University Of Minnesota Press: 838 books
Love in Vain
A Vision of Robert Johnson
Language: English
Release Date: October 28, 2012
Robert Johnson was undoubtedly the most outstanding of the Mississippi Delta blues musicians and also one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but his short life remains steeped in mystery and wrapped in some of the most enduring legends of modern music. Love in Vain is Alan Greenberg’s...
Mediators
Aesthetics, Politics, and the City
Language: English
Release Date: October 30, 2014
Reinhold Martin’s Mediators is a series of linked meditations on the globalized city. Focusing on infrastructural, technical, and social systems, Martin explores how the aesthetics and the political economy of cities overlap and interact. He discusses a range of subjects, including the architecture...
The Urban Apparatus
Mediapolitics and the City
Language: English
Release Date: January 4, 2017
Urbanization is a system of power and knowledge, and today’s city functions through the expansive material infrastructures of the urban order. In The Urban Apparatus, Reinhold Martin analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic, socioeconomic, and mediapolitical terms. He argues that...
Our Gang
A Racial History of The Little Rascals
Language: English
Release Date: December 29, 2015
It was the age of Jim Crow, riddled with racial violence and unrest. But in the world of Our Gang, black and white children happily played and made mischief together. They even had their own black and white version of the KKK, the Cluck Cluck Klams—and the public loved it.
The story of race...
Virtual Modernism
Writing and Technology in the Progressive Era
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2013
In Virtual Modernism, Katherine Biers offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen Crane, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein,...
Stare in the Darkness
The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2011
Rap’s critique of police brutality in the 1980s. The Hip Hop Political Convention. The rise (and fall) of Kwame Kilpatrick, the “hip-hop mayor” of Detroit. Barack Obama echoing the body language of Jay-Z on the campaign trail. A growing number of black activists and artists claim that rap and hip-hop...
The Idea of Haiti
Rethinking Crisis and Development
Language: English
Release Date: May 17, 2013
After Haiti was struck by a devastating earthquake on January 12, 2010, aid workers and offers of support poured in from around the world. Tellingly, though, news reports on the catastrophe and relief efforts frequently included a pejorative description of the country that outsiders were determined to...
Eating Fire
My Life as a Lesbian Avenger
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2014
When Kelly Cogswell plunged into New York’s East Village in 1992, she had just come out. An ex–Southern Baptist born in Kentucky, she was camping in an Avenue B loft, scribbling poems, and playing in an underground band, trying to figure out her next move. A couple of months later she was consumed...
The Nearness of Others
Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2014
“Funny how a gay man’s hand resting heavily on your shoulder used to say let’s fuck but now means let’s not. Funny how ostensible nearness really betrays distance sometimes.” —from The Nearness of Others
In this radical, genre-bending narrative, David Caron tells the story of his...
All about Almodóvar
A Passion for Cinema
Language: English
Release Date: May 21, 2009
One of world cinema’s most exciting filmmakers, Pedro Almodóvar has been delighting, provoking, arousing, shocking, and—above all—entertaining audiences around the globe since he first burst on the international film scene in the early 1980s. All about Almodóvar offers new perspectives on...
by Leigh Fondakowski
Language: English
Release Date: February 1, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: February 1, 2013
The saga of Jonestown didn’t end on the day in November 1978 when more than nine hundred Americans died in a mass murder-suicide in the Guyanese jungle. While only a handful of people present at the agricultural project survived that day in Jonestown, more than eighty members of Peoples Temple, led...
by Amy L. Stone
Language: English
Release Date: April 11, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: April 11, 2012
The passage of the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in California in 2008 stunned gay rights activists across the country. Although facing a well-funded campaign in support of the ballot measure, LGBT activists had good reasons for optimism, including the size and strength of their campaign. Since 1974,...
Body and Soul
The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination
Language: English
Release Date: October 20, 2011
Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. Here Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known...
Breathing Race into the Machine
The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics
Language: English
Release Date: February 1, 2014
In the antebellum South, plantation physicians used a new medical device—the spirometer—to show that lung volume and therefore vital capacity were supposedly less in black slaves than in white citizens. At the end of the Civil War, a large study of racial difference employing the spirometer appeared...