Art
How new media art informed by feminism yields important and original insights about interacting with technologies In A Capsule Aesthetic, Kate Mondloch examines how new media installation art intervenes in the fields of technoscience and new materialism, showing how three diverse artists—Pipilotti Rist, Patricia Piccinini, and Mariko Mori—contribute to the urgent conversation about everyday technology and the ways it constructs our bodies. A Capsule Aesthetic establishes the unique insights that feminist theory offers to new media art and new materialisms, offering a fuller picture of human–nonhuman relations. In-depth readings of works by Rist, Piccinini, and Mori explore such questions as the role of the contemporary art museum in our experience of media art, how the human is conceived of by biotechnologies, and how installation art can complicate and enrich contemporary science’s understanding of the brain. With vivid, firsthand descriptions of the artworks, Mondloch takes the reader inside immersive installation pieces, showing how they allow us to inhabit challenging theoretical concepts and nonanthropomorphic perspectives. Striving to think beyond the anthropocentric and fully consider the material world, A Capsule Aesthetic brings new approaches to questions surrounding our technology-saturated culture and its proliferation of human-to-nonhuman interfaces.
£22.99
University of Minnesota Press The Geek's Chihuahua: Living with Apple
At dinnertime: check. At a traffic light: check. In bed at the end of the day: check. In line at the coffee shop: check. In The Geek’s Chihuahua, Ian Bogost addresses the modern love affair of “living with Apple” during the height of the company’s market influence and technology dominance. The ubiquitous iPhone and its kin saturate our lives, changing everything from our communication to our posture. Bogost contrasts the values of Apple’s massive success in the twenty-first century with those of its rise in the twentieth. And he connects living with Apple with the phenomenon of “hyperemployment”—the constant overwork of today’s technological life that all of us now experience. Bogost also reflects on the new potential function—as well as anxiety and anguish—of devices like the Apple Watch. We are tethered to our devices, and, as Bogost says: that’s just life—anxious, overworked, and utterly networked life. 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.
£9.81
University of Minnesota Press Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times
The world is in a terrible mess. It is toxic, irradiated, and full of injustice. Aiming to stand aside from the mess can produce a seemingly satisfying self-righteousness in the scant moments we achieve it, but since it is ultimately impossible, individual purity will always disappoint. Might it be better to understand complexity and, indeed, our own complicity in much of what we think of as bad, as fundamental to our lives? Against Purity argues that the only answer—if we are to have any hope of tackling the past, present, and future of colonialism, disease, pollution, and climate change—is a resounding yes. Proposing a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures, Against Purity undertakes an analysis that draws on theories of race, disability, gender, and animal ethics as a foundation for an innovative approach to the politics and ethics of responding to systemic problems. Being against purity means that there is no primordial state we can recover, no Eden we have desecrated, no pretoxic body we might uncover through enough chia seeds and kombucha. There is no preracial state we could access, no erasing histories of slavery, forced labor, colonialism, genocide, and their concomitant responsibilities and requirements. There is no food we can eat, clothes we can buy, or energy we can use without deepening our ties to complex webbings of suffering. So, what happens if we start from there? Alexis Shotwell shows the importance of critical memory practices to addressing the full implications of living on colonized land; how activism led to the official reclassification of AIDS; why we might worry about studying amphibians when we try to fight industrial contamination; and that we are all affected by nuclear reactor meltdowns. The slate has never been clean, she reminds us, and we can’t wipe off the surface to start fresh—there’s no fresh to start. But, Shotwell argues, hope found in a kind of distributed ethics, in collective activist work, and in speculative fiction writing for gender and disability liberation that opens new futures.
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University of Minnesota Press Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet
Sensors are everywhere. Small, flexible, economical, and computationally powerful, they operate ubiquitously in environments. They compile massive amounts of data, including information about air, water, and climate. Never before has such a volume of environmental data been so broadly collected or so widely available.Grappling with the consequences of wiring our world, Program Earth examines how sensor technologies are programming our environments. As Jennifer Gabrys points out, sensors do not merely record information about an environment. Rather, they generate new environments and environmental relations. At the same time, they give a voice to the entities they monitor: to animals, plants, people, and inanimate objects. This book looks at the ways in which sensors converge with environments to map ecological processes, to track the migration of animals, to check pollutants, to facilitate citizen participation, and to program infrastructure. Through discussing particular instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution sensing and urban sensing, Program Earth asks how sensor technologies specifically contribute to new environmental conditions. What are the implications for wiring up environments? How do sensor applications not only program environments, but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives we might become?Program Earth suggests that the sensor-based monitoring of Earth offers the prospect of making new environments not simply as an extension of the human but rather as new “technogeographies” that connect technology, nature, and people.
