University of Minnesota Press

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema, Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. A new book by Nicholas de Villiers, CRUISY, SLEEPY, MELANCHOLY, offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films and reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema. Here, the author is joined in conversation with Beth Tsai. Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida.Beth Tsai is visiting assistant professor of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.REFERENCES:Books by Nicholas de Villiers (all with University of Minnesota Press):-Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual DIsorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang-Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary-Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and WarholBook by Beth Tsai:-Taiwan New Cinema at Film Festivals (Edinburgh University Press)Tsai Ming-liang films:-No No Sleep-Stray Dogs-Goodbye, Dragon Inn-Vive L’Amour-I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone-Rebels of the Neon God-The Wayward Cloud-It’s a Dream-The Hole-Face (Visage)-What TIme Is It There?-DaysOther films:-Saw Tiong Guan / Past Present (documentary)-Fred Barney Taylor / The Polymath -Elizabeth Purchell / Ask Any Buddy (podcast: https://www.ask-any-buddy.com/podcast)-Hou Hsiao-hsien / Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge-Hou Hsiao-hsien / Café Lumière-Albert Lamorisse / Le Ballon Rouge-Wong Kar-wai / Chungking Express-Jon M. Chu / Crazy Rich Asians-Peter Wang / A Great Wall-Edward Yang / The TerrorizersResearch, persons, publications:-Song Hwee Lim / Tsai Mingliang and the Cinema of Slowness-François Truffaut-Elena Pollacchi-Samuel Delany / Times Square Red, Times Square Blue -José Esteban Muñoz / Cruising Utopia-John Paul Ricco / The Logic of the Lure-Alex Espinoza / Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pasttime-Roland Barthes-Elena Gorfinkel’s public lecture: Cinema, the Soporific: Between Exhaustion and Eros-Jean Ma / At the Edges of Sleep-Marcel Proust / Swann’s Way-Jean Ma / Melancholy Drift-Jonathan Flatley’s work on melancholia and modernism-Judith Butler-Douglas Crimp-Anne Cvetkovich / Depression: A Public Feeling-David Eng-Anne Anlin Cheng-Shi-Yan Chao / Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape-Sianne Ngai-Christopher Lupke / The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien-Zhu Tianwen-Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell Williams Davis / Thirty-Two New Takes on Taiwan Cinema-David Lynch-Sara Ahmed / Queer Phenomenology-Michel de Certeau-Fran Martin-The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Camp: Notes on Fashion-Susan Sontag on camp-Esther Newton / Mother Camp-Jonathan Te-hsuan Yeh-Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, “Camping Out with Tsai Ming-liang”-Stray Dogs at the Museum: Tsai Ming-liang Solo Exhibition -Fran Martin, “Introduction: Tsai Ming-liang’s intimate public worlds,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas Vol. 1 No. 2.-Eve Sedgwick’s idea of camp as a form of reparative reading-Tom Roach / Friendship as a Way of Life-Rey Chow / Writing Diaspora-Michelle Bloom-Fran Martin, “The European Undead: Tsai Ming-liang’s Temporal Dysphoria,” Senses of Cinema (https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/tsai_european_undead/) 

Are you feeling merry as a grig? Or merry as a pismire? Pert as a pearmonger? Fit as a fiddle? Where do these idioms come from? Do they make life more fun? If you’ve ever wanted to be in a room full of expert etymologists, this is your ticket. Anatoly Liberman, author of TAKE MY WORD FOR IT: A Dictionary of English Idioms, is joined in conversation by Ari Hoptman and J. Lawrence (Larry) Mitchell. After listening, you will be informed, you will be enthralled, and most importantly, you will never sign off on another letter or e-mail with “All best” again. We are not talking through our hats here. That’s the cheese!Episode references:Notes & Queries, a long-running quarterly scholarly journal est. 1849James H. Murray, primary editor of the Oxford English DictionaryTheodore Francis (T. F.) PowysVirginia WoolfGod’s Acre (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)Walter W. Skeat (the author of still the most authoritative English etymological dictionary)

In queer culture, silence has been equated with voicelessness, complicity, and even death. Queer Silence insists, however, that silence can be a generative and empowering mode of survival. Triangulating insights from queer studies, disability studies, and rhetorical studies, J. Logan Smilges explores what silence can mean for people whose bodyminds signify more powerfully than their words. Smilges is here in conversation with Travis Chi Wing Lau and Margaret Price.J. Logan Smilges (they/them) is author of Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence and Crip Negativity and assistant professor of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. Led by commitments to transfeminism and disability justice, their scholarship and teaching lie at the nexus of disability studies, trans studies, queer studies, and rhetoric. Their other writing can be found in Disability Studies Quarterly, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, and elsewhere.Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and Hypertext, as well as in three chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019), Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2022). [travisclau.com]Margaret Price (she/her/hers) is an Associate Professor of English (Rhetoric & Composition) at The Ohio State University, where she also serves as Director of the Disability Studies Program, as well as co-founder and lead PI of the Transformative Access Project. Her award-winning research focuses on sharing concrete strategies and starting necessary dialogues about creating a culture of care and a sense of shared accountability in academic spaces. During Spring 2022, she was in residence at the University of Gothenberg, Sweden, on a Fulbright Grant to study universal design and collective access. Margaret’s book Crip Spacetime is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2024. [http://margaretprice.wordpress.com].References:How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind by La Marr Jurelle BruceMia MingusJennifer NashM. Remi YergeauJasbir PuarCrip Negativity by J. Logan SmilgesA transcript of this episode is available: z.umn.edu/ep53-transcript

In postwar Italy, a group of visionary artists used emergent computer technologies to experiment with art and technology and subvert conceptions of freedom and control. ARTE PROGRAMMATA is a book that describes how Italy’s distinctive political climate fueled the group’s engagement with computers, cybernetics, and information theory, creating a broad range of immersive environments, kinetic sculptures, and other multimedia art and design works. Here, author Lindsay Caplan is joined in conversation with Tina Rivers Ryan and Jacopo Galimberti.Lindsay Caplan is assistant professor in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Brown University.Tina Rivers Ryan is an art historian focused on art and technology. Ryan is curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York, and a critic who writes most frequently for Artforum.Jacopo Galimberti is an art historian and assistant professor at IUAV (Venice).REFERENCES:-The New Museum / Ghosts in the Machine Show (2012)-Jackson Pollock-New Tendencies (Armin Medosch)-Antonio Negri-Michael Hardt-From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Fred Turner)-Christiane Paul (Whitney Museum of American Art)-Edward A. Shanken-Pier Paolo Pasolini-Spazio elastico (Elastic Space, 1967), Gianni Colombo-Guy Debord-Enzo MariTOPICS:gestalt art, abstraction, politics, information theory, freedom, technology, operaismo (or: “workerism”)

A lot of societal structures have been permanently upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. We’re here to talk about two: air travel and dog ownership. Margret Grebowicz, author of Rescue Me, talks about the abundance of pet adoptions during the pandemic and the existential and social implications of this trend. Christopher Schaberg, author of Grounded, discusses contemporary air travel and the broad cultural landscape of empty airports and grounded planes in the early months of the virus’s spread. Both are concerned with philosophical and critical inquiries into their subjects; how to think about things, how to frame phenomena and change, and how the future will continue to reshape these experiences.Rescue Me and Grounded are in the Forerunners: Ideas First series from University of Minnesota Press.Margret Grebowicz is associate professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. She is author of several books, including Rescue Me: On Dogs and Their Humans; Mountains and Desire: Climbing vs. the End of the World; The National Park to Come; and Whale Song.Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University and author of several books, including Grounded: Perpetual Flight . . . and Then the Pandemic; The End of Airports; and The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth.REFERENCES:-Rescue Me (Margret Grebowicz)-Grounded (Christopher Schaberg)-The End of Airports (Christopher Schaberg)-The Dodo Videos (Facebook videos)-cat videos, Tik Tok-The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson)-Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel; book, TV series)-Tripoli Canceled (film)-Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 (docuseries)

Amid fervent conversations about antiracism and police violence, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers vital new ideas, analyzing how media culture instructs viewers to act and feel in accordance with new racial norms created for an era supposedly defined by an end to legal racism. Author Allison Page examines U.S. media from the 1960s to today and argues that visual culture works through emotion, a powerful lever for shaping and managing racialized subjectivity. On this episode, Page joins collaborator and friend Brittany Farr in conversation.Allison Page is assistant professor of media studies with a joint appointment in the Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University. Page is the author of Media and the Affective Live of Slavery.Brittany Farr is an assistant professor of law at New York University School of Law. Farr’s areas of research include civil rights, contract law, legal history, property, and race.REFERENCES:-Saidiya Hartman-Represent and Destroy (Jodi Melamed)-Slavery Footprint (website; slaveryfootprint.org)-Ask a Slave (Azie Mira Dungey, YouTube web series; askaslave.com)-A Subtlety (Kara Walker, public project)-Lorraine Hansberry, playwright-Roots (television miniseries)-Dark Matters (Simone Browne)-Alex Haley, writer-Stephanie Smallwood-Christina Sharpe-On Agency (Walter Johnson)-Black Feminism Reimagined (Jennifer Nash)

