What lives in the spaces between dreams and apocalypse? What can Aboriginal filmmaking reveal about Indigenous presence and futures? The product of years of embedded fieldwork within Indigenous film crews in Northwestern Australia, William Lempert’s Dreaming Down the Track delves deeply into Aboriginal cinema as a transformative community process. Here, Lempert is joined in conversation with Karrmen Crey about the process of preserving community stories and enacting sovereign futures.
William Lempert is assistant professor of anthropology at Bowdoin College and author of Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema.
Karrmen Crey is associate professor of Aboriginal communication and media studies in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Crey is author of Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada and coeditor (with Joanna Hearne) of By Their Work: Indigenous Women’s Digital Media in North America.
REFERENCES/MEDIA:
Donna’s Story (film)
Indians + Aliens (reality television series)
The Visit (animated documentary short)
Tjawa Tjawa (film)
Rutherford Falls (sitcom)
REFERENCES/PEOPLE:
Mark Moora
Faye Ginsburg
Jesse Wente
Doug Cuthand
Donna Gamble
Lisa Jackson
Billy-Ray Belcourt
Jeff Barnaby
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Cynthia Lickers-Sage
Taiko Waititi
Foucault
Coulthard
Audra Simpson
REFERENCES/OTHER
Mark Rifkin / Beyond Settler Time
ImagiNATIVE Australia
Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema by William Lempert is available from University of Minnesota Press, and has an open-access edition through Manifold. Karrmen Crey’s Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada and By Their Work: Indigenous Women’s Digital Media in North America (a collection co-edited with Joanna Hearne) are also available from University of Minnesota Press.
In interwar Paris, the encounter between surrealism and the nascent discipline of ethnology led to an intellectual project now known as “ethnographic surrealism.” Joyce Suechun Cheng considers the ethnographic dimension of the surrealist movement in its formative years in her new book The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject, the inaugural volume in the University of Minnesota Press’s Surrealisms series. By broadening the scope of ethnographic surrealism, Cheng offers new insights that challenge longstanding beliefs about this multifaceted movement in poetry, the arts, and culture. Here, Cheng is joined in conversation with Surrealisms series editor Jonathan Eburne.
Joyce Cheng is associate professor of art history at the University of Oregon and author of The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject.
Jonathan Eburne is J. H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He is author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas and Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry.
REFERENCES:
Michael Stone-Richards
James Clifford / The Predicament of Culture
Natalya Lusty
Effie Rentzou
James Leo Cahill / Zoological Surrealism
Georges Bataille / Documents
Vincent Debaene / Far Afield
Severed hand collages
Marcel Mauss
Hannah Arendt
Johannes Fabian / Time and the Other
Malkam Ayyahou
The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject by Joyce Suechun Cheng is available from University of Minnesota Press and is the first book in its Surrealisms series. The University of Minnesota Press is also publisher of the International Journal of Surrealism.
In Copenhagen in 1972, during the exhilarating early days of women’s liberation in Scandinavia and dramatic social change around the world, seven women had a child together. Recounting her mothers’ history—from the passions and beliefs they shared to the political divisions over sexual identity that ultimately split them apart—Pernille Ipsen’s chronicle of gender, sexuality, and feminism as it was constructed, contested, and lived reminds us that new worlds are always possible. Here, Ipsen is joined in conversation with Adriane Lentz-Smith.
Pernille Ipsen is author of My Seven Mothers: Making a Family in the Danish Women's Movement and professor of gender and women’s studies and history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ipsen is a historian of gender, women, feminism, race and colonialism in Scandinavia and the larger Atlantic world.
Adriane Lentz-Smith is associate professor of history, African American studies, and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University. Lentz-Smith is author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I.
Praise for the book:
"This book is a treasure, especially for a second-wave American feminist who was thrilled to learn of the boldness and courage of our Danish sisters at the very start of the 1970s women’s movement. I can’t recommend it highly enough."
—Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City
"My Seven Mothers certainly is not all happiness and light, but that makes it even more moving, and as an American feminist I felt a sense of recognition infused with my own memories."
—Linda Gordon, author of Seven Social Movements That Changed America
"Compulsively readable and historically insightful, My Seven Mothers reveals the spirit, courage, and tenacity required of the women who paved the way for second-wave feminist organizing in Denmark."
—Birgitte Søland, author of Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s
My Seven Mothers: Making a Family in the Danish Women’s Movement by Pernille Ipsen is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.
Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently from how she is classically understood; rather than the doyen of the cisheteronormative marriage plot, Washington argues that Austen leverages the generic restraints of the novel and envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that supposedly solidifies in the eighteenth century. Here, Washington discusses a politics built on plurality and possibility with Marquis Bey, Christopher Breu, and Alison Sperling.
Chris Washington is associate professor of English at Francis Marion University. He is author of Nonbinary Jane Austen and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.
Marquis Bey is professor of black studies and gender and sexuality and critical theory at Northwestern University. Bey is author of several books including Cistem Failure, Black Trans Feminism, and The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender.
Christopher Breu is author of several books including In Defense of Sex, Insistence of the Material, Hard-Boiled Masculinities, and coeditor of Noir Affect. Breu is professor of English at Illinois State University.
Alison Sperling is assistant professor of literature, media, and culture at Florida State University, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin.
REFERENCES:
Derrida’s Of Grammatology
Foucault
Trans Femme Futures / Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift
The Anthropocene Unconscious / Mark Bould; Alison Sperling review in Los Angeles Review of Books
The Matrix film
Black on Both Sides / C. Riley Snorton
Fred Moten
Judith Butler
We Are All Nonbinary (essay) / Kadji Amin
Edward Said
Histories of the Transgender Child / Jules Gill-Peterson
S. Pearl Brilmyer / “The Ontology of the Couple” issue of GLQ
A Mercy / Toni Morrison
Sojourner Truth
Nonbinary Jane Austen is available in the Forerunners series from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at manifold.umn.edu. Thank you for listening.
“Lack of political will and corruption of the ruling class are certainly enormous obstacles but do not (fully) explain the widespread inaction against our current multidimensional crisis (ecological catastrophe, failing democracies, permanent and more destructive wars, etc.).” So opens Andrea Righi’s Three Economies of Transcendence, which takes a deep philosophical dive into the fundamental dimensions of subjectivity, society, and time through the lens of transcendence. Here, Righi is joined in a wide-ranging conversation with Michael Lewis about finitude, infinitude, evolution, neoliberalism, and radical change.
Andrea Righi is a cultural theorist and professor of European studies and Italian at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Righi is author of Three Economies of Transcendence; The Other Side of the Digital: The Sacrificial Economy of New Media; and coeditor with Cesare Casarino of Another Mother: Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism.
Michael Lewis is senior lecturer in philosophy at University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and editor of the Journal of Italian Philosophy.
EPISODE REFERENCES:
René Girard
Adriana Cavarero
Emanuele Severino
Hannah Arendt
Paolo Virno
Jacques Lacan
Ministry for the Future / Kim Stanley Robinson
Fredric Jameson
Hardt and Negri
Three Economies of Transcendence by Andrea Righi is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book is part of the Forerunners series, and an open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.
In his book Late Star Trek, Adam Kotsko analyzes the wealth of content set within Star Trek’s sprawling continuity, beginning with the prequel series Enterprise, highlighting creative triumphs and the tendency for franchise faithfulness to get in the way of new ideas. Arguing against the consensus that franchises are a sign of cultural decay, Kotsko zeroes in on their status as modern myths, owned as corporate intellectual property, as a source of creative limitation. Here, Kotsko is joined in conversation with David Seitz.
Adam Kotsko teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College and runs an active, free-to-read Substack. He is author of many books including Late Star Trek, Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory, Neoliberalism’s Demons, and What Is Theology?
David Seitz is assistant professor of cultural geography at Harvey Mudd College. He is author of A Different Trek and A House of Prayer for All People.
REFERENCES:
Shawna Kidman
Frederic Jameson
Anna Kornbluh
Christopher L. Bennett
Kirsten Beyer
David Mack
Michael Chabon
Lauren Berlant / On the Inconvenience of Other People
Star Trek references include:
Deep Space Nine
Enterprise
Nemesis
Discovery
Praise for the book:
”Combining the rigorous critical eye of a literary and political theorist with the encyclopedic knowledge of a devoted fan, Adam Kotsko offers an original, persuasive, ethical, funny, grim, and nevertheless hopeful examination of Star Trek’s twenty-first-century incarnations. Late Star Trek is a salutary intervention, a sustained, cogent analysis of what’s gone wrong, what’s gone right, and what possibilities remain for creative and critical storytelling in our late-neoliberal streaming era.”
—David Seitz
“Adam Kotsko has written an eminently readable and deeply researched book on twenty-first-century Star Trek, providing an analysis that is both timely and long overdue. A must-read for anyone teaching, doing research on, or just thinking about this ever-growing franchise.”
—Sabrina Mittermeier, coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek and Fighting for the Future: Essays on “Star Trek: Discovery”
Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era by Adam Kotsko is the inaugural volume in the University of Minnesota Press’s Mass Markets series.
Some attributes of the paranormal mind are dismissed as nonsense, but what can an exploration of pseudoscientific phenomena tell us about accepted scientific and cultural thought? In Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal, Derek Lee traces the evolution of psi epistemologies and uncovers how these ideas have migrated into scientific fields such as quantum physics and neurology, as well as diverse literary genres including science fiction, ethnic literature, and even government training manuals. Here, Lee is joined in conversation with Alicia Puglionesi.
Derek Lee is author of Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal and assistant professor of literature at Wake Forest University.
Alicia Puglionesi is a lecturer in the medicine, science, and humanities program at Johns Hopkins University and is author of Common Phantoms and In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire and Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science.
REFERENCES:
Society for Psychical Research
Roger Luckhurst
Stargate Project
Ingo Swann
Star Fire / Ingo Swann
Psitron
Adrian Dobbs
Philip K. Dick
William Butler Yeats
Joseph E. Uscinski
Praise for the book:
“Derek Lee engages the ‘pseudoscience’ moniker, that ultimate rhetorical insult, and seeks to replace it with a more accurate ‘parascience’—a place where science and that which is other than science meet and express themselves in literally global pathways as distinct as pulp and science fiction, environmental thought, Asian and Indigenous ways of knowing, U.S. secret espionage, and ethnic fiction. Lee shows all of this with consummate skill and rigor, pushing us beyond our present impasses. This thing is not going away. This is a revolution.”
—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly
“Derek Lee delves into the rich history of the paranormal to instigate a captivating discussion of its influence on literature and science into the twenty-first century through SF and ethnic fictions with the unproven concepts of parascience—precognition, telekinesis, clairvoyance, spectral communication, and telepathy. A classic in the making!”
—Isiah Lavender III, author of Afrofuturism Rising
Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal by Derek Lee is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.
Sasha Davis, an activist and scholar of radical environmental advocacy, brings new hope for social justice movements by looking to progressive campaigns that have found success by unconventional means. From contesting environmental abuse to reasserting Indigenous sovereignty, these movements demonstrate how people can collectively wrest control over their communities from oppressive governments and manage them with a more egalitarian ethics of care. The work is exciting, it’s messy, and it seeks to change the world. Here, Davis joins Laurel Mei-Singh and Khury Petersen-Smith in conversation about his new book, Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail.
Sasha Davis is an activist and professor in the Department of Environmental and Sustainability Studies at Keene State College in New Hampshire. He is author of Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail; Islands and Oceans: Reimagining Sovereignty and Social Change; and The Empires’ Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific.
Laurel Mei-Singh is assistant professor of geography and Asian American studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow and the Co-Director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
REFERENCES:
J. K. Gibson-Graham
Haunani-Kay Trask
Military Geographies / Rachel Woodward
Michel Foucault / biopower
Praise for the book:
“As the United States is being destroyed, millions of spaces are opening up for something new to emerge. Offering urgent lessons and insights, Replace the State explores relational governance as an alternative to systems that no longer serve. Sasha Davis shows how we can move forward to create and claim a truly inclusive, sustainable world.”
—Lisa Fithian, author of Shut It Down: Stories from a Fierce, Loving Resistance
Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail by Sasha Davis is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.
From Get Out to The Babadook to Saint Maud: In his new book, Josh Gooch uses the horror film genre to expose the hostile conditions of life under capitalism, drawing connections between Marxist theory and contemporary narratives of psychological unease. Here, Gooch is joined in conversation with Jo Isaacson. This episode contains spoilers for multiple films (list below).
Joshua Gooch is professor of English at D’Youville University in Buffalo, New York. He is author of Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film; Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity and The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy.
Johanna Isaacson is professor of English at Modesto Junior College and author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror.
EPISODE REFERENCES:
Sianne Ngai
Michael Löwy / “critical irrealism”
Linda Williams on Psycho, essay in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: A Casebook
Søren Mau
Nancy Fraser
Mariarosa Dalla Costa
Silvia Federici
Amitav Ghosh
Kim Stanley Robinson
Jason W. Moore
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Sophie Lewis
M. E. O’Brien
Kathi Weeks
Lauren Berlant
FILMS DISCUSSED:
Psycho
Dracula
Nosferatu
Candyman
Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell
Joe Lynch’s Mayhem
Robert Eggers’s The Witch
Gillian Wallace Horvat’s I Blame Society
Rose Glass’s Saint Maud
Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook
Ari Aster’s Hereditary
Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Jordan Peele’s Get Out
Jordan Peele’s Us
Mariame Diallo’s Master
Tim Story’s The Blackening
Timothy Covell’s Blood Conscious
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead
Lamberti Bava’s Demons
The Ring
Jeremy Saulnier’s Murder Party
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
Praise for the book:
"Fiercely smart." —Annie McClanahan, author of Dead Pledges
"This is a book not just for fans of horror but for everyone interested in the ways films embed and communicate values, judgments, and affects." —Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, author of Gothic Things
Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film by Joshua Gooch is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.
Between the World Wars, ideas about meaning, truth, and the ethics of persuasion informed newly articulated principles for combining word and image. The young field of graphic design developed quickly during this period, and photography played a central role as a visual language of modern life. The concept Typophoto was coined by Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy and played a foundational role in the modernist graphic design movement known as the New Typography. Here, Jessica D. Brier, author of Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography, joins Ellen Lupton in conversation about this fascinating period in design history.
Jessica D. Brier is curator of photography at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. She is author of Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography, editor of On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print and coeditor of Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna.
Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, writer, and curator who has authored many books about design, including Thinking with Type and Extra Bold, and teaches design theory at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.
REFERENCES:
Painting, Photography, Film / László Moholy-Nagy
Jan Tschichold
Walter Benjamin
El Lissitzky
Never Use Futura / Douglas Thomas
Paul Renner
Meisterschule für Deutschlands Buchdrucker
Bauhaus
Praise for the book:
“A novel interplay between text and image, Typophoto fused—as Jessica D. Brier demonstrates in this insightful account—the interests of advertisers with those of the avant-garde, thus instigating a process that ultimately resulted in the ubiquitous pixelated imagery of our own day.
—Kathleen James-Chakraborty, author of Modernism as Memory
“Deeply researched . . . highlights the ways new print technologies enabled photography to become the central medium of modernist visual culture. “
—Paul Stirton, author of Jan Tschichold and the New Typography
Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography by Jessica D. Brier is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.
From Plato and Derrida to anti-aging treatments, cryogenics, cloning, and whole-brain uploads, the dream of indefinite life is technological and, as Adam Rosenthal shows in Prosthetic Immortalities: a matter of prosthesis, the transformation of the original being. There can be no certainty of immortality and yet, the problem of immortality continues to haunt the soul. Rosenthal engages David Wills and Deborah Goldgaber in a conversation that touches on philosophy, transhumanism, biopolitics, Dolly the sheep and the return of the dire wolf, what it means to extend life or, ultimately, to extend death.
Adam R. Rosenthal is associate professor of French and global studies at Texas A&M University. Rosenthal is author of Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life and Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida.
David Wills is professor of French studies at Brown University and author of Prosthesis.
Deborah Goldgaber is assistant professor of philosophy at Louisiana State University and author of Speculative Grammatology: Deconstruction and the New Materialism.
REFERENCES:
Plato
Homer
Descartes
Heidegger (the Dasein)
Derrida
Geoffrey Hinton
Hegel
Nick Bostrum
Dolly the sheep
David Chalmers
Aubrey de Grey
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Praise for the book:
“Rigorous, compelling, and beautifully written, Prosthetic Immortalities is at the vanguard of the new wave in Derrida studies.”
—Nicole Anderson, founding editor, Derrida Today Journal
“Adam R. Rosenthal conjures up the ghosts of metaphysics that return today through the promises of indefinite life from medical science and transhumanist speculations, moving brilliantly between science and science fiction.”
—Francesco Vitale, author of Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences
Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life by Adam R. Rosenthal, with foreword by David Wills, is available from University of Minneota Press. Thank you for listening.
Presenting a view of fascism as a complex power network that plays out on scales both large and small, Alexander Menrisky, author of Everyday Ecofascism, shows how extremist sentiments have crept into everyday language, stories, and ideas. He illuminates ecofascism’s narrative patterns and their easy permeation of environmentalist discourses, from back-to-the-land movements to the resurgence of psychedelic drugs, food localism, and pandemic politics. Here, Menrisky is joined in conversation with April Anson and Kyle Boggs.
Alexander Menrisky is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature and Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology.
April Anson is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Anson writes and teaches at the intersection of the environmental humanities, Indigenous and American studies, and political theory. Anson is cofounder of the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative and coauthor of Against the Ecofascist Creep.
Kyle Boggs is associate professor of rhetoric and community engagement in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Boise State University and author of Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors.
REFERENCES:
Anti-Creep Climate Initiative
Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy
Tommy Pico
Jeff Mann
Gloria Anzaldua
Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God
Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence
Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog
Theodore Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley
Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia
Ketan Joshi on lazy ecofascism
Mark Rifkin’s Settler Common Sense
Emily Martin’s Flexible Bodies
Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature by Alexander Menrisky is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.
The story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and its Historical Committee—and its fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite its history—is the focus of Rose Miron’s award-winning book Indigenous Archival Activism. Miron’s research and writing are shaped by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations as part of her more-than-a-decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation. Miron is not Mohican and is careful to consider her own positionality and reflects on what it means for non-Native researchers and institutions to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations in the content of academia and public history, offering a model both for tribes undertaking their own reclamation projects and for scholars looking to work with tribes in ethical ways. Here, Miron is joined in conversation with Jennifer O’Neal.
Rose Miron is vice president of research and education at Newberry Library in Chicago and author of Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory, winner of the National Council for Public History Book Award and the Book of Merit Award from the Wisconsin Historical Society.
Jennifer O’Neal is assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon.
Praise for the book:
“A necessary volume on the intersection of Indigenous knowledge loss, recovery, and production in the context of settler colonialism.”
—Jacki Thompson Rand, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“a must-read for archivists, researchers, and tribal historians working with/in Indian Country.”
—Shannon Martin, Lynx Clan, Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians; former director, Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways
Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory by Rose Miron is available from University of Minnesota Press.
Society has yet to fully grapple with the administrative chaos that has ensued from the growth of the urban. One such city allows tremendous insight into the process of urbanization in the new millennium: Bengaluru. During the past two decades, Bengaluru’s real estate sector and infrastructure investments have exploded in a massive transformation that stimulated rapid urbanization and unbounded growth. The coedited collection of writings Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru explores how people caught up in the whirlwinds of change—construction laborers, street vendors, gig workers—experience, struggle, strive, and speculate to make a livable city for themselves.
Several contributors to this book are gathered here in conversation:
Vinay Gidwani is professor of geography and global studies at the University of Minnesota and author of Capital Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India.
Hemangini Gupta is lecturer in gender and global politics and associate director of GENDER.ED at the University of Edinburgh. She is author of Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India and coeditor of Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader.
Kaveri Medappa is a postdoctoral researcher in human geography at the University of Oxford.
Swathi Shivanand is assistant professor at the Department of Liberal Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences in Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India.
Michael Goldman is associate professor of sociology and global studies at the University of Minnesota and author of Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization.
Praise for Chronicles of a Global City:
“A nuanced investigation into the precise nature in which Bengaluru (and the global sphere) has embraced what the authors have dubbed 'speculative urbanism', a capital-led paradigm that has monopolised the imagination over public spaces and city-building.”
—Frontline Magazine
Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru is available from University of Minnesota Press.
Tamara Dean's quest to live lightly on the planet in the midst of the environmental crises of our time led her to a landscape unlike any other: the Driftless area of Wisconsin, a region untouched by glaciers, marked by steep hills and deeply carved valleys, capped with forests and laced with cold, spring-fed streams. There she confronted, in ways large and small, the challenges of meeting basic needs while facing the ravages of climate change. Here, Dean is joined in conversation with Curt Meine.
Tamara Dean is an educator and writer, author of Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless and The Human-Powered Home: Choosing Muscles over Motors. Her essays and stories have been published in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, the Guardian, One Story, Orion, and The Progressive.
Curt Meine is a conservation biologist, environmental historian, and writer. Meine is the award-winning author of the first biography of Aldo Leopold and has written and edited many books on conservation, including The Driftless Reader.
REFERENCES:
The Land Remembers / Ben Logan
Order Upon the Land / Hildegard Binder Johnson
Aldo Leopold
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
"Dean writes with a clarity and wisdom that illuminates the past, the present, and the future. Shelter and Storm is an essential book for our time."
—Jane Hamilton, award-winning author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World
"In this remarkable collection of essays, Tamara Dean conveys the depth of our connection to the natural world with careful research and gentle words."
—Joan Maloof, author of Teaching the Trees
"There is so much to admire in these beautifully written essays, but foremost are Tamara Dean’s sense of awe in the natural world, her citizen science undertakings, and her deep research into both history and biology."
—Nancy Lord, former Alaska State Writer Laureate and author of Early Warming
Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless by Tamara Dean is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.
Cities across the US are rethinking streets, going beyond sidewalks and bike lanes to welcome nonmotorists to share the roadway. David L. Prytherch, author of Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets, traces the historical evolution of America’s streets and explores contemporary movements to retake them from cars for diverse forms of mobility and community life. Can we design more just streets? Here, Pryterch gets into it with Mimi Sheller and Peter Norton.
David Prytherch is professor of geography at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is author of Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets; Law, Engineering, and the American Right-of-Way: Imagining a More Just Street; and coeditor of Transport, Mobility, and the Production of Urban Space.
Mimi Sheller is Dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Sheller is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, founding co-director of the Centre for Mobilities at Lancaster University, England, and past president of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. Sheller is author of Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes.
Peter Norton is associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. He is author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City and Autonorama: The Illustory Promise of High-Tech Driving.
REFERENCES:
John Urry
The Death and Life of Great American Cities / Jane Jacobs
Robert Moses
Complete Streets
The Untokening
Kimberly Crenshaw
Praise for the book:
"Reporting from the front lines of recent post-pandemic physical and cultural transformations of public space in nine major American cities, David L. Prytherch raises profound questions about what streets are for and how they might be equitably shared. The result is a fresh, hopeful vision for intersectional mobility justice and public placemaking."
—Mimi Sheller, author of Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes
"David L. Prytherch gives a crisp, clear, and accessible narrative of the movement to reclaim public streets after one hundred years of domination by private automobile interests. Steering us through the politics of streets during the Covid-19 pandemic and recovery, this is a refreshingly innovative and optimistic book for anyone concerned about our urban mobility future."
—Jason Henderson, coauthor of Street Fights in Copenhagen: Bicycle and Car Politics in a Green Mobility City
Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets by David L. Prytherch is available from University of Minnesota Press.
Cinema can be furtive and intensely beautiful—and it can leave a viewer craving more. Cinemal is Tessa Laird’s passionate inquiry into the desire to write about animals and to write about art, juxtaposing the two and burrowing into the ways that films mimic the majesty, mystery, and movements of animals. Here, Laird is joined in conversation with Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard, editors of the Art after Nature series with University of Minnesota Press.
Tessa Laird is an artist, writer, and senior lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Her books include a fictocritical exploration of color, A Rainbow Reader, and a cultural history of bats, Bat, in Reaktion Books’ celebrated Animal series.
Giovanni Aloi teaches art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is author or editor of many books on the nonhuman and art.
Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and founder of the Green Lantern Press.
EPISODE REFERENCES:
The Animal That Therefore I Am / Jacques Derrida
Donna Haraway
Arthur and Corinne Cantrill
Michael Taussig
Monocultures of the Mind / Vandana Shiva
What Animals Teach Us about Politics / Brian Massumi
Len Lye, New Zealand modernist artist
Sergei Eisenstein
Electric Animal / Akira Lippit
Baptiste Marizot
Undrowned / Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Sriwhana Spong
Praise for the book:
“Original, erudite, and playful all in one, Cinemal is not only a joy to read but estranges the very idea of cinema, and therefore of life, in ways wondrous and wise.”
—Michael Taussig, Columbia University
“A sparkling, engaging book, a virtuosic and thrilling interleaving of experimental cinema, philosophies of the more-than-human, and stories of animal encounters. Celebrating the variety and inventiveness of cinematic experimentation, Tessa Laird calls for us to remake our human senses in order to align better with the needs of the planet.”
—Laura U. Marks, author of The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos
Art after Nature is a series edited by Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard that explores epistemological questions that emerge from the expanding, environmental consciousness of the humanities.
Cinemal: The Becoming-Animal of Experimental Film by Tessa Laird is available from University of Minnesota Press.
“There is no such thing as a raw, natural, aggressive urge that underlies human violence. While we inherit defense mechanisms, they work only when triggered culturally.” So opens John Protevi’s Regimes of Violence: Toward a Political Anthropology, which takes as its biocultural basis that social practices shape our bodies and minds, and analyzes human aggression throughout history: early nomadic foragers, organized sports, berserkers and blackout rages, maroons escaping slavery, the January 6th invasion of the US Capitol, and responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Protevi entwines the philosophical with the anthropological and considers why humans’ capacity for cooperation and sharing is persistently overlooked by stories of aggression and warfare.
This book is an important contribution to the studies of Deleuze and Guattari, and here, Andrew Culp (Dark Deleuze) and Protevi (“joyous Deleuze”) dig into myriad shades of human expression from philosophical and cultural perspectives.
John Protevi is professor of French studies and philosophy at Louisiana State University and author of Regimes of Violence: Toward a Political Anthropology; Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic; Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences; and Edges of the State.
Andrew Culp is director of the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at California Institute of the Arts and author of Dark Deleuze and A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal.
Episode references:
Francisco Varela
Evan Thompson
Esequiel Di Paolo
Hanne De Jaegher
Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch, Evan Thompson / The Embodied Mind
Wilhelm Reich
Baruch Spinoza
Sigmund Freud
Gustave Le Bon
Jeremy Gilbert / Common Ground
Rodrigo Nunes / Neither Vertical nor Horizontal
Manuel DeLanda / War in the Age of Intelligent Machines
Manuel DeLanda / A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
Deleuze and Guattari / Anti-Oedipus
Bataille
Nietzsche
Marx
Freud
Deleuze and Guattari / A Thousand Plateaus
Claude Lévi-Strauss / Wild Thought
Lisa Adkins / The Time of Money
Arline T. Geronimus / Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society
Andrew Culp / Dark Deleuze
Deleuze and Guattari / What Is Philosophy?
Suzanne de Brunhoff / Marx on Money
Quentin Badaire
Quentin Badaire’s book review of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
Lewis Henry Morgan
Hobbes
Locke
Daniel Luban / Hobbesian Slavery (essay in Political Theory)
Rousseau
Case studies discussed in this episode:
Berserkers
Esprit de Corps
Robert Bales
Shenetta White-Ballard
Praise for the book:
"A brilliant and novel political anthropology that updates our most entrenched philosophical biases and looks to a politics of joy beyond the relations of command."
—Davide Panagia
Regimes of Violence: Toward a Political Anthropology by John Protevi is available from University of Minnesota Press.
Scholars have long challenged the common assumption of midwestern isolationism. In Global Heartland, historian Peter Simons reorients the way we look at the critical period in US history from the 1930s through 1950s, showing how farmers across the Midwest understood their work as contributing to an era of international upheaval, geographical reimagination, and global ecological thinking. Here, Simons is joined in conversation with Michael Lansing about the rural heartland, US foreign policy, and the changing and multidisciplinary ways that scholars approach history.
Peter Simons is a historian in upstate New York and author of Global Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm.
Michael Lansing is a professor of history at Augsburg University and author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics.
EPISODE REFERENCES:
Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century / Hendrik Meijer
The Heartland: An American History / Kristin Hoganson
Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the US Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies / Molly P. Rozum
Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region / Flannery Burke
Supermarket USA: Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race / Shane Hamilton
Nuclear Country: The Origins of the Rural New Right / Catherine McNicol Stock
Lester E. Helland Papers, Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Madison
Praise for the book:
“From Lend-Lease to Food for Peace, Global Heartland reveals how rural Midwesterners came to see their farms as being at the heart of the world.”
—Kristin Hoganson
“This rich and revealing book transforms the way we think about the rural heartland.”
—Michael Lansing
Global Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm by Peter Simons is available from University of Minnesota Press.
Talia Mae Bettcher’s Beyond Personhood provides an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity. Arguing that the tense relation between trans oppression and resistance is mediated through the complex social phenomenon of gender make-believe, Bettcher introduces the groundbreaking theory of interpersonal spatiality, which requires rejection of the philosophical concepts of person, self, and subject. Here, Bettcher is joined in conversation with Judith Butler.
Talia Mae Bettcher is professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles, and author of Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy and coeditor of Trans Philosophy.
Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. They are author of several books including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and, most recently, Who’s Afraid of Gender?
Praise for the book:
"It's a beautiful book. Challenging, crucial, indispensable to our times."
—Judith Butler (in this episode)
"Profound and provocative . . . broadly relevant to many disciplines and social movements."
—Susan Stryker, Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford University
Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy is available from University of Minnesota Press.