University of Minnesota Press

Marlene M. Johnson’s memoir is an essential record of the ascension of women in American politics. In Rise to the Challenge: A Memoir of Politics, Leadership, and Love, Johnson chronicles her life of learning and leadership in activism, entrepreneurship, politics, and public service, weaving professional play-by-plays with candidness about navigating personal loss. Here, Johnson is joined in conversation with Lori Sturdevant and Elisabeth (Betsy) Griffith.Marlene M. Johnson was Minnesota’s first woman lieutenant governor, serving in Governor Rudy Perpich’s administration from 1983 until 1991. She is cofounder of the Minnesota Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners and the Minnesota Women’s Campaign Fund and was executive director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators for nearly two decades. She is on the advisory board of Kakenya’s Dream, a board member of the Washington Office on Latin America, and a trustee of The Alexandria Trust. She lives in Washington, DC.Lori Sturdevant is a retired Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist who has written about Minnesota government and politics since 1978.Elisabeth Griffith is an American historian, educator, and activist. She is author of Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality: 1920–2020 and In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.OTHER WORKS REFERENCED:Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief / Pauline BossTurnout: Making Minnesota the State That Votes / Joan Anderson Growe with Lori SturdevantLoving Someone who has Dementia / Pauline BossPraise for Rise to the Challenge:“Marlene M. Johnson wasn’t just the first woman to be Minnesota’s Lieutenant Governor. She was also the first Lieutenant Governor to have a specific policy portfolio. She had access and influence in ways that laid the groundwork for me and others to follow. Marlene is of a class of women who made important strides in DFL politics, and I'm grateful for her place in Minnesota's history and for this book that tells that story”.—Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan“An essential document of the midcentury rise of women into American politics. In this memoir of a remarkable public life, Marlene M. Johnson braids a love story tragically turned into caregiving and the domestic devotion of guardian and advocate. She proves that faithfulness in love and commitment to the betterment of the world are not opposites after all.”—Patricia Hampl, author of The Art of the Wasted Day“In the dynamic mid-twentieth-century women’s movement, Marlene M. Johnson stood out and stood up with clarity of vision and purpose. Her multiple public service initiatives propelled her to a national presence and then into international education leadership.”—Judge Harriet Lansing, retired, Minnesota Court of Appeals“An important read for aspiring public servants, male or female.”—J. Brian Atwood, former administrator, US Agency for International Development

How are spaces once imagined to be empty, vast, and mysterious transformed into something with material and cultural value? Two authors tackle this same question, one from the perspective of the seafloor, and one from Canada’s oil sands: key spaces where the meaning of sustainability is actively negotiated. Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor by Lisa Yin Han looks at oceanic media and shows how deepwater mediation is entangled in existential hopes and fears for our planetary future. Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil through Social Media by Jordan B. Kinder looks at how an increasingly influential network of pro-oil groups in Canada work to reform the public view of oil extraction as something socially, economically, and ecologically beneficial. Here, Lisa and Jordan are joined in conversation with Thomas Pringle.Lisa Yin Han is assistant professor of media studies at Pitzer College.Jordan B. Kinder is assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.Thomas Pringle is assistant professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California. Pringle is co-author, with Gertrud Koch and Bernard Stiegler, of Machine.REFERENCES:Nature’s Metropolis / William CrononEthical Oil / Ezra LevantTar Wars / Geo TakachSustaining Seas / eds. Elspeth Probyn, Kate Johnson, and Nancy Lee (referencing essay by Lesley Green)Oceaning / Adam FishAnimal Revolution / Ron BroglioZoe Todd, “Fossil Fuels and Fossil Kin: An Environmental Kin Study of Weaponised Fossil Kin and Alberta’s So-Called ‘Energy Resources Heritage,’” Antipode (2023)After Oil CollectiveIsabelle StengersPraise for Deepwater Alchemy:“An essential contribution to the watery depths of the blue humanities.”—Jennifer Gabrys“Deepwater Alchemy tells a story vital to our present.”—Stefan HelmreichPraise for Petroturfing:“A profound and necessary book.”—Janet Walker“Offers great insight into an underdeveloped aspect of the cultural study of energy.”—Stephanie LeMenager