“White people passed laws specifically in order to take away this land from our people. And then we did these other things in order to try to survive.” ALLOTMENT STORIES is a volume that collects more than two dozen chronicles of white imperialism and Indigenous resistance, highlighting how Indigenous peoples have consistently engaged creativity to sustain collective ties, kinship relations, and cultural commitments in the face of land privatization. Two contributors to this volume, Sarah Biscarra Dilley and Joseph M. Pierce, are here to share their pieces of this history.Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini) is an artist, educator, and PhD candidate in Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis, nitspu tititʸu tsʔitɨnɨ patwin, in the unceded homeland of the Patwin-speaking people (unratified Treaty “J” region).Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) is associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890–1910 and, with S.J Norman (Koori, Wiradjuri descent), cocurator of the Indigenous-led performance series Knowledge of Wounds.ALLOTMENT STORIES: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege is a collection of essays edited by Daniel Heath Justice and Jeani O’Brien. More info: z.umn.edu/allotmentstories.

How is it possible that you are—simultaneously—cells, atoms, a body, quarks, a component in an ecological network, a moment in the thermodynamic dispersal of the sun, and an element in the gravitational whirl of galaxies? Joshua DiCaglio’s SCALE THEORY provides a foundational theory of scale that explains how scale works, the parameters of scalar thinking, and how scale reconfigures objects, subjects, relationships—while teaching us to think in terms of scale, no matter where our interests may lie. DiCaglio is joined here by author Dorion Sagan in a dazzling conversation about how a theory of scale might challenge perspectives on space and time, philosophy, innerness, psychedelics—with careful attention to scientific thinking as well as fascination and mysticism, much attuned to the way scale transforms both reality and ourselves.Joshua DiCaglio is assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University.Dorion Sagan is an award-winning writer, editor, and theorist. He is the son of the astronomer Carl Sagan and the biologist Lynn Margulis.References and citations:-Scale Theory (Joshua DiCaglio)-Cosmic Apprentice (Dorion Sagan)-Dazzle Gradually (Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan)-Cosmos (Carl Sagan)-Powers of Ten video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0)-Inner Life of a Cell video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKW4F0Nu-UY)-Jakob von Uexküll-Microcosmos (Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan)-Symbiotic Planet (Lynn Margulis)-Simon Levin-Samuel Butler-Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, editors); Sagan has a contribution in this volume.-The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick (James Edward Burton)-Darwin’s Pharmacy (Richard Doyle)-Friedrich Nietzsche-Luigi Fantappiè-Molecular Capture (Adam Nocek)

In the 1960s, Christopher Isherwood gave an unprecedented series of lectures at California universities about his life and work. During this time, Isherwood spoke openly for the first time about his craft and spirituality. The release of the updated edition of ISHERWOOD ON WRITING includes the long-lost conclusion to the second lecture, including its discussion of A Single Man and A Meeting by the River. This conversation brings the volume’s editor, James J. Berg, into conversation with fellow Isherwood scholars Chris Freeman and Claude Summers.BIOS:James J. Berg is a writer, editor, and scholar living in New York, and editor of ‘Isherwood on Writing.’ Chris Freeman is professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California. The two are coeditors of ‘Isherwood in Transit,’ ‘The American Isherwood,’ ‘Conversations with Christopher Isherwood,’ and ‘The Isherwood Century,’ winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Studies.Claude Summers is William E. Stirton Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. A founding member of the Modern Language Association’s gay and lesbian caucus, Summers helped lead the gay studies movement to maturity within the academy.NOTE:This episode includes archival audio of Christopher Isherwood speaking at the Honors Convocation at the University of Southern California, 1974.

In a time when online classrooms and meetings have become both indispensable and mundane features of the university, STUDIOUS DRIFT asks: What kind of university becomes possible when digital tools are not taken for granted but hacked into and tinkered with in order to set study adrift? In part a meditation on the essence of the studio space, this book looks at ways we can creatively and critically muddle through the rise of e-learning logics to redefine education. Authors Tyson E. Lewis and Peter B. Hyland both teach at the University of North Texas, and are joined here today by colleague and studio artist James Thurman.Tyson E. Lewis is professor of art education in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas.Peter B. Hyland is director of the Jo Ann (Jody) and Dr. CHarles O. Onstead Institute for Education in the College fo Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas.James Thurman is associate professor of metalsmithing and jewelry in the Department of Studio Art at the University of North Texas.References:Gert Biesta (“learnification”)Alfred Jarry’s pataphysicsThe Undercommons / Stefano Harney and Fred MotenLinks:-Read Studious Drift free online: z.umn.edu/studiousdrift-m (also available for purchase: z.umn.edu/studiousdrift)-Watch: Education as Experimentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llUj_Qyd5Zo-Education as Experimentation: The Studio-D Project (homepage): https://onstead.cvad.unt.edu/studio-d