£25.99
University of Minnesota Press Elusive Jannah: The Somali Diaspora and a Borderless Muslim Identity
As a Somali working since high school in the United Arab Emirates, Osman considers himself “blessed” to be in a Muslim country, though citizenship, with the security it offers, remains elusive. For Ardo, smuggled out of Somalia to join her husband in South Africa, insecurities are of a more immediate, physical kind, and her economic prospects and legal status are more uncertain. Adam, in the United States—a destination often imagined as an earthly Eden, or jannah, by so many of his compatriots—now sees heaven in a return to Somalia.The stories of these three people are among the many that emerge from mass migration triggered by the political turmoil and civil war plaguing Somalia since 1988. And they are among the diverse collection presented in eloquent detail in Elusive Jannah, a remarkable portrait of the very different experiences of Somali migrants in the UAE, South Africa, and the United States. Somalis in the UAE, a relatively closed Muslim nation, are a minority within a large South Asian population of labor migrants. In South Africa, they are part of a highly racialized and segregated postapartheid society. In the United States they find themselves in a welfare state with its own racial, socioeconomic, and political tensions. A comparison of Somali settlements in these three locations clearly reveals the importance of immigration policies in the migrant experience.Cawo M. Abdi’s nuanced analysis demonstrates that a full understanding of successful migration and integration must go beyond legal, economic, and physical security to encompass a sense of religious, cultural, and social belonging. Her timely book underscores the sociopolitical forces shaping the Somali diaspora, as well as the roles of the nation-state, the war on terror, and globalization in both constraining and enabling their search for citizenship and security.
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University of Minnesota Press Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
Having set global warming in irreversible motion, we are facing the possibility of ecological catastrophe. But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist with one another and with nonhumans, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art. Moving fluidly between philosophy, science, literature, visual and conceptual art, and popular culture, the book argues that hyperobjects show that the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place. Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves inside a number of hyperobjects, such as climate, nuclear weapons, evolution, or relativity. Such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning. Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in, Hyperobjects takes the first steps, outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action.
£21.99
University of Minnesota Press Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics
How race became embedded in a medical instrument In the antebellum South, plantation physicians used a new medical device—the spirometer—to show that lung volume and therefore vital capacity were supposedly less in black slaves than in white citizens. At the end of the Civil War, a large study of racial difference employing the spirometer appeared to confirm the finding, which was then applied to argue that slaves were unfit for freedom. What is astonishing is that this example of racial thinking is anything but a historical relic.In Breathing Race into the Machine, science studies scholar Lundy Braun traces the little-known history of the spirometer to reveal the social and scientific processes by which medical instruments have worked to naturalize racial and ethnic differences, from Victorian Britain to today. Routinely a factor in clinical diagnoses, preemployment physicals, and disability estimates, spirometers are often “race corrected,” typically reducing normal values for African Americans by 15 percent.An unsettling account of the pernicious effects of racial thinking that divides people along genetic lines, Breathing Race into the Machine helps us understand how race enters into science and shapes medical research and practice. Honorable Mention, 2017 Rachel Carson Prize, Society for the Social Studies of Science Winner of the 2018 Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science
£19.07
University of Minnesota Press Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend
From the stages of Berlin to anti-Nazi efforts and silver-screen stardom, Steven Bach reveals the fascinating woman behind the myth surrounding Marlene Dietrich in a biography that will stand as the ultimate authority on a singular star. Based on six years of research and hundreds of interviews—including conversations with Dietrich—this is the life story of one of the century’s greatest movie actresses and performers, an icon who embodied glamour and sophistication for audiences around the globe.
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University of Minnesota Press Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India
Afterimage of Empire provides a philosophical and historical account of early photography in India that focuses on how aesthetic experiments in colonial photography changed the nature of perception. Considering photographs from the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 along with landscape, portraiture, and famine photography, Zahid R. Chaudhary explores larger issues of truth, memory, and embodiment.Chaudhary scrutinizes the colonial context to understand the production of sense itself, proposing a new theory of interpreting the historical difference of aesthetic forms. In rereading colonial photographic images, he shows how the histories of colonialism became aesthetically, mimetically, and perceptually generative. He suggests that photography arrived in India not only as a technology of the colonial state but also as an instrument that eventually extended and transformed sight for photographers and the body politic, both British and Indian. Ultimately, Afterimage of Empire uncovers what the colonial history of the medium of photography can teach us about the making of the modern perceptual apparatus, the transformation of aesthetic experience, and the linkages between perception and meaning.
