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What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, this book contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world. Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, the book explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. The book’s examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings’ interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare’s Tempest and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws to Spivak’s theories of subalternity. In this book’s interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara’s dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with “perfect knowledge of the ground.”

Backwater Blues offers a critique of long-standing ideas of African American environmental complacency by showing the ways in which black commentators from W.E.B. Du Bois to Bessie Smith provided an ecological and intellectual criticism of the 1927 flood. Through most of the twentieth-century assumptions of black environmental complacency have given rise to the wide-spread belief that African Americans rarely expressed thoughts or ideas about their surrounding environmental world. To the contrary, African Americans have a long tradition of racial consciousness, intellectual narration, and articulation of environmental landscapes that were heightened during the 1927 flood. Black cultural and intellectual commentary of the flood was rooted in the lived historical experience of race and nature being interrelated burdens; the perils of rain, wind, and water exacerbating existing vulnerabilities of second-class citizenship. The 1927 flood represents a polysemy of both an engineered environmental ecology of vulnerability and a blues ideology of group expression, drawing attention to the multiple narratives that created a backwater flood. While many scholars have written about the blues in the context of the U.S. South and disasters, I bring a fresh approach by contextualizing not only the meaning of blues lyrics but also what the blues archives on the 1927 flood tell us about blues culture and technology. I also take seriously the point that the 1927 flood was a national event that influenced more than the 1928 Presidential Election and flood control policies. It also influenced ideas of charity, migration patterns, and labor rights activism.

“The same rebellion, the same impatience, the same anger that exists in the hearts of the dark people in Africa and Asia,” Malcolm X declared in a 1962 speech, “is existing in the hearts and minds of 20 million black people in this country who have been just as thoroughly colonized as the people in Africa and Asia.” Four decades later, the hip-hop artist Talib Kweli gave voice to a similar Pan-African sentiment in the song “K.O.S. (Determination)”: “The African diaspora represents strength in numbers, a giant can’t slumber forever.” Linking discontent and unrest in Harlem and Los Angeles to anticolonial revolution in Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere, Black leaders in the United States have frequently looked to the anti-imperialist movements and antiracist rhetoric of the Muslim Third World for inspiration. This book maps the rich, shared history between Black Muslims, Black radicals, and the Muslim Third World, showing how Black artists and activists imagined themselves not as national minorities but as part of a global majority, connected to larger communities of resistance. This book traces these interactions and alliances from the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power era to the “War on Terror,” placing them within a broader framework of American imperialism, Black identity, and the global nature of white oppression.

The spirometer is used routinely to diagnose respiratory disease in specialist and primary care settings, although most patients probably do not recognize the name of the device. An important feature of spirometry is that numerical values produced with the device are routinely “corrected” for race and sometimes ethnicity. The “correction” factors for race and/or ethnicity are embedded seamlessly in the software and hardware of the spirometer, such that operators are generally unaware of the details of the correction process activated when they use the machine. The basis of this practice dates to Civil War anthropometrists and plantation physicians who reported lower lung capacity in blacks as compared to whites. This book explores the production of scientific ideas about the “vital capacity” of the lungs and social ideas about racial and ethnic difference from the mid-nineteenth century to the present through the mediating mechanisms of the spirometer. For reasons that this book examines, a century and a half of research investigations have converged on the idea that people labeled black – and most other groups worldwide – differ in the capacity of their lungs from people historically labeled white/European/Caucasian. Explanations for difference varies but notions of innate/genetic difference continue to shape the biomedical literature on lung capacity. If anything, the advent of genomics has brought a reinvigoration of ideas of innate difference in current research. Race correction continues to the present day.

During the colonial period in Guyana, the country’s coastal lands were worked by enslaved Africans and indentured Indians. This book investigates how their descendants, collectively called Creoles, have remade themselves as Guyana’s new natives, displacing indigenous peoples in the Caribbean through an extension of colonial attitudes and policies. Looking particularly at the nation’s politically fraught decades from the 1950s to the present, the book explores aboriginal and Creole identities in Guyanese society. Through government documents, interviews, and political speeches, it reveals how Creoles, though unable to usurp the place of aboriginals as First Peoples in the New World, nonetheless managed to introduce a new, more socially viable definition of belonging, through labor. The very reason for bringing enslaved and indentured workers into Caribbean labor became the organizing principle for Creoles’ new identities. Creoles linked true belonging, and so political and material right, to having performed modern labor on the land; labor thus became the basis for their subaltern, settler modes of indigeneity—a contradiction for belonging under postcoloniality that this book terms “Creole indigeneity.”

While other scholars have demonstrated that the global marketplace is timeful and complex and not timeless and simple, my book is unique because I analyze how four academic groups-historians, economists, literary critics–and ecologist have responded to the failure of the prophecy of a new world. I am not aware of other scholarship that makes comparisons and contrasts among these four academic groups. I demonstrate that because of the long segregations of the physical sciences from the humanities and social science, historians, literary critics, and economists in the 1990s were not aware that the modem science of the Enlightenment that defined space as timeless had been replaced in the nineteenth century by the heretical sciences of geology, biology, and the physics of Einstein which defined space as timeful. Ecologists, who are aware of this revolution, have used the theory that nature is always timeful and complex to criticize the modem faith in a timeless, single global marketplace. I make a contribution by showing how the humanities have been moving toward the ecological critique of the modem metaphor of two worlds. They are seeing a single world that is timeful and complex.

Spanning the half-century after the Civil War, Degrees of Freedom draws a rare picture of black experience in a northern state and of the nature of black discontent and action within a predominantly white, ostensibly progressive society. William D. Green reveals little-known historical characters among the black men and women who moved to Minnesota following the Fifteenth Amendment; worked as farmhands and laborers; built communities (such as Pig’s Eye Landing, later renamed St. Paul), businesses, and a newspaper (the Western Appeal); and embodied the slow but inexorable advancement of race relations in the state over time. Within this absorbing, often surprising, narrative we meet “ordinary” citizens, like former slave and early settler Jim Thompson and black barbers catering to a white clientele, but also personages of national stature, such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, all of whom championed civil rights in Minnesota. And we see how, in a state where racial prejudice and oppression wore a liberal mask, black settlers and entrepreneurs, politicians, and activists maneuvered within a restricted political arena to bring about real and lasting change.

Digital State tells the long overdue history of Minnesota’s world famous computer industry. The book profiles each of the most notable Minnesota companies, beginning with the founding of the Engineering Research Associates (in St. Paul) in 1946. Univac was a local successor to ERA, while Control Data was a spinoff that became a billion dollar a year concern by the 1960s. Honeywell was the state’s largest private sector employer, and IBM Rochester was a prominent outpost of that global company. The book is based on archival records of ERA, Control Data, and Univac and draws extensively on 60-plus oral histories collected at the Charles Babbage Institute as well as interviews done by the author. The book’s two final chapters consider how Minnesota embraced the coming of the “information economy” with assessments of its changing workforce and activities of prominent institutions (such as the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, the University of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium). A unique firm-level dataset of nearly 250 Minnesota computer companies (1980-2011) anatomizes significant connections between the computing industry and today’s medical device industry. The “industrial district” concept used in the book meaningfully ties together the company case studies as well as has direct implications for the state’s economic development strategy. There is no other book that tells the history (1940s–today) of Minnesota’s computer industry and high tech economy.

This book examines Asian American cultural production and its challenge to the dominant understanding of American imperialism, Cold War dynamics, and race and gender formation. The book demonstrates the degree to which Asian American literature and film critique the record of U.S. imperial violence in Asia and provides a glimpse into the imperial and gendered racial logic of the Cold War. It unfolds this particularly entangled and enduring episode in the history of U.S. global hegemony—one that, contrary to leading interpretations of the Cold War as a simple bipolar rivalry, was significantly triangulated in Asia. The Asian American works analyzed here constitute a crucial body of what the book reveals as transnational ‘Cold War compositions,’ which are at once a geopolitical structuring, an ideological writing, and a cultural imagining. Arguing that these works reframe the U.S. Cold War as a project of gendered racial formation and imperialism as well as a production of knowledge, this book offers an interdisciplinary investigation into the transnational dimensions of Asian America and its critical relationship to Cold War history.

In the midst of vast cultural and political shifts in the early twentieth century, politicians and cultural observers variously hailed and decried the rise of the “New Negro.” This phenomenon was most clearly manifest in the United States through the outpouring of Black arts and letters and social commentary known as the Harlem Renaissance. What is less known is how far afield of Harlem that renaissance flourished—how much the New Negro movement was actually just one part of a collective explosion of political protest, cultural expression, and intellectual debate all over the world. In this volume, the Harlem Renaissance “escapes from New York” into its proper global context. The chapters here recover the broader New Negro experience as social movements, popular cultures, and public behavior spanned the globe from New York to New Orleans, from Paris to the Philippines and beyond. This book does not so much map the many sites of this early twentieth-century Black internationalism as it draws attention to how New Negroes and their global allies already lived. Resituating the Harlem Renaissance, the book stresses the need for scholarship to catch up with the historical reality of the New Negro experience.