For Chris Marker, writing came before filmmaking. A decade after Marker’s death, critics continue to rediscover his remarkable oeuvre, which comprised writing, photography, film, video, radio, and digital media. Associated with the Left Bank subset of the French New Wave, Marker is perhaps best recognized for directing La Jetée (1962). To celebrate the publication of the first English translation of Marker’s early writings (published between 1948 and 1955), Steven Ungar, the editor of Chris Marker: Early Film Writings, with translator Sally Shafto, have joined Jean-Michel Frodo and Sam Di Iorio in conversation.“The French Cinema has its dramatists and its poets, its technicians, and its autobiographers, but only has one true essayist: Chris Marker.”—film theorist Roy ArmesChris Marker (born Christian Hippolyte François Georges Bouche-Villeneuve, 1921–2012) was a French writer, artist, and director. His time-travel film La Jetée (1962) is one of the most celebrated shorts ever made. A true polymath, his later creations ranged from videos and the interactive CD-ROM Immemory to the multimedia digital platform Second Life.Steven Ungar is professor emeritus of cinematic arts, French, and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. He is author of several books including Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave.Sally Shafto is a French film scholar and translator and assistant professor of English at Framingham State University. She is author of The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 1968, and her translations include Jean-Marie Staub and Danièle Huillet’s Writings. She teaches at Framingham State University.Jean-Michel Frodon is a journalist and one of the most influential film critics and film historians in the world. He is author or contributor of several books including The World of Jia Zhangke and Le Cinéma Français de la Nouvelle Vague a Nos Jours, and wrote the foreword to “Night and Fog”: A Film in History by Sylvie Lindeperg. Frodon blogs at Projection Publique.Sam Di Iorio is Associate Professor of French at Hunter College and Deputy Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in French at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has written about postwar films and filmmakers, political theory, and cultural history for Screen, Trafic, Film Comment and the Criterion Collection. His essay “Comolli’s Detours: Free Jazz, Film Theory, Cinéma Direct” is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press. EPISODE REFERENCES AND RECOMMENDED READING:-André Bazin-Robert Cannon’s Gerald McBoing-Boing-Alain Resnais-Agnès Varda-Jean Rouch-René Leibowitz-Joseph Rovan (born Joseph Adolph Rosenthal)-Nicole Védrès-Eternal Current Events (translated by Jackson B. Smith)-Le Dépays / Chris Marker-Camera Obscura piece by Ivan Cerecina translating Nicole Védrès’s “Les feuilles bougent” (“The Leaves Are Stirring”) and an accompanying essay-Republic of Images / Alan Williams-Le Cinéma Français de la Nouvelle Vague a Nos Jours / Jean-Michel Frodon-The Fragile Present: Statues Also Die with Night and Fog by Sam Di Iorio; article in South Central Review.-Trafic N°105 (Printemps 2018), with article by Sam Di IorioMORE CHRIS MARKER:chrismarker.chGorgomancy.netThe Criterion ChannelChris Marker: Early Film Writings is available from University of Minnesota Press."One of the pleasures of Chris Marker’s films is the singular literary voice of his inimitable commentaries, in all its wit and quicksilver intelligence. That voice is present here, being honed through contact with others’ images and before Marker moved from the page to the screen himself. This groundbreaking collection introduces aficionados old and new to work likely unknown to them and allows us all to discover another dimension of this prodigious artist: Marker the film critic."—Chris Darke, author of La Jetée (BFI Film Classics)

Has the idea of the end of the world captured your imagination? Ted Toadvine’s book The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology contends that a preoccupation with the world’s precarity relies on a flawed understanding of time that neglects the past and present with the goal of managing the future. Toadvine integrates insights from phenomenology, deconstruction, critical animal studies, and new materialism to argue for a new philosophy of time that takes seriously the entangled temporal events spanning cosmic, geological, evolutionary, and human durations. Here Toadvine is joined in conversation with David Morris and Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault.Ted Toadvine is Nancy Tuana Director of the Rock Ethics Institute and professor of philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University.David Morris is professor of philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal.Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault is a graduate student of philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University.REFERENCES:Maurice Merleau-Ponty (body of works including Phenomenology of Perception)Immanuel KantDipesh ChakrabartyMichel Serres / The IncandescentMartin HeideggerJacques DerridaJean-Luc NancyJerome MillerHenri BergsonEdmund HusserlJames PlayfairJames Hutton (Hutton’s Unconformity)John Sallis / StoneAdam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson / The Blind SpotJane BennettDonald S. Maier / What’s So Good About Biodiversity?Ferdinand de SaussureÉmile P. Torres / Human ExtinctionRachel Carson / Silent SpringKyle Powys WhyteAlfred North Whitehead / The Concept of Nature  The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology is available from University of Minnesota Press.“The Memory of the World achieves two important things: it steers our understanding of Merleau-Ponty toward a temporal interpretation of his thought and, at the same time, it uses that reading to make a critical intervention amongst theories of environmental apocalypse. Ted Toadvine’s concept of ‘biodiacritics’ should lead to a reorientation of the ‘eschatological imagination,’ producing effects in knowledge that are as insightful as they are impactful. This is a wonderful book that is a pleasure to think alongside.”—John Ó Maoilearca

Antoine Volodine is the primary pseudonym of a French-Russian writer of many books. The meditative, postapocalyptic noir Mevlido’s Dreams, translated by Gina M. Stamm, is an urgent communiqué from a far-future reality of irreversible environmental damage and civilizational collapse that asks what it means to love and care for others at the end of the world. Here, Stamm is joined in conversation with Joshua Armstrong about translating this key work in Volodine’s post-exotic fictional universe.Gina M. Stamm is assistant professor of French at the University of Alabama.Joshua Armstrong is associate professor of French at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.Mevlido’s Dreams: A Post-Exotic Novel is available from University of Minnesota Press.“Translator Stamm does an admirable job of rendering Volodine’s serpentine prose in English, and the noirish, surrealist story turns into an unlikely romp as it riffs on the absurdity of 20th-century political institutions and pop culture.” —Publishers Weekly“Certainly the strangest and arguably one of the most accomplished contemporary writers of fiction in French, Antoine Volodine has created a vast and perplexing universe of bad dreams in several dozen works under a variety of pseudonyms over the past forty years. Mevlido’s Dreams provides a new pathway into Volodine’s labyrinth, which for all the horrors it recounts is always cast in stylishly crafted prose.” —David Bellos, Princeton University

Joanna Brooks’s ancestors were among the early waves of emigrants to leave England for North America. Her book Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants reveals the violence and dislocation that propelled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration, and follows American folk ballads back across the Atlantic to find histories of economic displacement, environmental destruction, and social betrayal at the heart of the early Anglo-American migrant experience. A tenth-anniversary edition of the book has just been released, which includes a new preface and develops a haunting historical perspective on the ancestors we thought we knew. Here, Brooks is joined by Desmond Hassing in conversation.Joanna Brooks is an award-winning scholar and writer whose work tends to catastrophes of human belonging in American history. The author or editor of ten books on race, religion, colonialism, and social movements, her writing has been featured in the BBC, NPR, the Daily Show, CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post.An enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and a San Diego native, Dr. Desmond Hassing is a conceptual artist, scholar, and activist who focuses on educating Western subjects on the intentionally disremembered subject of the Indigenous Peoples of North America. Hassing is founder of the Indigenous Peoples Reading Room, a planned open-access scholarship archive, and creator of The National Indian Project, an annotated bibliography of Native American, First Nations, and Pacific Islander representations in DC/National comic books of the same period. Hassing is lecturer in the Department of American Indian Studies at San Diego State University.Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants is available from University of Minnesota Press.“A surprising, bold, and altogether brilliant contribution to our understanding of why people crossed the Atlantic to live in a strange new world.”—Marcus Rediker

Everything Is Police is a new book by Tia Trafford, who argues that institutional and interpersonal policing have been central to colonial modernity, the result of which is a situation where we cannot practically experience or even imagine worlds free from policing. Trafford is joined here in conversation with Melayna Lamb.Tia Trafford is reader in philosophy and design at University for the Creative Arts in London. They are author of Everything Is Police and The Empire at Home, and coeditor of Alien Vectors.Melayna Lamb is lecturer at the University of Law, UK, and author of A Philosophical History of Police Power.EPISODE REFERENCES:Frank B. Wilderson IIIRinaldo WalcottThe Empire at Home / Tia TraffordJared SextonTapji GarbaSylvia WynterFrantz FanonSara-Maria SorentinoSaidiya HartmanDavid MarriottBiko Mandela GraySylvia WynterSara-Maria SorentinoMute Compulsion / Søren MauImmanuel KantWilliam Wimsatt on generative entrenchmentRed, White & Black / Frank B. Wilderson IIIThe First Black Slave Society / Hilary BecklesSean CapenerPaul GilroyStuart HallJohn LockeSlavery is a Metaphor / essay by Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino, published in AntipodeTaija McDougallPetero KaluléEverything Is Police is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

