University of Minnesota Press

Eco Soma proposes an art/life method of sensory tuning to the inside and the outside simultaneously. Petra Kuppers asks readers to be alert to their own embodied responses to art practice, reading contemporary performance encounters while modeling a disability culture sensitivity to living in a shared world, oriented toward socially just futures. In this episode, Kuppers joins Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard, coeditors of the Art after Nature series, in a conversation that begins with an embody journey and touches on questions of awareness, thought patterns, attention, capitalism, performance, language, identity, and disability culture.Petra Kuppers is a community performance artist and disability culture activist. She is professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Michigan and serves on the faculty of the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College.Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. Aloi is editor in chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and executive director of Green Lantern Press.ECO SOMA is free to read online at Manifold: z.umn.edu/ecosoma-m.References in the episode include:-the umwelt (“enviroment” or “surroundings”)-taisha paggett-Tiffany King (The Black Shoals)-Yinka Shonibare

How do contemporary art and theory contemplate the “bio” of biopolitics and bioart? One of the foremost theorists of posthumanism, Cary Wolfe argues for the reconceptualization of nature in art and theory to turn the idea of the relationship between the human and the planet upside down in his new book, ART AND POSTHUMANISM. This is the inaugural volume in the new series ART AFTER NATURE, edited by Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard. The series fosters multidisciplinarity, creatively engaging with new and alternative discourses at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy. It engages with the politics and contradictions of the Anthropocene in order to problematize disciplines such as animal studies, posthumanism, and speculative realism, through art writing and art making.Cary Wolfe is Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. Wolfe has written on a range of topics including debates in animal studies and posthumanism, has authored many books, and edits the Posthumanities series for University of Minnesota Press.Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. Aloi is editor in chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and executive director of Green Lantern Press.References in the episode include:FoucaultAgambenDerridaDonna HarawayFlusserJacob von UexkullDamien HirstSteve BakerGregory BatesonEija-Liisa AhtilaNiklas Luhmann

Plastics have been a defining feature of contemporary life since at least the 1960s. Yet our proliferating use of plastics has also triggered catastrophic environmental consequences. In this second episode of a two-part series, literary scholars and contributors to the volume LIFE IN PLASTIC: ARTISTIC RESPONSES TO PETROMODERNITY discuss public health, affective politics, postplastic utopias, temporality, globalism, class, geopolitics, literature, and activism as they relate to the problem and politics of plastic. Featuring Caren Irr, Crystal Bartolovich, Christopher Breu, and Sean Grattan.Caren Irr is a professor of English at Brandeis University and author of Toward the Geopolitical Novel, Pink Pirates, and The Suburb of Dissent.Crystal Bartolovich is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University and coeditor of Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies.Christopher Breu is professor of English at Illinois State University. He is author of Insistence of the Material and Hard-Boiled Masculinities, and coeditor of the forthcoming Noir Affect.Sean Grattan is an independent scholar and author of Hope Isn’t Stupid.Works and people referenced in the episode:Gain by Richard PowersFredric JamesonN. Katherine HaylesJane Bennett A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth OzekiChris JordanSylvia WynterThomas More’s Utopia

Plastics have been a defining feature of contemporary life since at least the 1960s. Yet our proliferating use of plastics has also triggered catastrophic environmental consequences. Plastics are derived from petrochemicals and enmeshed with the global oil economy, and they permeate our consumer goods and their packaging, our clothing and buildings, our bodies and minds. In this first episode of a two-part series, contributors to the volume LIFE IN PLASTIC: ARTISTIC RESPONSES TO PETROMODERNITY discuss plasticity and myth, stretchy superheroes, how plastic became gendered, plastic as a colonizing force, plastic in art and everyday life, and more. Featuring Caren Irr, Lisa Swanstrom, Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, and Daniel Worden.Caren Irr is a professor of English at Brandeis University and author of Toward the Geopolitical Novel, Pink Pirates, and The Suburb of Dissent.Lisa Swanstrom is an associate professor of English at the University of Utah, coeditor of Science Fiction Studies, and author of Animal, Vegetable, Digital.Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor is professor of English and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is author of Postmodern Utopias and co-curator of Plastic Entanglements.Daniel Worden is associate professor of interdisciplinary humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology and author of Masculine Style, editor of The Comics of Joe Sacco, and coeditor of Oil Culture and Postmodern/Postwar—and After.Works and people referenced in the episode:Catherine MalabouRoland BarthesThrough the Arc of the Rain Forest by Karen Tei YamashitaThe Drought by J.G. BallardMutant 59: The Plastic EatersCovehithe by China MiévilleArtist Pinar YoldasPlastic by Doug Wagner and Daniel HillyardGreat Pacific (comic, 16-issue series)The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

