University of Minnesota Press strana 2 z 3

How twentieth-century developments in science influenced the aesthetics of the burgeoning American cartoon What do technical renderings of plant cells in trees have to do with Disney’s animated opus Fantasia? Quite a bit, as it turns out: such emergent scientific models and ideas about nature were an important inspiration for Disney’s groundbreaking animated realism. In Drawn to Nature, Colin Williamson presents a vivid portrait of how developments in biology, physics, and geology between 1900 and the long 1960s influenced not just Disney but the American cartoon industry as a whole. Drawing on original research on the scientific appetites of animators and studios such as Winsor McCay, the Fleischer Brothers, Walt Disney, and United Productions of America, Williamson opens new avenues for understanding the history and aesthetics of cartoons. Interrogating the differences between art and science and reconsidering the realms of dream, magic, and fantasy as they pertain to pop culture, he yields novel proposals for bridging longstanding divides between animation, live-action cinema, and the history of science. Drawn to Nature not only illuminates the extent to which animators have drawn on scientific insights, it also considers seriously how commercial animations themselves participate in scientific discourse. It revises and revitalizes our existing narratives about the history of American animation to uncover the many ways science informs our collective cultural imagination.

The spellbinding initial exploits of detective Shadwell Rafferty—now available in paperback Shadwell Rafferty’s last case may have led to his murder, but naturally—and fortunately, for followers of the indefatigable St. Paul detective—there’s more to the story. Mysterious Tales of Old St. Paul gathers three novellas from Larry Millett, casting back to Rafferty’s beginnings to recount a trio of intriguing cases that honed his skills before he joined forces with Sherlock Holmes. In “Death in the News,” St. Paul citizens wake one morning to find that the sign on downtown’s tallest building that reads PIONEER PRESS has been altered—at considerable effort—to LIARS. An elaborate prank, yes, but it foreshadows a far worse crime, and Rafferty is on the case. In “The Birdman of Summit Avenue,” cats are turning up dead in the yards of St. Paul’s prominent citizens, and suspicion swiftly falls on the wealthy avian enthusiast Ambrose Harriman, but the case turns darker still when a neighborhood boy is found murdered in Harriman’s yard. In “The Gold King,” an enigmatic stranger arrives in town, calling himself the Gold King and announcing his plans to unearth hidden treasure, which eventually leads to a shocking conclusion. Steeped in the mystery and history of nineteenth-century St. Paul, these interlocking detective stories feature the characters—and the local character—that have made the Shadwell Rafferty series irresistible. Spellbinding as ever, these stories also afford the curious pleasure of watching Rafferty find his footing on his way to becoming the consummate detective whose exploits have delighted readers again and again.

A fifty-year-old mystery converges with a present-day struggle over family, land, and history-now available in paperback   When a rock is dislodged from its slope by mischievous ancestors, the past rises to meet the present, and Half-Dime Hill gives up a gruesome secret it has kept for half a century. Some people of Mozhay Point have theories about what happened; others know-and the discovery stirs memories long buried, reviving a terrible story yet to be told.   Returning to the fictional Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota she has so deftly mapped in her award-winning books, Linda LeGarde Grover reveals traumas old and new as Margie Robineau, in the midst of a fight to keep her family’s long-held allotment land, uncovers events connected to a long-ago escape plan across the Canadian border, and the burial-at once figurative and painfully real-of not one crime but two. While Margie is piecing the facts together, Dale Ann is confronted by her own long-held secrets and the truth that the long ago and the now, the vital and the departed are all indelibly linked, no matter how much we try to forget.    As the past returns to haunt those involved, Margie prepares her statement for the tribal government, defending her family’s land from a casino development and sorting the truths of Half-Dime Hill from the facts that remain there. Throughout the narrative, a chorus of spirit women gather in lawn chairs with coffee and cookies to reminisce, reflect, and speculate, spinning the threads of family, myth, history, and humor-much as Grover spins another tale of Mozhay Point, weaving together an intimate and complex novel of a place and its people.     Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

