MSU Press Podcast

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 psychoanalytical attempts to pin it down. For Grande, these and other great works of literature corroborate René Girard’s understanding of desire as taking shape “according to the other’s desire.” This mimetic approach frees desire from certain preconceptions of psychology and puts literary criticism in touch with the concrete substance of fictional narratives.

Per Bjørnar Grande is a professor in the Department of Pedagogy, Religion, and Social Studies at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences.

Desire: Flaubert, Proust, Fitzgerald, Miller, Lana Del Rey, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. 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 the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

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, or imprisoned.

The book also considers those who rejected the temptations of terrorism with a close look at one man from Minneapolis, the American-born son of a couple who fled Somalia, who came dangerously close to answering the ISIS call. From 2014 to 2016, Abdirahman Abdirashid Bashir and a dozen friends—some still in their teens—schemed to find ways to join Bashir’s other friends and cousins with ISIS in Syria. Some succeeded. In the end, Bashir made a different choice. Not only did he reject ISIS’s call, he decided to work with the FBI to spy on his friends and ultimately to testify against them in court. Drawing on extensive interviews for Divided Loyalties, Joseph Weber explains why.

JOE WEBER is the Jerry and Karla Huse Professor of News-Editorial and an Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He worked for thirty-five years in daily and weekly journalism, including twenty-two years in several posts across North America for BusinessWeek, departing as the magazine's chief of correspondents.

Divided Loyalties: Young Somali Americans and the Lure of Extremism, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. 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 the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

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 Louise Erdrich illustrated by such artists as Delishia Williams, GMB Chomichuk, and Nicholas Burns. The second volume, Relational Constellation, extends the focus of the series to include additional original works that provide a unique opportunity for audiences to hear from myriad Indigenous voices on the meaning of love.

Gordon Henry, Jr. is an Anishinaabe poet, fiction writer, and essayist, and an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation. He is the author of the poetry collection The Failure of Certain Charms (2008) and the novel The Light People (1994), which was the recipient of the American Book Award. A professor of literature and creative writing at Michigan State University, Gordon also serves as editor of MSU Press’s American Indian Studies Series.

Elizabeth LaPensée is an award-winning designer, writer, artist, and researcher. She is Anishinaabe from Baawaating with relations at Bay Mills Indian Community and Métis. She is Assistant Professor of Media & Information and Writing, Rhetoric & American Cultures at Michigan State University, and has contributed to comics as an illustrator, writer, and editor, including Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection and Deer Woman: An Anthology.

The first two volumes of Sovereign Traces are available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Gordon and Elizabeth on Instagram @drpinepoint and @elizabethlapensee. 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, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

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 @ctredits 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 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, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

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 rejoinder to standard imperial histories by parting the curtains for us to see, with more clarity and precision than we have before, the place of Indigenous and French women in the making of Detroit.”

Karen L. Marrero is Associate Professor of early American History at Wayne State University where she teaches courses on early North American and Indigenous history.

Dr. Marrero’s book, Detroit’s Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. 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, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

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 Plan for Public Buildings of 1903 but also inspired an additional quarter century of impressive City Beautiful buildings for all forms of public use.

As Anne Trubek puts it, Cleveland Architecture, 1890-1930 is a stunning accomplishment. At once a history, an encyclopedia, and an analysis of the City Beautiful movement, the book contains startling original research and offers a comprehensive resource for anyone interested in Cleveland, architecture, or history. Gorgeously illustrated in a splendid hardcover format, this is a necessary book and a remarkable service to the city and to scholarship.

Jeannine deNobel Love is an independent art historian focusing on American art and architecture. She has worked at the Detroit Institute of Art and served as Director of the Intermuseum Conservation Association, a regional art conservation center in Ohio. She has written on Frank Lloyd Wright and his collaborators and on John La Farge’s stained glass in Cleveland. She has also contributed to The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art: Guide to the Collections. 

Cleveland Architecture, 1890-1930, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. 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, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

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 African diasporic filmmakers to express the reconstruction of identity.

The book analyzes the contemporary diaspora through the prism of cultural hybridization and the processes of recomposing fragmented identities, out of which new identities emerge. In the words of Francoise Pfaff, African Diasporic Cinema “brilliantly incorporates sociopolitical, psychological, and philosophical tools … Ricci’s well-documented book highlights personal journeys and diverse representations of global issues: migration, exile, biracialism, hybrid cultural identities, exclusion, alienation, and alterity. A must read for researchers in film, African studies, and diaspora studies.”

Daniela Ricci teaches film studies at Paris Nanterre University and the University of Paris 8 in France. She is part of the research laboratory History of Arts and Representations and is a member of the African Federation of Film Critics, the African Studies Association, and the African Literature Association.

Daniela Ricci’s book, African Diasporic Cinema, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find her online at her website, which is linked in the podcast description and on Facebook. 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, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo.

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 the consequences of consumerism and why radical changes are needed so our own species learns to live in harmony with nature.

Malcolm Smith is a biologist, a former chief scientist and deputy chief executive at the Countryside Council for Wales, and a former board member of the Environmental Agency, Europe’s largest environmental regulator, for England and Wales. He’s the author of four previous books, including Ploughing a New Furrow: A Blueprint for Wildlife Friendly Farming.

Hats: A Very UNnatural History, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Malcolm @drmalcomsmith on Twitter. 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, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press, especially Elise Jajuga and Julie Reaume, for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

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 problem and not the “disease” causing it. 

The goal of this book is to lay the context for how to connect Western science and Indigenous knowledge frameworks to form a holistic and ethical decision process for the environment. A collection of essays, interviews, stories, and research, The Medicine Wheel does not just describe the problems inherent to each knowledge framework but offers new insights for how to connect culture and art to science knowledge frameworks. In the words of Doug Decker, The Medicine Wheel is a volume you’ll want to consult time and again, and to share with your peers.

Dr. Mike E. Marchand is a former Chair and Council Member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville, President of the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians Economic Development Corporation, and he earned his PhD at the University of Washington Seattle. Kristiina A. Vogt is professor of ecosystem management and holistic assessment of ecosystems at the University of Washington Seattle. 

The Medicine Wheel: Environmental Decision-Making Process of Indigenous Peoples, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Dr. Marchand on Facebook, and 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, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

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. As Jay Watson puts it, “This is an invaluable work that will kindle important scholarship about the Black war experience and its literary representation for years to come. A vital contribution to African American literary criticism and literary history.”

Shirley A. James Hanshaw is professor emerita in the English Department at Mississippi State University where she was instrumental in establishing the first African American Studies Program. She is the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a Danforth Associateship for Outstanding Teaching in the Sciences and Humanities, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

Re-Membering and Surviving: African American Fiction of the Vietnam War, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. 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, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press, especially Elise Jajuga and Julie Reaume, for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo.