American Studies

Life Support Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor Kalindi Vora 2015 Spring

How global capitalism has turned human beings into a new form of biocapital

Zoo Renewal White Flight and the Animal Ghetto Lisa Uddin 2015 Spring

Race, urban life, and the postwar revitalization of American zoos

Imagine the Sound Experimental African American Literature after Civil Rights Carter Mathes 2015 Spring

Examines the use of sound in the works of African American writers during the post–Civil Rights era

The Poitier Effect Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation Sharon Willis 2015 Spring

Sidney Poitier as an icon of the civil rights era, signifying racial reconciliation without threat to the white status quo

Physics of Blackness Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology Michelle M. Wright 2015 Spring

Reveals how assumptions we make about time and space inhibit more inclusive definitions of Blackness

Slaves of the State Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary Dennis Childs 2015 Spring

A sweeping cultural history of U.S. prison slavery

Impossible Heights Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder Adnan Morshed 2014 Fall

A rich exploration of the influence of skyscrapers, airplanes, and aerial vision on interwar American visual culture

Building Zion The Material World of Mormon Settlement Thomas Carter 2014 Fall

What the built environment shows us about the complex and evolving nature of nineteenth-century Mormon social and religious life

The Way Things Go An Essay on the Matter of Second Modernism Aaron Jaffe 2014 Fall

That rare modernist book: erudite, innovative, thought provoking, and playful

The American Isherwood James J. Berg and Chris Freeman, Editors 2014 Fall

Shines a critical spotlight on the American life of the famed author

Savage Preservation The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology Brian Hochman 2014 Fall

How ethnographic encounters shaped audiovisual media in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America

Civil Rights Childhood Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks Katharine Capshaw 2014 Fall

The unexpected and evocative role of children’s photographic books in cultural transformation and social change

Distant Wars Visible The Ambivalence of Witnessing Wendy Kozol 2014 Fall

Mapping the fraught space between empathy and spectacle in the witnessing of military conflict

Under Bright Lights Gay Manila and the Global Scene Bobby Benedicto 2014 Fall

Reassessing gay globalization as seen and lived by third world gay men of means

Backwater Blues The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination Richard M. Mizelle Jr. 2014 Fall

A broad examination of the flood that, prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, was the most influential environmental disaster in American history

Oil Culture Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden, Editors 2014 Fall

The cultural life of oil—from aesthetics and politics to economy and ecology

Abolitionist Geographies Martha Schoolman 2014 Fall

The geographic claims and spatial contradictions of abolitionist literature, from British West Indian Emancipation to the U.S. Civil War

Chicago Hustle and Flow Gangs, Gangsta Rap, and Social Class Geoff Harkness 2014 Fall

Explores the symbiotic relationship between gangsta rap and Chicago street gangs

Total Liberation The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement David Naguib Pellow 2014 Fall

All oppression is linked: radical environmental and animal liberation movements in the struggle for social justice

Debt to Society Accounting for Life under Capitalism Miranda Joseph 2014 Fall

Reveals how credit, debt, and accounting shape and influence our lives

University of Minnesota Press