A beguiling, perspective-shifting story of obsession and loss set in the grimy, late-colonial decadence of Macau at the end of the twentieth century   In The Inner Harbour, Antoine Volodine focuses his literary investigations away from dystopian futures to a specific place at a particular historical moment: Macau on the eve of the Portuguese colony’s transfer to China. In a seedy flat in one of the city’s slums, a hired assassin named Kotter interrogates Breughel, a writer on the run from a mysterious organization code-named Paradise. Breughel has been hiding out in Macau with his lover, Gloria Vancouver, and a significant sum of the organization’s money. But Gloria is dead and the money spent-or so Breughel claims-and now he lives alone in humid squalor.   With increasing severity, Kotter extracts Breughel’s confessions, but are they truth or subterfuge? Or are the confessions an elaborate work of fiction by a writer aware that they are no longer able to differentiate between memory and fantasy? Volodine brilliantly blurs the levels of narration-between what Breughel tells his interrogator, what he remembers or invents, and the stories he has written, including his accounts of Gloria’s hallucinatory visions of an apocalyptic war between military forces and the “chrysalids.”   Interweaving threads of fiction and truth, lies and hallucinations, The Inner Harbour evokes many of the themes found in Volodine’s other “post-exotic” works: the slippage between dreams and reality, the nightmares of history, the exhaustion of literature and politics, and questions about what it means to be faithful to people or ideas long since vanished. But Volodine also uses the setting of Macau’s late-colonial decadence to explore new sensations of foreignness, alienation, and resignation, all of which coalesce into a nesting doll of narrative that houses an unconventional and tragic love story.     Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Seven women raise a child together while redefining their place in society at the beginning of the Women’s Movement in Denmark in the 1970s On New Year’s Eve in Copenhagen in 1972, seven women had a child together: one gave birth and six others attended. They had met a year earlier at a feminist women’s camp on a small island and now, with about twenty other women’s liberationists, they occupied three dilapidated apartment buildings in the center of Copenhagen. One became the country’s first Women’s House, the nerve center of the Women’s Movement in Denmark, and the other two were women-only communal living spaces that were Pernille Ipsen’s first home. In this intimate portrait of life during the exhilarating early days of women’s liberation in Scandinavia and dramatic social change around the globe, she tells the stories of these seven women, her seven mothers.   Recounting her mothers’ history-from the passions and beliefs they shared to the political divisions over sexual identity that ultimately split them apart-Ipsen captures the individuality of each of her mothers as well as the common experiences that drew them together. As she deftly reflects the practical and emotional realities of her mothers’ women-centered life, Ipsen presents an engrossing picture of intersecting lives that, half a century ago, raised questions we still grapple with today: What is a family? Who is a woman? And who gets to decide?    A chronicle of gender, sexuality, and feminism as it was constructed, contested, and lived, My Seven Mothers is an eye-opening account of the challenges and possibilities connected with liberation and radical social change during the 1970s. In this time of fierce struggles over family, sexuality, and child-rearing, it reminds us that new worlds are always possible.

The true story of a Midwestern “town” created with leaves, sticks, and children’s imaginations Leaf Town suddenly springs up. One day the clearing outside the school is empty, and the next it’s a bustling town complete with a hotel, shop, and mayor. Children gather and find treasures everywhere: feathers, acorns, lost rings, an old medal, and plenty of leaves and pine needles. They even uncover a silver skeleton key in the muddy banks of a nearby creek and proclaim it the heart of Leaf Town. As the town grows, it attracts the attention of the kids up the street, and a colossal fight threatens to destroy everything that was built. But the heart of Leaf Town is saved, and the kids rally to rebuild their city together, expanding to welcome the neighboring kids as well as all sorts of birds and animals. They hang a sign, Leaf Town Forever, and pass the key to the next generation of children who will look after their beloved town. Based on a true story, Leaf Town Forever is the gentle tale of a town created by children with vivid imaginations. The timeless and universal saga, written in haiku, reminds both kids and adults that some dreams are worth protecting. Unfurling over the cycle of seasons, this is the story of an enchanting place full of tenacity and hope, creativity and fun—a connection to the natural world within reach for us all if we unite to make and maintain it.