In inspired and incisive writing the contributors to WE ARE MEANT TO RISE speak unvarnished truths not only to the original and pernicious racism threaded through the American experience but also to the deeply personal, bearing witness to one of the most unsettling years in the history of the United States. This episode features Carolyn Holbrook, David Mura, Douglas Kearney, Melissa Olson, Said Shaiye, and Kao Kalia Yang. It is a recording from a live event at Next Chapter Booksellers in St. Paul, MN, on November 29, 2021. Minor edits and adjustments have been made for sound quality; some volume adjustment might be needed from time to time.We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World can be purchased at Next Chapter Booksellers. https://www.nextchapterbooksellers.com/book/9781517912215Carolyn Holbrook is founder and director of More Than a Single Story, as well as founder of SASE: The Write Place. She is a writer, educator, and an advocate for the healing power of the arts.David Mura has written ten books, including the memoirs Turning Japanese (a New York Times Notable Book) and Where the Body Meets Memory. He teaches at VONA, a writers' conference for writers of color, and has worked with Alexs Pate's Innocent Classroom.Douglas Kearney has published seven collections, including Sho; the award-winning Buck Studies; and a collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues. He teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota.Melissa Olson is an Indigenous person of mixed Anishinaabe and Euro-American heritage, a tribal citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. Melissa has worked as a writer and producer of independent public media at KFAI Fresh Air Community Radio in Minneapolis.Said Shaiye is a Somali writer working on his MFA degree at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Are You Borg Now?Kao Kalia Yang is an award-winning Hmong American writer for both children and adults. She is the Edelstein-Keller Writer in Residence in the creative writing program of the University of Minnesota.Show note: At 43:11, a minor sound glitch occurs during a reading; the full text reads: “‘Fuck-12’ in a ragged handwriting was tagged everywhere, and Black and Brown youths zipped around on their bikes observing people wandering around in shock and disbelief.”

Outsiders Within is a volume of essays, fiction, poetry, and art by transracially adopted writers from around the world who tackle difficult questions about how to survive the racist and ethnocentric worlds they inhabit. The volume was first published in 2006 and released in a new edition in 2021: a year in which reproduction and adoption politics have been spotlighted anew.In this episode, three transracial adoptees talk about what society often gets wrong about adoption.Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in the Chicago area. She is an award-winning poet, writer, and cultural worker, whose books include Unbearable Splendor and What We Hunger For. She lives in Minneapolis.Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and award-winning author. She was adopted by white parents in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1975. Gibney is a professor of English at Minneapolis College. Her forthcoming novel Botched explores themes of transracial adoption through speculative memoir.JaeRan Kim was born in South Korea and adopted to the United States in 1971. She is associate professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma, in the social work program. She is a contributor to the volume The Complexities of Race (NYU Press), and her blog, Harlow’s Monkey, is one of the longest-running transracial adoption blogs in the US.

SICKENING is a book that examines the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes between Black and white Americans. Author Anne Pollock of King’s College London takes readers through anti-Black racism operating in healthcare: from the spike in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina to the lack of protection for Black residents during the Flint water crisis—and even the life-threatening childbirth experience for tennis star Serena Williams. Ruha Benjamin of Princeton University joins Pollock in conversation. Pollock is professor of global health and social medicine at King’s College London. She is author of ‘Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States’; ‘Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference’; and ‘Synthesizing Hope: Matter, Knowledge, and Place in South African Drug Discovery.’Ruha Benjamin is professor of African American studies at Princeton University, founding director of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab, author of two books: ‘People Science’ and ‘Race After Technology,’ and editor of ‘Captivating Technology.’"A crucial guided analysis of anti-Blackness and its impact on Black people’s ability to live as fully entitled citizens, Pollock’s scholarship is essential medicine for a society in denial about its sickness." —Foreword 

”Adapting Balzac is no small feat for any filmmaker” (Variety)—or any translator. LOST ILLUSIONS and LOST SOULS are two newly translated volumes in Honoré de Balzac’s vast HUMAN COMEDY, a sprawling and interconnected fictional portrait of early nineteenth-century France. Keenly attuned to the acerbic charm and subtleties of Balzac’s prose, these editions are invaluable resources for today’s readers as they navigate the author’s copious allusions to classical and contemporaneous politics and literature. In this episode, MacKenzie is interviewed by University of Minnesota Press director Doug Armato about Balzac’s incomparable style and the intricacies of translation. (Spoiler alert: Key plot points from Lost Illusions and Lost Souls are discussed.)Other University of Minnesota Press translations by MacKenzie include:Red and Black (Stendhal), forthcoming in summer 2022Italian Chronicles (Stendhal)Diaboliques (Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly)Graziella (Alphonse de Lamartine)Brouhaha (Lionel Ruffel)

Dianne Harris offers a rare exploration of the racial and class politics of architecture in her book LITTLE WHITE HOUSES, which examines how postwar media representations associated the ordinary single-family house with middle-class whites to the exclusion of others. This book adds a new dimension to our understanding of race in America and the inequalities that persist in the housing market in the United States. Harris is an architectural historian and dean of the University of Washington College of Arts & Sciences. She is joined in conversation by Mabel O. Wilson, an architect, designer, cultural historian, and curator who teaches at Columbia University. This conversation was recorded in July 2021.

Race plays a fundamental role in naturalizing social, political, and economic inequalities in the United States. Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph Lowndes document the changing politics of race and class in the age of Trump in their book PRODUCERS, PARASITES, PATRIOTS: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity, which ultimately brings to light the changing role of race in right-wing politics. Racial subordination is an enduring feature of US political history, and it continually changes in response to shifting economic and political conditions. HoSang and Lowndes are here with a primer on, and insightful analyses of, The 1619 Project launched by the New York Times in August 2019, The 1776 Report commissioned by Donald Trump and released in January 2021, and recent and ongoing attacks on critical race theory in the US.