Part of MSU Press’s “Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory” series, Per Bjørnar Grande’s Desire draws on both modern masterpieces and iconic works of contemporary pop culture to shed new light on the frustrating and repetitive nature of human relations in a world of vanishing taboos. In novels and plays by Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Arthur Miller and music by Lana Del Rey, Grande sees desire operating in a complex, slippery way that eludes philosophical and psychoanalyti...
Mar 08, 2021•31 min•Season 3Ep. 2
In Divided Loyalties: Young Somali Americans and the Lure of Extremism , Joseph Weber examines the cases of the more than fifty Somali Americans, mostly young men from Minnesota, who made their way to Somalia or Syria, attempted to get to those countries, aided people who did, or financially backed terrorist groups there. Throughout the book, Weber asks why people join violent extremist movements like al-Shabab, al-Qaida, and the Islamic State when so many of those who do end up dead, missing, o...
Mar 01, 2021•39 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Now into two volumes, the Sovereign Traces series merges works of contemporary North American Indian literature with imaginative illustrations by US and Canadian artists. As comics, the Sovereign Traces volumes provide an extended means for audiences to engage with works of Native Literature, including fiction, poetry, and memoir in a variety of exciting forms. The first volume, Not (Just) (An)Other includes text adapted from writers such as Gordon Henry Jr., Gerald Vizenor, Joy Harjo, and Louis...
Nov 30, 2020•45 min•Season 2Ep. 11
Catherine Cocks is the assistant director and editor in chief of MSU Press you can find her on Twitter @catherine_msup . Caitlin Tyler Richards acquires in African studies, African diaspora, African American studies, Anthropology, and digital humanities. You can find her @ctredit s on Twitter. Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communication includes several posts on virtual conferencing , which we discussed in the show. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitte...
Nov 23, 2020•50 min•Season 2Ep. 10
The hidden channels of Detroit’s French-Indigenous history run backward and forward through time, cutting through and becoming visible in the expanse of the imperial record only to disappear into local story and song. These are seams in Detroit’s history that reveal the contingent and “messy” nature of national borders and local identities. As Sophie White describes it, Detroit’s Hidden Channels is a meticulous and sophisticated analysis of Detroit’s founding era … it offers an important rejoind...
Nov 16, 2020•40 min•Season 2Ep. 9
At the turn of the twentieth century, Cleveland became a model of what could be accomplished by a partnership between the city’s wealthy and the local government to create an architecturally beautiful, livable, industrial city. Inspired by the success of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, with its classically inspired Beaux-Arts buildings, Cleveland developed an architectural and urban planning strategy over the next three decades which not only resulted in the Cleveland Group Pla...
Nov 09, 2020•42 min•Season 2Ep. 8
The African diasporic condition in the Western world is characterized by the intersection of various factors. As a result, quests for the self and self-reconstruction are frequent themes in the films of the African diaspora, and yet the filmmakers refuse to remain trapped in the confines of an assigned, rigid identity. Translated from the French by Melissa Thackway, Daniela Ricci’s African Diasporic Cinema: Aesthetics of Reconstruction analyzes the aesthetic strategies adopted by contemporary Af...
Nov 02, 2020•39 min•Season 2Ep. 7
As Martin Harper, the Global Conservation Director of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds puts it, Hats: A Very UNnatural History is a remarkable book that documents the impact that our obsession with hats has had on the natural world. It outlines how the global trade in fur and feathers evolved and the damage it caused, and highlights how heroic campaigners brought about reform, which in many cases aided recovery of species whose existence was threatened. It is a timely reminder of th...
Oct 26, 2020•44 min•Season 2Ep. 6
The medicine wheel built by Indigenous people acknowledges that ecosystems experience unpredictable recurring cycles and that people and the environment are interconnected. The Western science knowledge framework is incomplete when localized intergenerational knowledge is not respected and becomes part of the problem-definition and solution process. If both forms of knowing continue on separate parallel tracks, the decision process will most likely identify the “symptom” of an environmental prob...
Oct 19, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Season 2Ep. 5
In the words of Yusef Komunyakaa, Shirley A. James Hanshaw’s Re-Membering and Surviving is a powerful call seeking a response. This superb analytical voice examines literature by four black writers—John A. Williams, Wesley Brown, A. R. Flowers, and George Davis—who are masterful storytellers shaped by the caldron of war. Through her attention to these figures, Hanshaw reveals an American voice that has been kept in obscurity. Here, the historical background illuminates a postmodern imagination. ...
Oct 12, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Season 2Ep. 4
The Crisis of School Violence is the only interdisciplinary book about school violence. It presents a broad and in-depth approach to the key questions about why bullying continues at an unprecedentedly high rate and why rampage shootings continue to shock the nation. Based on extensive research, the book investigates human nature and its relation to aggressive behavior, with a special focus on the culture of violence that predicates school violence and perpetuates industries that profit from vio...
Oct 05, 2020•37 min•Season 2Ep. 3
In his new book, The Manufacture of Consent , Dr. Underhill treats J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure as FBI director as a case study in political power, focusing on the rhetorical nature of that power. He analyzes Hoover’s relationship with the presidency, the press, and the film industry to reveal the ways in which Hoover was able to use prevailing discourses of racial, gender, class, and religious hierarchies to dominate the media and to create and sustain the role of the FBI in United States society. ...