EL Putnam’s new book Livestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter considers how livestreaming constitutes new patterns of being together that are complex, ambivalent, and transformative. Digging into how humans and technology co-evolve, Putnam and Noel Fitzpatrick engage in conversation about relation and hyper-individualism, glitch and switchtasking, activism and hidden labor and performance and more.EL Putnam is an artist-philosopher and assistant professor of digital media at Maynooth University, Ireland. Putnam is author of Livestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter in the University of Minnesota Press Forerunners series and The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption.Noel Fitzpatrick is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics and the Academic Lead of the European Culture and Technology Laboratory at the Technological University Dublin.Episode references:Gilbert SimondonBernard StieglerYuk Hui HegelKantJackson PollockHeideggerPaul RicoeurAyana EvansAna VoogN. Katherine HaylesMiriam WolfDiamond Reynolds and the livestream of Philando Castile’s murderSafiya Umoja NobleChristina SharpeSaidiya HartmanTonia SutherlandJacques RancièreSimone BrowneÈdouard GlissantSusan SontagSara AhmedH. P. GriceRelated works:On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects / SimondonOn the Existence of Digital Objects / HuiArt and Cosmotechnics / HuiOneself as Another / RicoeurMemory, History, Forgetting / RicoeurResurrecting the Black Body / SutherlandDark Matters / BrowneRegarding the Pain of Others / SontagLivestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

Estado Vegetal is Manuela Infante’s riveting experimental performance art through which plants are charged with an agency capable of uprooting culturally grounded conceptions of the world. The book Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking, edited by Giovanni Aloi, is the first book dedicated to this performance and features essays from scholars and artists, including a fictional continuation of Infante’s work by Mandy-Suzanne Wong. Here, Infante and Wong join Art after Nature series editors Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard in conversation.Manuela Infante is a Chilean playwright, director, screenwriter, and musician who creates her own performances and tours in America, Europe, and Asia. Her works include Estado Vegetal and Metamorphosis. Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. She is an award-winning author whose books include The Box and Drafts of a Suicide Note.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.A performance of Manuela Infante’s Estado Vegetal (Vegetative State), performed by Marcela Salinas, is available to watch on YouTube.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.Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking is available from University of Minnesota Press and includes pieces by Maaike Bleeker, Lucy Cotter, Prudence Gibson, Michael Marder, Dawn Sanders, Catriona Sandilands, Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem, and Mandy-Suzanne Wong.Episode references:The Conquest of America / Tzvetan TodorovCapitalist Realism / Mark FisherHorizon / Manuela Infante

Masculinity in Transition is a book that moves the study of masculinity away from an overriding preoccupation with cisnormativity, whiteness, and heteronormativity, and toward a wider and more generative range of embodiments, identifications, and ideologies. Author K. Allison Hammer’s bold rethinking of masculinity and its potentially toxic effects lays bare the underlying fragility of normative masculinity. Here, Hammer is joined in conversation with Kale Bantigue Fajardo. This episode was recorded in late fall of 2023.K. Allison Hammer (they/them) is assistant professor and coordinator of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Southern Illinois University. Hammer is author of Masculinity in Transition.Kale Bantigue Fajardo (he/him) is associate professor of American studies and Asian American studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Fajardo is author of Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities, and Globalization.REFERENCES:The Politics of Friendship / Jacques DerridaThe Feeling of Kinship / David EngMen in Place / Miriam J. AbelsonTrue Sex / Emily SkidmoreMasculinities in Theory / Todd ReeserGertrude SteinFemale Masculinity / Jack HalberstamSons of the Movement / Bobby NobleThe Future of Whiteness / Linda Martín AlcoffDisturbing Attachments / Kadji AminEmily DickinsonWilla CatherStone Butch Blues / Leslie FeinbergMinnie Bruce PrattAndrea GibsonReinaldo ArenasMarlon RiggsPresidential masculinity (Reagan, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden)The Color Pynk / Omise’eke Natasha TinsleyNao BustamanteJudith ButlerThe Crying Game (film, 1992)Disclosure (film, 2020)BuddhismCare Work / Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-SamarasinhaTrans Care / Hil MalatinoNormal Life / Dean SpadeMutual Aid / Dean SpadeWorkers in Industrial America / David BrodyMasculinity in Transition and Filipino Crosscurrents are available from University of Minnesota Press.MORE: Listen to more talks with K. Allison Hammer on the University of Minnesota Press YouTube page (with Greta Olson and Christopher Breu), the Gender Stories podcast, and on In Conversation with Frank Schaeffer."A major intervention into masculinities studies, Masculinity in Transition brilliantly and consistently pushes the field toward a critical understanding of masculinity as a complex gender formation."—Christopher Breu, author of Hard-Boiled Masculinities"How might we understand masculinity if we turn toward culture rather than biology? K. Allison Hammer uncover(s) remakings of masculinity that center care, porosity, and unruly alliances—uplifting models for the precarious now."—Amber Jamilla Musser, author of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance