University of Minnesota Press

What is the opposite of “big” data? In a society where households commonly store personal archives of photos, financial records, and other documents, the “little” database—the personal data collection that is stored and backed up and not accessed frequently—deserves a category of its own. In The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats, Daniel Scott Snelson examines globally accessible little databases, such as Textz, Eclipse, and UbuWeb, explores how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host, and asks how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn. Snelson is joined in conversation with Vicki Bennett, Craig Dworkin, and Luca Messarra.  Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, archivist, and assistant professor in the departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, where he also serves as faculty with the Digital Humanities Program, the UCLA Game Lab, and the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. He is author of multiple volumes of experimental poetry and poetics, including Elden Poem, Apocalypse Reliquary, and EXE TXT.Vicki Bennett is a multidisciplinary British artist working under the name People Like Us. Craig Dworkin is professor of English at the University of Utah.Luca Messarra is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University, and founder of Undocumented Press.EPISODE REFERENCES:Alan LiuJerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, “deformance”We Edit Life, film (People Like Us/Vicki Bennett; partnership with Lovebytes)Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (Internet Archive, 2024, eds. Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland, Juliya Ziskina)Eclipse, an image-based archive of small press poetry books and magazinesPennSound, a site distributing audio recordings of poetry readingsUbuWeb, a collection of experimental film and video artAllen Institute for AIC4/Colossal Clean Crawled CorpusChristopher KeltyLANGUAGE magazineChristian Marclay’s The ClockJohanna DruckerMemory of the World archiveNot Equals language projectFuture Knowledge podcastHeated Words: Searching for a Mysterious Typeface / Rory McCartney and Charlie MorganIn Praise of Copying / Marcus BoonPraise for the book:“The Little Database is an incredibly powerful intervention into twenty-first-century experimental poetics and avant-garde media practices.”—Stephanie Boluk“The Little Database opens new ground for close reading in an environment that heavily promotes big data techniques and the neoliberal ideologies that accompany it in the new economy of attention.”—Leonardo Reviews“Snelson targets the fundamental assumption underlying much of contemporary DH work: that meaningful interpretation necessarily depends on the deployment of massive amounts of data.”—Oxford's Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory“This book, while short in length, is certain to be long in influence, as it lays groundwork for future scholars, artists, readers, website makers, and archivists. The twists and turns, both in methodology and in specific analyses, are far more exciting than any summary, or even multiple readings of them, could serve.”—Digital Humanities QuarterlyThe Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats by Daniel Scott Snelson is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at Manifold. 

What lives in the spaces between dreams and apocalypse? Two authors discuss their books on Indigenous media: Karrmen Crey, whose Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada considers the political and cultural conditions that enabled the proliferation of Indigenous media across Canada in the early 1990s. 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. Crey and Lempert are joined in conversation here about the process of preserving community stories and enacting sovereign futures.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. William Lempert is Osterweis Family Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College and author of Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema.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 MooraFaye GinsburgJesse WenteDoug CuthandDonna GambleLisa JacksonBilly-Ray BelcourtJeff BarnabyLeanne Betasamosake SimpsonCynthia Lickers-SageTaiko WaititiFoucaultCoulthardAudra SimpsonREFERENCES/OTHERMark Rifkin / Beyond Settler TimeImagiNATIVE AustraliaKarrmen 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 available from University of Minnesota Press. 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. 

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-RichardsJames Clifford / The Predicament of CultureNatalya LustyEffie RentzouJames Leo Cahill / Zoological SurrealismGeorges Bataille / DocumentsVincent Debaene / Far AfieldSevered hand collagesMarcel MaussHannah ArendtJohannes Fabian / Time and the OtherMalkam AyyahouThe 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 1920sMy 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 GrammatologyFoucaultTrans Femme Futures / Nat Raha and Mijke van der DriftThe Anthropocene Unconscious / Mark Bould; Alison Sperling review in Los Angeles Review of BooksThe Matrix filmBlack on Both Sides / C. Riley SnortonFred MotenJudith ButlerWe Are All Nonbinary (essay) / Kadji AminEdward SaidHistories of the Transgender Child / Jules Gill-PetersonS. Pearl Brilmyer / “The Ontology of the Couple” issue of GLQA Mercy / Toni MorrisonSojourner TruthNonbinary 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 GirardAdriana CavareroEmanuele SeverinoHannah ArendtPaolo VirnoJacques LacanMinistry for the Future / Kim Stanley RobinsonFredric JamesonHardt and NegriThree 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 associate 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 KidmanFrederic JamesonAnna KornbluhChristopher L. BennettKirsten BeyerDavid MackMichael ChabonLauren Berlant / On the Inconvenience of Other PeopleStar Trek references include:Deep Space NineEnterpriseNemesisDiscoveryPraise 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 ResearchRoger LuckhurstStargate ProjectIngo SwannStar Fire / Ingo SwannPsitronAdrian DobbsPhilip K. DickWilliam Butler YeatsJoseph E. UscinskiPraise 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 RisingParascientific 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-GrahamHaunani-Kay TraskMilitary Geographies / Rachel WoodwardCooperation JacksonMichel Foucault / biopowerPraise 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 ResistanceReplace 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 NgaiMichael Löwy / “critical irrealism”Linda Williams on Psycho, essay in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: A CasebookSøren MauNancy FraserMariarosa Dalla CostaSilvia FedericiAmitav GhoshKim Stanley RobinsonJason W. MooreRuth Wilson GilmoreSophie LewisM. E. O’BrienKathi WeeksLauren BerlantFILMS DISCUSSED:PsychoDraculaNosferatuCandymanSam Raimi’s Drag Me to HellJoe Lynch’s MayhemRobert Eggers’s The WitchGillian Wallace Horvat’s I Blame SocietyRose Glass’s Saint MaudJennifer Kent’s The BabadookAri Aster’s HereditaryJane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s FairJordan Peele’s Get OutJordan Peele’s UsMariame Diallo’s MasterTim Story’s The BlackeningTimothy Covell’s Blood ConsciousCoralie Fargeat’s The SubstanceRomero’s Night of the Living DeadLamberti Bava’s DemonsThe RingJeremy Saulnier’s Murder PartyStanley Kubrick’s The ShiningPraise 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 ThingsCapitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film by Joshua Gooch is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.