£25.99
University of Minnesota Press Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji
Terayama Shuji (1935-1983) was an avant-garde Japanese poet, dramatist, film director, and photographer known for his highly provocative work. In this inventive and revealing work, Steven Ridgely examines Terayama's life and art to show that a conventional notion of him does not do full justice to the meaning and importance of his wide-ranging, often playful body of work.Ridgely places Terayama at the center of Japanese and global counterculture and finds in his work a larger story about the history of postwar Japanese art and culture. He sees Terayama as reflecting the most significant events of his day: young poets seizing control of haiku and tanka in the 1950s, radio drama experimenting with form and content after the cultural shift to television around 1960, young assistant directors given free rein in the New Wave as cinema combated television, underground theatre in the politicized late 1960s, and experimental short film through the 1970s after both the studio system and art house cinema had collapsed.Featuring close readings of Terayama's art, Ridgely demonstrates how across his oeuvre there are patterns that sidestep existing power structures, never offering direct opposition but nevertheless making the opposition plain. And, he claims, there is always in Terayama's work a broad call for seeking out or creating pockets of fiction-where we are made aware that things are not what they seem-and to use otherness in those spaces to take a clearer view of reality.
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University of Minnesota Press The End Of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy
In the mid-1990s, at the height of academic discussion about the inevitability of capitalist globalization, J. K. Gibson-Graham presented a groundbreaking and controversial argument for envisioning alternative economies. This new edition includes an introduction in which the authors address critical responses to The End of Capitalism and outline the economic research and activism they have been engaged in since the book was first published. “Paralyzing problems are banished by this dazzlingly lucid, creative, and practical rethinking of class and economic transformation.” —Meaghan Morris, Lingnan University, Hong Kong “Profoundly imaginative.” —Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, City University of New York “Filled with insights, it is clearly written and well supported with good examples of actual, deconstructive practices.” —International Journal of Urban and Regional Research J. K. Gibson-Graham is the pen name of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, feminist economic geographers who work, respectively, at the Australian National University in Canberra and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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University of Minnesota Press Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle
In a long overdue contribution to geography and social theory, Katherine McKittrick offers a new and powerful interpretation of black women’s geographic thought. In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material geographies, McKittrick reveals how human geographies are a result of racialized connections, and how spaces that are fraught with limitation are underacknowledged but meaningful sites of political opposition. Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, the author addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs’s attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s philosophies. Central to McKittrick’s argument are the ways in which black women are not passive recipients of their surroundings and how a sense of place relates to the struggle against domination. Ultimately, McKittrick argues, these complex black geographies are alterable and may provide the opportunity for social and cultural change. Katherine McKittrick is assistant professor of women’s studies at Queen’s University.
£21.99
University of Minnesota Press Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality
A groundbreaking collection of essays in feminist music criticism, this book addresses problems of gender and sexuality in repertoires ranging from the early seventeenth century to rock and performance art. “. . . this is a major book . . . [McClary’s] achievement borders on the miraculous.” The Village Voice“No one will read these essays without thinking about and hearing music in new and interesting ways. Exciting reading for adventurous students and staid professionals.” Choice“Feminine Endings, a provocative ‘sexual politics’ of Western classical or art music, rocks conservative musicology at its core. No review can do justice to the wealth of ideas and possibilities [McClary’s] book presents. All music-lovers should read it, and cheer.” The Women’s Review of Books"McClary writes with a racy, vigorous, and consistently entertaining style. . . . What she has to say specifically about the music and the text is sharp, accurate, and telling; she hears what takes place musically with unusual sensitivity."-The New York Review of Books
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University of Minnesota Press Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet
In the nineties, neoliberalism simultaneously provided the context for the Internet’s rapid uptake in the United States and discouraged public conversations about racial politics. At the same time many scholars lauded the widespread use of text-driven interfaces as a solution to the problem of racial intolerance. Today’s online world is witnessing text-driven interfaces such as e-mail and instant messaging giving way to far more visually intensive and commercially driven media forms that not only reveal but showcase people’s racial, ethnic, and gender identity. Lisa Nakamura, a leading scholar in the examination of race in digital media, uses case studies of popular yet rarely examined uses of the Internet such as pregnancy Web sites, instant messaging, and online petitions and quizzes to look at the emergence of race-, ethnic-, and gender-identified visual cultures. While popular media such as Hollywood cinema continue to depict nonwhite nonmales as passive audiences or consumers of digital media rather than as producers, Nakamura argues the contrary—with examples ranging from Jennifer Lopez music videos; films including the Matrix trilogy, Gattaca, and Minority Report; and online joke sites—that users of color and women use the Internet to vigorously articulate their own types of virtual community, avatar bodies, and racial politics. Lisa Nakamura is associate professor of speech communication and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet and coeditor, with Beth Kolko and Gilbert Rodman, of Race in Cyberspace.
£18.99
University of Minnesota Press Cine-Ethnography
One of the most influential figures in documentary and ethnographic filmmaking, Jean Rouch has made more than one hundred films in West Africa and France. In such acclaimed works as Jaguar, The Lion Hunters, and Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet, Rouch has explored racism, colonialism, African modernity, religious ritual, and music. He pioneered numerous film techniques and technologies, and in the process inspired generations of filmmakers, from New Wave directors, who emulated his cinema verité style, to today’s documentarians.Ciné-Ethnography is a long-overdue English-language resource that collects Rouch's key writings, interviews, and other materials that distill his thinking on filmmaking, ethnography, and his own career. Editor Steven Feld opens with a concise overview of Rouch’s career, highlighting the themes found throughout his work. In the four essays that follow, Rouch discusses the ethnographic film as a genre, the history of African cinema, his experiences of filmmaking among the Songhay, and the intertwined histories of French colonialism, anthropology, and cinema. And in four interviews, Rouch thoughtfully reflects on each of his films, as well as his artistic, intellectual, and political concerns. Ciné-Ethnography also contains an annotated transcript of Chronicle of a Summer—one of Rouch's most important works—along with commentary by the filmmakers, and concludes with a complete, annotated filmography and a bibliography.The most thorough resource on Rouch available in any language, Ciné-Ethnography makes clear this remarkable and still vital filmmaker's major role in the history of documentary cinema.Jean Rouch was born in Paris in 1917. He studied civil engineering before turning to film and anthropology in response to his experiences in West Africa during World War II. Rouch is the recipient of numerous awards, including the International Critics Award at Cannes for the film Chronicle of a Summer in 1961. Steven Feld is professor of music and anthropology at Columbia University.
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University of Minnesota Press Philosophy of New Music
An indispensable key to Adorno’s influential oeuvre—now in paperbackIn 1949, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music was published, coinciding with the prominent philosopher’s return to a devastated Europe after his exile in the United States. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Arnold Schoenberg reviled it. Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal to composition, rather than a matter of musical performance. Consisting of two distinct essays, “Schoenberg and Progress” and “Stravinsky and Reaction,” Philosophy of New Music poses the musical extremes in which Adorno perceived the struggle for the cultural future of Europe: between human emancipation and barbarism, between the compositional techniques and achievements of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In this translation, which is accompanied by an extensive introduction by distinguished translator Robert Hullot-Kentor, Philosophy of New Music emerges as an essential guide to the whole of Adorno's oeuvre.
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University of Minnesota Press Writings
Ten years after his death, Vilém Flusser’s reputation as one of Europe’s most original modern philosophers continues to grow. Increasingly influential in Europe and Latin America, the Prague-born intellectual’s thought has until now remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. His innovative writings theorize—and ultimately embrace—the epochal shift that humanity is undergoing from what he termed "linear thinking" (based on writing) toward a new form of multidimensional, visual thinking embodied by digital culture. For Flusser, these new modes and technologies of communication make possible a society (the "telematic" society) in which dialogue between people becomes the supreme value.The first English-language anthology of Flusser’s work, this volume displays the extraordinary range and subtlety of his intellect. A number of the essays collected here introduce and elaborate his theory of communication, influenced by thinkers as diverse as Martin Buber, Edmund Husserl, and Thomas Kuhn. While taking dystopian, posthuman visions of communication technologies into account, Flusser celebrates their liberatory and humanizing aspects. For Flusser, existence was akin to being thrown into an abyss of absurd experience or "bottomlessness"; becoming human required creating meaning out of this painful event by consciously connecting with others, in part through such technologies. Other essays present Flusser’s thoughts on the future of writing, the revolutionary nature of photography, the relationship between exile and creativity, and his unconventional concept of posthistory. Taken together, these essays confirm Flusser’s importance and prescience within contemporary philosophy.Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) was born in Prague and taught philosophy in Brazil. Andreas Ströhl is director of the film department at the Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes in Munich. Erik Eisel works for a software technology company in Southern California.
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