Across nineteenth-century New England, antiquarians and community leaders wrote hundreds of local histories about the founding and growth of their cities and towns. Ranging from pamphlets to multivolume treatments, these narratives shared a preoccupation with establishing the region as the cradle of an Anglo-Saxon nation and the center of a modern American culture. They also insisted, often in mournful tones, that New England’s original inhabitants, the Indians, had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled. This book argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. Erasing and then memorializing Indian peoples also served a more pragmatic colonial goal: refuting Indian claims to land and rights. Drawing on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880, as well as censuses, monuments, and accounts of historical pageants and commemorations, the book explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness.

This book presents a full biography of a key figure in Minnesota’s past: Thomas Sadler Roberts (1858–1946), a doctor for three decades, a bird lover virtually from birth, the father of Minnesota ornithology, and the man who, perhaps more than any other, promoted the study of the state’s natural history. Roberts came to Minnesota as a boy and began keeping detailed accounts of Minneapolis’s birds. These journals, which became the basis for his landmark work The Birds of Minnesota, also inform this book, affording a view of the state’s rich avian life in its early days—and of a young man whose passion for birds and practice of medicine among Minneapolis’s elite eventually dovetailed in his launching of the beloved Bell Museum of Natural History. Bird enthusiast, doctor, author, curator, educator, conservationist: every chapter in Roberts’s life is also a chapter in the state’s history.

This book explores the origins and development of the North Woods vacation landscape and experience, demonstrating how tourism altered land, people, and institutions across northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. With roots dating back more than a century, it is a story of interest to historians, geographers, landscape architects, conservation professionals, policymakers, and the general public, particularly those who live, work, and vacation in the region. The market’s intrusion into the nineteenth century countryside established connections between urban and rural worlds that exploited natural resources, altered lives, and transformed the landscape. In the twentieth century this former hinterland developed as the North Woods, drawing on urban resources and offering a place where many escaped to enjoy rejuvenation outdoors in a reforested landscape. Improved transportation, promotion, declining lumber and mining industries, and recreational land use and conservation initiatives contributed to the emergence of a vacation destination. North Woods tourist advocates, like earlier lumbermen, viewed nature as something that yielded profit. But unlike the cut and run lumbermen, they relied on nature’s regenerative forces to provide a new cash crop, a forested and lake-dotted countryside offering outdoor recreation for the masses. While often dismissed as casual and unimportant, tourism tells us much about modern America. Vacations served as a transformative leisure experience, a site of work, an emblem of worker participation in consumer culture and as a factor in America’s changing workforce and landscape.

This book is a study of the contemporary cultural production of Portuguese-speaking Africa and its critical engagement with globalization in the aftermath of colonialism, especially since the advent of multiparty politics and market-oriented economies. Exploring the evolving relationship of Lusophone Africa with Portugal, its former colonial power, and Brazil, this book situates the countries on the geopolitical map of contemporary global forces. Drawing from popular music, film, literature, cultural history, geopolitics, and critical theory to investigate the postcolonial condition of Portuguese-speaking Africa, the book offers an entirely original discussion of world music phenomenon Cesária Évora, as well as the most thorough examination to date of Lusophone African cinema and of Angolan post-civil-war fiction. The book evokes the rich multidimensionality of this community of African nations as a whole and of its individual parts: Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique, and São TomÉ and Príncipe since they gained their independence in the mid-1970s. In doing so, he puts forth a conceptual framework for understanding, for the first time, recent cultural and historical developments in Portuguese-speaking Africa.

Mishuana Goeman provides feminist interventions into an analysis of colonial spatial restructuring of Native lands and bodies in the twentieth century. Through an examination of the ways that Native women's poetry and prose reveal settler colonialism in North America as an enduring form of gendered spatial violence, she continually ask how rigid spatial categories, such as nations, borders, reservations, and urban areas are formed by settler nation-states structuring of space. As Native people become mobile, reserv/ation land bases become overcrowded, and the state seeks to enforce means of containment and close its borders to incoming, often indigenous, immigrants, it is imperative to refocus Native nations efforts beyond replicating settler models of territory, jurisdiction, borders, and race. The authors imagining of such alternative to gendered and colonial spatial violence, territorial property logics, and uneven regimes of capitalist accumulation and dispossession have deep roots in narrative geographies, thus providing the basis for her Native feminist interventions. The book brings multiple fields into this complex conversation such as Native American Studies, Literary and Cultural Studies, Feminist and Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Geography, and American Studies. In (re)mapping colonial logics, Native people hold the power to rethink the way they engage with territory, relationships to each other and with other Native nations and settler nations. It is these stories that will lead the way as they have for generations.

Social upheaval, political gridlock, and controversies over taxes, the environment, and an unpopular war: the state of Minnesota in 1968 was a lot like the state of America today. This book’s account of the making of legislative history at the state level and relationships with federal and local governments has much to tell us about where we stand as a nation and how change happens. A firsthand look into the political and personal mysteries and realities that make real and significant differences in people’s lives, this book provides a civics lesson and legislative primer with a rare kick—it’s as rollicking as it is relevant. The book tells the stories behind changes made in legislative policies and programs during a critical decade, describing the key players, their emotions, the politics they employed, their electoral wins and losses, the impact of national politics when Walter Mondale was elected vice president, and the role of important court decisions. It was a time of partisanship, high emotions, violent protests, heated controversy, and outright political fights over issues that continue to haunt us; but it was also a time when government functioned well, in what Time Magazine called “A State That Works.”

Myths of the Rune Stone tells the story of how white Midwesterners created, adapted, and propagated a myth that Viking missionaries had visited their region and were “massacred” by local Indians prior to the explorations of Christopher Columbus. Popular enthusiasm for this story developed as a local expression of American exceptionalism that both affirmed and challenged status quo assumptions about the formation of the United States as a nation and what it means to be a “real American.” The narrative of a primordial, white, Christian sacrifice staked an exclusive claim to the landscape, shaped collective identities, and generated social power for groups that viewed themselves as “under attack.” In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, locals persisted in their belief in this Viking origin myth, using it advance their ethnic, racial, civic and religious goals. Although such myths are often thought to be the exclusive provenance of Scandinavian immigrants, Myths of the Rune Stone demonstrates their appeal to a diverse cross-section of residents, including Catholics and the descendants of Yankee pioneer settlers.

In the 150 years since the birth of the petroleum industry, oil has saturated our culture, fueling our cars and wars, our economy and policies. But just as thoroughly, culture saturates oil. So what exactly is “oil culture”? This book pursues an answer through petrocapitalism’s history in literature, film, fine art, wartime propaganda, and museum displays. Investigating cultural discourses that have taken shape around oil, the book composes the first sustained attempt to understand how petroleum has suffused the Western imagination. The chapters examine the oil culture nexus, beginning with the whale oil culture it replaced and analyzing literature and films such as Giant, Sundown, Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Via del Petrolio, and Ben Okri’s “What the Tapster Saw”; corporate art, museum installations, and contemporary photography; and apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster and science fiction. By considering oil as both a natural resource and a trope, the chapters show how oil’s dominance is part of culture rather than an economic or physical necessity.

Native identity is usually associated with a particular place. But what if that place is the ocean? This book explores this question as it considers how Māori and other Pacific peoples frame their connection to the ocean, to New Zealand, and to each other through various creative works. This book shows how and when Māori and other Pacific peoples articulate their ancestral history as migratory seafarers, drawing their identity not only from land but also from water. Although Māori are ethnically Polynesian, and Aotearoa New Zealand is clearly a part of the Pacific region, in New Zealand the terms “Māori” and “Pacific” are colloquially applied to two distinct communities: Māori are Indigenous, and “Pacific” refers to migrant communities from elsewhere in the region. Asking how this distinction might blur historical and contemporary connections, this book interrogates the relationship between indigeneity, migration, and diaspora, focusing on texts: poetry, fiction, theater, film, and music, viewed alongside historical instances of performance, journalism, and scholarship.

This collection of essays explores the complex interplay between disease as biological phenomenon, illness as a subjective experience, race as an ideological construct, and racism as a material practice. Ranging across time and space—from the interactions between white settlers and Native Americans in mid-nineteenth-century Puget Sound to physicians’ activism around hunger in the South and the Southwest in the 1960s—the contributions here collectively tell a complicated history of the relationship between medical knowledge, ideas of racial difference, health practices and power. Rather than reducing the heterogeneous histories of people of color and Western biomedicine to standard stories of medical racism or simple binaries of power and resistance, the essays highlight the contradictions and historical contingencies that mark the ways in which medical knowledge and public health policy work to racialize certain groups, on the one hand, and the ways in which racialized groups make demands on the health care profession or claims on the state to attend to their health needs, on the other. This collection of essays brings together for the first time in a single volume studies by scholars trained in the medical humanities and in the history of race and ethnicity, both fields which have grown considerably in the last two decades. Considered together, the essays provoke new ways of thinking about health and disease, race and citizenship in America.