Sep 28, 2020•44 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades is the journal of the Association of Gender and Sexuality Studies. First published in the spring of 1975 at the University of Colorado, Denver, REGS is one of the earliest academic journals devoted to gender-related issues, women authors, and feminist theory in the contexts of Hispanic literatures and cultures. Published biannually in a mix of Spanish and English, the journal includes critical articles on gender studies topics; unpublished work by Spa...
Sep 21, 2020•58 min•Season 2Ep. 1
On the hot summer evening of July 2, 1863, at the climax of the struggle for a Pennsylvania hill called Little Round Top, four Confederate regiments charge up the western slope, attacking the smallest and most exposed of their Union foe: the 16th Michigan Infantry. Terrible fighting has raged, but what happens next will ultimately—and unfairly—stain the reputation of one of the Army of the Potomac’s veteran combat outfits, made up of men from Detroit, Sagniaw, and other Michigan locales. In the ...
Jun 08, 2020•39 min•Season 1Ep. 11
Anthropology and Radical Humanism is based on the work of the famed ethnographer of the Winnebago, Paul Radin. During his three-year appointment at Fisk University in the late 1920s, Radin and a graduate student, Andrew Polk Watson, collected autobiographies and religious conversion narratives from elderly African Americans. Their texts represent the first systematic record of slavery as told by former slaves. Radin regarded each narrative as the unimpeachable self-representation of a unique, th...
Jun 01, 2020•39 min•Season 1Ep. 10
The Eagle Has Eyes is the first book of its kind to bring transparency to the FBI’s attempts to destroy the incipient Chicano Movement of the 1960s. The role of the US government in suppressing marginalized racial and ethnic minorities began to be documented with the advent of the Freedom of Information Act, and the book utilizes declassified files from the FBI to investigate the agency’s role in thwarting the efforts of César Chavez’s to build a labor union for farm workers. The book also docum...
May 25, 2020•48 min•Season 1Ep. 9
On today’s episode, we’re joined by Paul Stob to discuss his book, Intellectual Populism: Democracy, Inquiry, and the People . In response to denunciations of populism as undemocratic and anti-intellectual, Intellectual Populism argues that populism has contributed to a distinct and democratic intellectual tradition in which ordinary people assume leading roles in the pursuit of knowledge. Focusing on the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras, the book uses case studies of intellectual figures to trac...
May 18, 2020•50 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Dr. Tryon Woods is Associate Professor of crime and justice studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth where he teaches Black Studies and critical approaches to de-disciplining knowledge. In Blackhood against the Police Power , Dr. Woods “addresses the punishment of ‘race’ and the disavowal of sexual violence central to the contemporary ‘post racial’ culture of politics." Blackhood against the Police Power , is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find him onli...
May 11, 2020•55 min•Season 1Ep. 7
In (New) Fascism , Dr. Lawtoo discusses the new forms of fascism haunting our contemporary political scene. He reads this new style of fascism and crowd psychology through the lens of mimetic theory and traces the genealogy of (new) fascism back to the three related mimetic concepts of contagion, community, and myth. These concepts were once central to the spread of fascism in Europe and are now proving central to the rise of new fascisms as well. As Dr. Lawtoo writes, “A protean figure ... is n...
May 04, 2020•44 min•Season 1Ep. 6
Toward the Wild Abundance received the Wheelbarrow Books Prize for Poetry from Center for Poetry at the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities here at MSU in 2018. In her introduction to the volume, the contest’s judge, Sarah Bagby, says the book “conjures emotions initiated by the frailty and wonder of our lives. ... These kaleidoscopic poems also shine brilliance on themes of memory and the passage of time. They fluidly transport us from past to present and into the imagination to pose...
Apr 27, 2020•38 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Once Upon a Time at the Opera House explores the importance of opera houses to the cultural and community life of nonmetropolitan areas in Michigan. As both the civic and arts center for the community, the local opera house was a venue for community meetings, political rallies, concerts, lectures, and theatrical entertainments. The well-illustrated and often humorous stories readers encounter in the book are based on historical facts, anecdotes, urban legends, and tall tales associated with thre...
Apr 20, 2020•59 min•Season 1Ep. 4
RESPECT is a massive collection of poems and lyrics, a monument that shows the global impact of Detroit’s music scene. Its contents span genres from jazz and Motown and R&B to hip-hop, rap, rock, and even techno and electronica. The book’s contributors are Grammy winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, and poets laureate. In its nearly 450 pages appear pieces by Eminem, June Jordan, Rita Dove, Jack White, Nikki Giovanni, Patricia Smith, Billy Bragg, and many mo...
Apr 13, 2020•46 min•Season 1Ep. 3
In this episode, James D. Diamond discusses his book After the Bloodbath: Is Healing Possible in the Wake of Rampage Shootings . Topics include Indigenous justice traditions, restorative justice, the effects of rampage shootings on victims and families, and potential changes to the US legal system to encourage healing in the wake of tragedy. After the Blood Bath , “examines the typical American reaction to the tragedy of rampage killings,” the “interplay between offenders and their families and ...
Apr 06, 2020•47 min•Season 1Ep. 2
In this episode, the press's director, Gabe Dotto, and the press's editor-in-chief, Catherine Cocks, join us to talk about the history and future of MSU Press and some of the challenges facing university press publishers today. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb . The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to Daniel Trego, Madiha Ghous, D...
Mar 30, 2020•34 min•Season 1Ep. 1
