University of Minnesota Press

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.

The dynamics of adoptee communities have shifted in the decades since the first edition of OUTSIDERS WITHIN was published in 2006, yet the volume continues to provide critical perspectives that have gained renewed relevance during contemporary crises. Here, three writers and artists, Korean and Vietnamese adoptees who were adopted across geographic borders in the 1970s, talk isolation, racism, identity struggle, adoption policy, and how the Internet has changed the ways connection can be found. This conversation was recorded in May 2021.Jane Jeong Trenka is an activist and award-winning writer who was adopted from South Korea to Minnesota in 1972. She has a master of public administration from Seoul National University and was instrumental in revising Korea’s adoption law in 2011. She is author of the memoir ‘The Language of Blood’ and co-editor of ‘Outsiders Within,’ published in a new edition by University of Minnesota Press.Dr. Indigo Willing is a sociologist, lecturer, and creator of the Adopted Vietnamese International (AVI) network for adoptees from the Vietnamese community and war refugee generation. She lives in Australia.kimura byol-nathalie lemoine is an artist, activist, and archivist, and a Korean-born adoptee who grew up in Belgium and currently resides in Montreal. kimura*lemoine is co-founder of Euro-Korean League and an active member and archivist for the interracial adoptee community.Outsiders Within: z.umn.edu/outsiderswithin

What if we attended to an ailing ecosystem just as we would a body in the throes of a chronic medical condition? Ranae Lenor Hanson’s memoir WATERSHED encourages us to discover how the health of our bodies and the health of the world they inhabit are inextricably linked. In this episode, Hanson is joined by educators and community leaders Lena Jones and Teddie Potter. Ranae Lenor Hanson is an educator and climate activist who taught writing and global studies at Minneapolis College (MCTC) for 31 years. Lena Jones is a political science faculty member at Minneapolis College and connected to the Center for Earth, Energy and Democracy. Teddie Potter is Clinical Professor and Director of Planetary Health in the School of Nursing at the University of Minnesota."The credo ‘water is life’ has become a key environmental rallying cry in the years since Standing Rock, and this book helps us remember why. It recalls an American past, inhabits a global present, and imagines a working future—it will be an aid to many as they grapple with our difficult moment."—Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and author of The End of Nature

The Migrant’s Paradox connects global migration with urban marginalization, exploring how “race” maps onto place across the globe, state, and street. Suzanne Hall examines the brutal contradictions of sovereignty and capitalism in the formation of street livelihoods in the urban margins in five cities in Britain, in places where jobs are hard to come by and the impacts of historic state underinvestment are deeply felt. Hall is associate professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is joined in this episode by Tariq Jazeel, professor in human geography at University College London; Huda Tayob, senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Cape Town; and Les Back, professor of sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. This conversation was recorded in May 2021. It is published in partnership between the University of Minnesota Press and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.