A young girl reckons with the demolition of a Black Saint Paul neighborhood to make way for the Interstate in the early 1960s When thirteen-year-old Zenobia has to leave her friends and spend the summer at Grandma’s while Mama recovers from a stroke, life seems so unfair. But then the eviction letters start arriving throughout her grandparents’ neighborhood, and white men chalk arrows to mark the gas and water lines, and a new world of unfairness unfolds before her. It’s 1963, and Zenobia’s grandparents’ house on Rondo Avenue in Saint Paul-like all the homes in this thriving Black community-is targeted for demolition to make way for the new Interstate Highway 94.   As Zenobia gradually learns about what’s planned for the Rondo neighborhood and what this means for everyone who lives there, she discovers how her story is intertwined with the history of her family, all the way back to Great Grandma Zenobia and the secrets Grandma Essie held close about the reason for her light skin. With the destruction of the neighborhood looming, Zenobia takes a stand on behalf of her community, joining her no-nonsense neighbor, onetime cowgirl Mrs. Ruby Pearl, in a protest and ultimately getting arrested. Though Zenobia is grounded for a month, her punishment seems of little consequence in comparison to what is happening all around her. Even though the demolition continues, she is proud to discover the power and connection in protesting injustice.   The House on Rondo captures the heartbreak, resistance, and resilience that marks a community sacrificed in the name of progress-a “progress” that never seems to favor Black families and neighborhoods and that haunts cities like Saint Paul to this day. As Zenobia learns what can be destroyed and what cannot, her story teaches us that joy, community, and love persist, even amid violence and loss.

The definitive English translation of the celebrated story collection regarded as a landmark of Norwegian literature and culture-now in paperback The extraordinary folktales collected by Peter Christen AsbjOrnsen and JOrgen Moe began appearing in Norway in 1841. Over the next two decades the publication of subsequent editions under the title Norske folkeeventyr made the names AsbjOrnsen and Moe synonymous with Norwegian storytelling traditions. Tiina Nunnally’s vivid translation of their monumental collection is the first new English translation in more than 150 years-and the first ever to include all sixty original tales. Magic and myth inhabit these pages in figures both familiar and strange. Giant trolls and talking animals are everywhere. The winds take human form. A one-eyed old woman might seem reminiscent of the Norse god Odin. We meet sly aunts, resourceful princesses, and devious robbers. The clever and fearless boy Ash Lad often takes center stage as he ingeniously breaks spells and defeats enemies to win half the kingdom. These stories, set in Norway’s majestic landscape of towering mountains and dense forests, are filled with humor, mischief, and sometimes surprisingly cruel twists of fate. All are rendered in the deceptively simple narrative style perfected by AsbjOrnsen and Moe-now translated into an English that is as finely tuned to the modern ear as it is true to the original Norwegian. Included here-for the very first time in English-are AsbjOrnsen and Moe’s Forewords and Introductions to the early Norwegian editions of the tales. AsbjOrnsen gives us an intriguing glimpse into the actual collection process and describes how the stories were initially received, both in Norway and abroad. Equally fascinating are Moe’s views on how central characters might be interpreted and his notes on the regions where each story was originally collected. Nunnally’s informative Translator’s Note places the tales in a biographical, historical, and literary context for the twenty-first century. The Norwegian folktales of AsbjOrnsen and Moe are timeless stories that will entertain, startle, and enthrall readers of all ages.

Uncovering the Black Power movement’s contributions to theorizing the politics of automation?   On the Eve of the Cybercultural Revolution offers a comprehensive look at the Black Power movement’s theoretical work and insights into the entanglement of capitalism, technology, and racism. Drawing upon James and Grace Lee Boggs’s expanded notion of the cybercultural era, Brian Bartell demonstrates how a range of artists, writers, and activists from the 1960s prefigured the wider discourse around automation and made it a central concern of their politics.   Rather than reducing automation to an isolated technical phenomenon, theorists of the Black radical tradition identified its important historical antecedents in colonialism and plantation slavery, emphasizing how the emerging cyberculture joined with issues such as the reorganization of labor, ecological harm, and racial inequality. Examining the work of Martin Luther King Jr., Noah Purifoy, the Black Panthers, and others, On the Eve of the Cybercultural Revolution outlines the new forms of social reproduction conceived outside of the dominant structures of racial capitalism.   Bartell synthesizes a wide range of source texts, including political speeches, literature, and activist archives, to show how the Black Power movement sought to create a postscarcity, more-than-capitalist economy. By shedding light on the movement’s underexplored engagement with theories of technology, he provides a crucial key to understanding the historical dynamics responsible for our technocapitalist present.     Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

A history of cinema’s role in popularizing the politics of Palestinian liberation   For decades, Arab American activists and allies have used film, video, and multimedia to mobilize support for the Palestinian cause in the United States. In this detailed history of cinema’s role within the broader solidarity movement, Umayyah Cable analyzes the various strands of cinematic activism that have helped move Palestinian liberation politics from the periphery and into the mainstream.   Cable charts the shifting discourse around Palestine as it has been shaped by grassroots film production and alternative media distribution networks as well as more conventional outlets. Ranging from the circulation of educational filmstrips by the Association of Arab American University Graduates in the 1970s to the treatment of Palestinian solidarity at contemporary Hollywood awards ceremonies and film festivals, Mainstreaming Palestine tells the story of how cinema has promoted Palestinian liberation and solidarity politics. While highlighting various public controversies and struggles against censorship, Cable also acknowledges the drawbacks of the Palestinian cause being subsumed by the mainstream, discussing how activism risks becoming fashionable, undermining the radical potential of the very tools that helped bring it there.   Combining archival research, ethnographic observation and interviews, text analysis, and visual analysis of film, video, and multimedia, Mainstreaming Palestine encourages readers to critically assess the relationship between the politics of liberation and the all-consuming engine of contemporary capitalism. By underscoring the impact of visual media on the evolution of the Palestinian solidarity discourse, this book offers both a treatise on the practical power of cinema and a necessary historicization of an urgent issue in American politics.     Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

Watching Chinatown fifty years after its release reveals hidden connections to today’s energy and climate crises   Pipeline Noir offers a fascinating interpretation of Chinatown, a classic of New Hollywood cinema, through the lens of petromodernity. Michael Rubenstein reimagines the film as an allegory for the 1970s energy crises, revealing how its focus on water infrastructure in early-twentieth-century California serves as a surrogate for the oil pipelines shaping the postwar global order. Introducing the concept of the “petroscope,” Rubenstein demonstrates how the film’s cinematic style mirrors the worldview shaped by petroleum’s dominance in modern life.   Blending appreciation and analysis, this book uncovers layers of Chinatown’s narrative that resonate urgently today, and Rubenstein’s meticulous examinations of the screenplay’s draft history and of key scenes in the finished film shed new light on the film’s cultural and environmental significance. By aligning Chinatown with the emerging field of petrocriticism, Pipeline Noir offers a compelling contribution to film theory and the energy humanities.

How to remake the world with neurodivergence at its heart What if we embraced neurodivergent ways of being not as deviations to be corrected but as vital ways of inhabiting the world? What new realities might emerge? Bringing a much-needed humanistic perspective to the study of autism and other forms of neurodivergence, Counter-cartographies offers a bold reimagining of neurological difference, moving beyond rigid diagnostic frameworks to uncover more expansive, generative modes of existence.   Engaging the work of Fernand Deligny to trace how modern taxonomies of neurodivergence have hardened over time, Leon J. Hilton questions how these categories might instead serve as tools for remapping the world with neurodivergence at its center. At the heart of Counter-cartographies is an exploration of performance and performativity that reveals how the norm of neurotypical reality is continually reinforced through acts of doing, redoing, and undoing.   Charting the historical shift away from “mind” and toward “brain” and moving fluidly across disciplines-from digital art and documentary cinema to cybernetics and radical mental health movements-Hilton illuminates the deep interconnections between performance, perception, and the historical construction of the “neurotypical.” Through close readings of works by William Pope.L, Mel Baggs, Wu Tsang, and others, Hilton also examines how neurodivergence has been represented, embodied, and materialized in contemporary art and media. Restless, engrossing, and persistently attuned to moments of rupture when the neurotypical order falters, Counter-cartographies charts a path toward a more capacious, imaginative world.     Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

A practical call to action against oppression   Across the globe, millions of people have participated in protests and marches, donated to political groups, or lobbied their representatives with the aim of creating lasting social change, overturning repressive laws, or limiting environmental destruction. Yet very little seems to improve for those affected by rapacious governments. Replace the State brings new hope for social justice movements by looking to progressive campaigns that have found success by unconventional, and more direct, means.   Sasha Davis, an activist and scholar of radical environmental advocacy, focuses on the strategies of movements, many of them Indigenous, that have occupied contested sites and demonstrated their effectiveness at managing or governing them. Including case studies of resistance to development on Indigenous lands in Hawai‘i, nuclear testing in the Nevada desert, and the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa, he offers insight and direction for activists, students, academics, and others dedicated to protecting and improving the well-being of their communities and beyond.   It would be easy to succumb to pessimism and political apathy in the face of governing institutions that are increasingly unresponsive to calls for change and repressive in response to protest, even as they violate human rights, ignore existential climate catastrophes, and concentrate power into fewer and fewer hands. Instead, Davis finds inspiration for genuine political change through social movements that are successfully “replacing the state” and taking over the day-to-day governance of threatened places. From contesting environmental abuse to reasserting Indigenous sovereignty, these social movements demonstrate how people can collectively wrest control over their communities from oppressive governments and manage them with a more egalitarian ethics of care.     Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

Facing real threats of extinction and futurelessness, a search for new ground on which to build projects toward emancipationChaos and the Automaton is the first volume to collect Franco ?Bifo? Berardi?s extensive collaboration with e-flux, which has become one of his primary English-language publishers since 2010. The selection of key essays collected here presents Berardi?s prescient interventions into more than a decade of social turmoil, offering a tour through the cataclysms that have rocked the foundations of the global order since the 2008 financial crisis, from European austerity, Occupy, the Arab Spring, and Anonymous through the ascendance of Pope Francis, Brexit, Covid-19, the Trump?Biden sequence, the U.S. Capitol riots, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine?as well as bizarre new cultural occurrences that were consequences. Berardi draws not only from current events but also movements and figures at the firmament of his thought, such as Guattari, Pasolini, and Italian street art of the 1970s. His essays represent a sustained and singular effort to reveal the psychic and material underpinnings of a society in which history came roaring back at the same moment as any vision of a sustainable future receded from sight. ?I know that it is dangerous to write in simultaneity with events that nobody can precisely foresee, that can only be vaguely intuited,? he wrote on the eve of the 2020 American elections, ?but the only way to imagine something about the becoming of the psycho-sphere is to run ahead of the dynamics of the disaster.?

A bold and far-reaching new study of French queer cinema reimagines the relationship between sexuality and space Spatiality has long been a crucial and potent lens for understanding French culture and aesthetics. While canonical greats of French cinema such as Jean-Luc Godard, AgnEs Varda, and Louis Malle invoked the notion of flÂnerie to explore ideas of modernism, spatial exploration, and urban sociality, Jules O’Dwyer demonstrates how a more recent generation of French queer filmmakers continues to engage with-and contest-this legacy by focusing attention on the cognate practice of cruising. Through the work of Jacques Nolot, SÉbastien Lifshitz, Christophe HonorÉ, Vincent Dieutre, Alain Guiraudie, and others, The Seduction of Space draws film theory, queer studies, and spatial inquiry into close proximity to examine the politics of cruising and the gendering of space. Making the case that cinema not only documents the queer spaces of the past but continues to produce them, O’Dwyer maps the relationships between sex and spatiality as he takes up such varied topics as public sex in the porn theater, racial eroticization in the banlieue, and the ecocritical valences of rural cruising. Foregrounding the crucial role that spatiality plays in shaping the parameters of France’s visual cultures and political imaginary, The Seduction of Space is both an urgent queer reconceptualization of this tradition and a clarion call for film scholars to tarry with the politics of sexuality in all its messiness. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.