Forerunners
Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship. Out of Breath
Vulnerability of Air in Contemporary Art Caterina Albano Examines the cultural significance of breath and air to a wide array of forces in our midst, including economy, poli�cs, infec�on, and ecological violence. Through a considera�on of recent art prac�ces and projects, including the dance project Breath Catalogue, which makes visible the breathing pa�erns of dancers, and Forensic Architecture’s Cloud Studies video, which inves�gates eight different kinds of clouds from airstrikes to herbicides to tear gas, Albano focuses on breath as both an intui�ve process and a conveyer of meanings. Conceived in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and systemic inequali�es that it has laid bare, Out of Breath shows the poten�al of ar�s�c prac�ces to mobilize affect as a form of cultural and poli�cal cri�que.
University of Minnesota Press March 2022 96pp 9781517913557 £8.00 PB
Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now Grant Farred
Star�ng with the refusal of George Hill of the Milwaukee Bucks to par�cipate in an August 2020 playoff game following the shoo�ng of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Grant Farred shows how the Covid-restricted NBA “bubble” released an energy that spurred athletes into radical ac�on. They disrupted athle�c normalcy, and in their grief and rage against American racism they demonstrated the true progressivism lacking in even the most reformist-minded poli�cians and pundits. Farred goes on to trace the radicalism of black athletes in a number of sports, including the WNBA, women’s tennis, the NFL, and NASCAR, loca�ng contemporary athletes in a lineage that runs through Muhammad Ali as well as Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics. Uses sport as a point of departure to argue that the dystopic crisis of our current moment offers a singular opportunity to reimagine how we live in the world.
University of Minnesota Press February 2022 130pp 9781517913373 £8.00 PB
The World Is Gone
Philosophy in Light of the Pandemic Gregg Lambert Part personal memoir, part philosophical reflec�on and wri�en in the midst of the pandemic in 2021, The World Is Gone employs the Robinson Crusoe fable to launch an existen�al inves�ga�on of the effects of extreme isola�on, profound boredom, nightly insomnia, and the fear of madness associated with the loss of a world populated by others.
University of Minnesota Press February 2022 114pp 9781517913380 £8.00 PB
Safety Orange
Anna Watkins Fisher Safety Orange first emerged in the 1950s as a bureaucra�c color standard in technical manuals and federal regula�ons in the United States. Today it is most visible in the contexts of terror, pandemic, and environmental alarm systems; traffic control; work safety; and mass incarcera�on. In recent decades, the color has become ubiquitous in American public life—a marker of the extreme poles of state oversight and abandonment, of capitalist excess and derelic�on. Its unprecedented satura�on encodes the tracking of those bodies, neighborhoods, and infrastructures judged as worthy of care—and those deemed dangerous and expendable. Here, Anna Watkins Fisher uses Safety Orange as an interpre�ve key for theorizing the uneven distribu�on of safety and care in twenty-firstcentury U.S. public life and for pondering what the color tells us about neoliberalism’s intensifying impact o�en hiding in plain sight in ordinary and commonplace phenomena.
University of Minnesota Press January 2022 98pp 9781517913397 £8.00 PB
Young-Girls in Echoland
#Theorizing Tiqqun Andrea Jonsson & Heather WarrenCrow Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl is a controversial work of an�capitalist philosophy that has a�racted musicians, playwrights, feminist theorists, and men's-rights ac�vists since its publica�on in 1999. More than twenty years a�er its publica�on the interna�onal reverbera�on of Young-Girls shows no signs of weakening. This book is a guide to this ongoing postdigital conversa�on, engaging with artworks and textual cri�cism provoked by Tiqqun’s audacious, arguably misogynis�c textual voice. Shows how Tiqqun’s polarizing figure has grown and matured but also stayed unapologe�cally girly in the works of ar�sts and scholars discussed here. Rethinking the myth of Echo and Narcissus by performing a different kind of listening, they take us on a journey from VSCO girls to basic bitches to vampires. Offers a model for analyzing the call-andresponse of pop philosophy and for hearing the affec�ve rhythms of communica�ve capitalism.
University of Minnesota Press December 2021 126pp 9781517913021 £8.00 PB
Calamity Theory
Three Critiques of Existential Risk Joshua Schuster & Derek Woods A new philosophical field has emerged. “Existen�al risk” studies any real or hypothe�cal human ex�nc�on event in the near or distant future. This movement examines catastrophes ranging from runaway global warming to nuclear warfare to malevolent ar�ficial intelligence, deploying a curious mix of u�litarian ethics, sta�s�cal risk analysis, and, controversially, a transhuman advocacy that would aim to supersede almost all ex�nc�on scenarios. The proponents of existen�al risk thinking, led by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, have seen their work gain immense popularity, a�rac�ng endorsement from Bill Gates and Elon Musk, millions of dollars, and millions of views. Calamity Theory is the first book to examine the rise of this thinking and its failures to acknowledge the ways some communi�es and lifeways are more at risk than others and what it implies about human ex�nc�on.
University of Minnesota Press November 2021 136pp 9781517912918 £8.00 PB
The Global Shelter Imaginary
Virtue Hoarders
From the IKEA Founda�on’s Be�er Shelter to Airbnb’s Open Homes program, the consumer economy has engaged the global refugee crisis with seemingly new tac�cs that normalize an ins�tu�onally sanc�oned poli�cs of evasion. Exploring “the global shelter imaginary,” this book charts the ways shelter func�ons as a form of rightless relief that expels recogni�on of the rights of the displaced and advances poli�cal paradoxes of displacement itself.
Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performa�ve iden�ty and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social jus�ce and economic redistribu�on by promo�ng meritocracy, philanthropy, and other selfserving opera�ons to abet an individualist path to a be�er world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologe�cally polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consump�on habits. University of Minnesota Press
Ikea Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief Andrew Herscher & Daniel Bertrand Monk
University of Minnesota Press September 2021 96pp 9781517912222 £8.00 PB
The Case against the Professional Managerial Class Catherine Liu
Series: Forerunners: Ideas First January 2021 90pp 9781517912253 £8.00 PB
The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender
Grounded
A deep medita�on on and expansion of the figure of the Negro and insurrec�onary effects of the “X" as theorized by Nahum Chandler, The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender thinks through the problema�zing effects of blackness as, too, a problema�zing of gender. Through the paraontological, the between, and the figure of the “X" (with its explicit contemporary link to nonbinary and trans genders) Marquis Bey presents a medita�on on black feminism and gender nonnorma�vity. Chandler's text serves as both an argumenta�ve tool for rendering the “radical alterna�ve" in and as blackness as well as demonstra�ng the necessarily trans/gendered valences of that radical alterna�ve.
Considers the �me leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing global plummet in commercial flight. Mobility studies scholar Christopher Schaberg tours the newly opened airport terminal outside of New Orleans (MSY) in late 2019, and goes on to survey the broad cultural landscape of empty airports and grounded planes in the early months of the novel coronavirus’s spread in 2020. The book culminates in a reflec�on on the future of air travel: what may unfold, and what parts of commercial flight are almost certainly relics of the past. Grounded blends journalis�c reportage with cultural theory and philosophical inquiry in order to offer graspable insights as well as a s�nging cri�que of contemporary air travel.
Marquis Bey
University of Minnesota Press December 2020 96pp 9781517911959 £8.00 PB
Perpetual Flight . . . and Then the Pandemic Christopher Schaberg
University of Minnesota Press December 2020 92pp 9781517912024 £8.00 PB
Cruelty as Citizenship
Trans Care
More than a decade before the elec�on of Donald Trump, vitriolic and dehumanizing rhetoric against migrants was already part of the na�onal conversa�on. Situa�ng the contemporary debate on immigra�on within America's history of indigenous dispossession, cha�el slavery, the Mexican-American War, and Jim Crow, Cris�na Beltrán reveals white supremacy to be white democracy—a par�cipatory prac�ce of racial violence, domina�on, and exclusion that gave white ci�zens the right to both wield and exceed the law. S�ll, Beltrán sees cause for hope in growing movements for migrant and racial jus�ce.
What does it mean for trans people to show up for one another, to care deeply for one another? How have failures of care shaped trans lives? What care prac�ces have trans subjects and communi�es cul�vated in the wake of widespread transphobia and systemic forms of trans exclusion? Trans Care is a cri�cal interven�on in how care labor and care ethics have been thought, arguing that dominant modes of conceiving and cri�quing the poli�cs and distribu�on of care entrench norma�ve and cis-centric familial structures and gendered arrangements. A serious considera�on of trans survival and flourishing requires a radical rethinking of how care operates. University of Minnesota Press
How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy Cristina Beltrán
University of Minnesota Press October 2020 136pp 9781517911928 £8.00 PB
Hil Malatino
September 2020 72pp 9781517911188 £8.00 PB
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Kill the Overseer!
Wageless Life
Profiles and problema�zes digital games that depict Atlan�c slavery and “gamify” slave resistance. In videogames emphasizing planta�on labor, the player may choose to commit small acts of resistance like tool-breaking or working slowly. Others drama�cally stage the slave’s choice to flee enslavement and journey northward, and some depict outright violent revolt against the master and his apparatus. In this work, Sarah Juliet Lauro ques�ons whether the reduc�on of a historical enslaved person to a digital commodity in games such as Mission US, Assassin’s Creed, and Freedom Cry ought to trouble us as a further commodifica�on of slavery’s vic�ms, or whether these interac�ve experiences offer an empowering commemora�on of the history of slave resistance.
To live in this world is to be condi�oned by capital. Once paired with Western democracy, unfe�ered capitalism has led to a shrinking economic system that squeezes out billions of people—crea�ng a planet of surplus popula�ons. Wageless Life is a manifesto for building a future beyond the toxic failures of late-stage capitalism. Daring to imagine new social rela�ons, new modes of economic existence, and new collec�ve worlds, the authors provide skills and tools for perceiving—and living in— a post-capitalist future.
The Gamification of Slave Resistance Sarah Juliet Lauro
A Manifesto for a Future beyond Capitalism Ian G. R. Shaw & Marv Waterstone
University of Minnesota Press December 2019 142pp 9781517909260 £8.00 PB
University of Minnesota Press August 2020 100pp 9781517911003 £8.00 PB
How to Do Things with Sensors Jennifer Gabrys
Sensors are increasingly common within ci�zensensing and DIY projects, but these devices o�en require the use of a how-to guide. From online instruc�onal videos for troubleshoo�ng sensor installa�ons to handbooks for using and abusing the Internet of Things, the how-to genres and formats of digital instruc�on con�nue to expand and develop. As the how-to proliferates, and instruc�ons unfold through mul�ple aspects of technoscien�fic prac�ces, Jennifer Gabrys asks why the how-to has become one of the prevailing genres of the digital. How to Do Things with Sensors explores the ways in which things are made do-able with and through sensors and further considers how worlds are made sense-able and ac�onable through the instruc�onal mode of ci�zen-sensing projects.
University of Minnesota Press August 2019 106pp 9781517908317 £8.00 PB
Theory for the World to Come Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer
The future has become increasingly difficult to imagine. We might be able to predict a few events, but imagining how looming disasters will coincide is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Drawing on specula�ve fic�on and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversa�on about theories that move beyond nihilis�c concep�ons of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward genera�ve bodies of thought that provoke crea�ve ways of thinking about the world ahead. Ma�hew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on such authors as Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, and engages with afrofuturism, indigenous specula�ve fic�on, and films from the 1970s and ’80s to help think differently about the future and its possibili�es. University of Minnesota Press April 2019 116pp 9781517907808 £8.00 PB
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
The End of Man
No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None examines how the grammar of geology is founda�onal to establishing the extrac�ve economies of subjec�ve life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. Yusoff ini�ates a transdisciplinary conversa�on between feminist black theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the poli�cs of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep �me, and the a�erlives of geology. University of Minnesota Press
Where the Anthropocene has become linked to an apocalyp�c narra�ve, and where this narra�ve carries a widespread escapist belief that salva�on will come from a supernatural elsewhere, Joanna Zylinska has a different take. The End of Man rethinks the prophecy of the end of humans, interroga�ng the rise in populism around the world and offering an ethical vision of a “feminist counterapocalypse,” which challenges many of the masculinist and technicist solu�ons to our planetary crises. The book is accompanied by a short photo-film, Exit Man, which ul�mately asks: If unbridled progress is no longer an op�on, what kinds of coexistences and collabora�ons do we create in its a�ermath?
Kathryn Yusoff
November 2018 130pp 9781517907532 £8.00 PB
A Feminist Counterapocalypse Joanna Zylinska
University of Minnesota Press March 2018 78pp 9781517905590 £8.00 PB
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A Third University Is Possible la paperson
A Third University is Possible unravels the in�mate rela�onship between the more than 200 US land grant ins�tu�ons, American se�ler colonialism, and contemporary university expansion. Author la paperson cracks open uncanny connec�ons between Indian boarding schools, Black educa�on, and missionary schools in Kenya; and between the Department of Homeland Security and the University of California. Central to la paperson’s discussion is the “scyborg,” a decolonizing agent of technological subversion. Drawing parallels to Third Cinema and Black filmmaking assemblages, A Third University is Possible ul�mately presents new ways of using language to develop a framework for hotwiring university “machines” to the prac�cal work of decoloniza�on.
University of Minnesota Press
The Politics of Bitcoin
Software as Right-Wing Extremism David Golumbia Since its introduc�on in 2009, Bitcoin has been widely promoted as a digital currency that will revolu�onize everything from online commerce to the na�on-state. Yet supporters of Bitcoin and its blockchain technology subscribe to a form of cyberlibertarianism that depends to a surprising extent on far-right poli�cal thought. The Poli�cs of Bitcoin exposes how much of the economic and poli�cal thought on which this cryptocurrency is based emerges from ideas that travel the gamut, from Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises to Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists.
University of Minnesota Press September 2016 100pp 9781517901806 £8.00 PB
June 2017 100pp 9781517902087 £8.00 PB
Dark Deleuze
Deep Mapping the Media City
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is known as a thinker of crea�on, joyous affirma�on, and rhizoma�c assemblages. In this short book, Andrew Culp polemically argues that this once-radical canon of joy has lost its resistance to the present. Concepts created to defeat capitalism have been recycled into business mantras that joyously affirm “Power is ver�cal; poten�al is horizontal!” Culp recovers the Deleuze’s forgo�en nega�vity. He unse�les the prevailing interpreta�on through an underground network of references to conspiracy, cruelty, the terror of the outside, and the shame of being human. Ul�mately, he rekindles opposi�on to what is intolerable about this world.
Going beyond current scholarship on the “media city” and the “smart city,” Shannon Ma�ern argues that our global ci�es have been mediated and intelligent for millennia. Deep Mapping the Media City advocates for urban media archaeology, a mul�sensory approach to inves�ga�ng the material history of networked ci�es. Ma�ern explores the material assemblages and infrastructures that have shaped the media city by taking archaeology literally—using techniques like excava�on and mapping to discover the modern city’s roots in �me.
Andrew Culp
University of Minnesota Press
Shannon Mattern
University of Minnesota Press March 2015 28 b&w illustra�ons 70pp 9780816698516 £8.00 PB
June 2016 90pp 9781517901332 £8.00 PB
No Speed Limit
Three Essays on Accelerationism Steven Shaviro Accelera�onism is the bastard offspring of a fur�ve liaison between Marxism and science fic�on. Its basic premise is that the only way out is the way through: to get beyond capitalism, we need to push its technologies to the point where they explode. This may be dubious as a poli�cal strategy, but it works as a powerful ar�s�c program. Other authors have debated the pros and cons of accelera�onist poli�cs; No Speed Limit makes the case for an accelera�onist aesthe�cs. Our present moment is illuminated, both for good and for ill, in the cracked mirror of science-fic�onal futurity.
University of Minnesota Press January 2015 60pp 9780816697670 £8.00 PB
The Anthrobscene Jussi Parikka
Smartphones, laptops, tablets, and e-readers all at one �me held the promise of a more environmentally healthy world not dependent on paper and deforesta�on. The result of our ubiquitous digital lives is, as we see in The Anthrobscene, actually quite the opposite: not ecological health but an environmental wasteland, where media never die. Jussi Parikka cri�ques corporate and human desires as a geophysical force, analyzing the material side of the earth as essen�al for the existence of media and introducing the no�on of an alterna�ve deep �me in which media live on in the layer of toxic waste we will leave behind as our geological legacy. University of Minnesota Press October 2014 60pp 9780816696079 £8.00 PB
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