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Biotic Borders
A rich and eye-opening history of the mutual constitution of race and species in modern America. In the late nineteenth century, increasing traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a "biological yellow peril" when nursery stock and other agricultural products shipped from Japan to meet the growing demand for exotics in the United States. Over the next fifty years, these crossings transformed conceptions of race and migration, played a central role in the establishment of the US empire and its government agencies, and shaped the fields of horticulture, invasion biology, entomology, and plant pathology. In Biotic Borders, Jeannie N. Shinozuka uncovers the emergence ...
The Coloniality of Animal Monstrous Othering in Children’s Books, Films, and Toys
The Coloniality of Animal Monstrous Othering in Children’s Books, Films, and Toys examines how the portrayal of animals as physically distorted, behaviorally depraved, and intellectually defective serves to justify their debasement, violation, and destruction in materials directed toward young consumers. The author argues that this animal monstrous Othering arises from the Eurocentric belief in humans’ natural superiority over animals and the right to categorize animals in accordance with a scale of worthiness that parallels the subjugation of racialized persons. The chapters examine a variety of canonical figures like the dissolute wolf of Red Riding Hood stories and the disfigured titular character of the Wonky Donkey picture book alongside non-canonical animals including reprobate pigs, degenerate sharks, self-centered flamingos, and wicked piranhas. To counter this animal debasement, Varga juxtaposes these readings with an examination of materials that articulate harmonious animal-human interrelationships without dependence on styles of anthropomorphism that diminish animality.
The Recursive Frontier
The Recursive Frontier is an innovative spatial history of both the literature of Los Angeles and the city itself in the mid-twentieth century. Setting canonical texts alongside underexamined works and sources such as census bulletins and regional planning documents, Michael Docherty identifies the American frontier as the defining dynamic of Los Angeles fiction from the 1930s to the 1950s. Contrary to the received wisdom that Depression-era narratives mourn the frontier's demise, Docherty argues that the frontier lives on as a cruel set of rules for survival in urban modernity, governing how texts figure race, space, mobility, and masculinity. Moving from dancehalls to offices to oil fields and beyond, the book provides a richer, more diverse picture of LA's literary production during this period, as well as a vivid account of LA's cultural and social development as it transformed into the multiethnic megalopolis we know today.
Viral World
This book argues that the catastrophe of COVID-19 provided a momentous time for groups, institutions, and states to reassess their worldviews and relationship to the entire world. Following multiple case studies across dozens of countries throughout the course of the pandemic, this book is a timely contribution to cultural knowledge about the pandemic and the viral politics at the heart of it. Mapping the various forms of global consciousness and connectivity engendered by the crisis, the book offers the framework of "viral worlding," defined as viral forms of relationality, becoming, and communication. It demonstrates how worlding or world-making processes accelerated with the novel coronav...
Botanical Imagination
Botanical Imagination explores the complicated legacy and enduring lure of plant life in modern Japanese literature and media. Using critical plant studies, Jon L. Pitt examines an unlikely group of writers and filmmakers in modern Japan, finding in their works a desire to "become botanical" in both content and form. For nearly one hundred years, a botanical imagination grew in response to moments of crisis in Japan's modern history. Pitt shows how artists were inspired to seek out botanical knowledge in order to construct new forms of subjectivity and attempt to resist certain forms of state violence. As he follows plants through the tangled histories of imperialism and state control, Pitt also uncovers the ways plants were used in the same violence that drove artists to turn to the botanical as a model of resistance in the first place. Botanical Imagination calls on us to rethink plants as significant but ambivalent actors and to turn to the botanical realm as a site of potentiality.
Human–Bug Encounters in Multispecies Networks
While providing a basis for all ecosystems, bugs such as insects and arachnids also destroy crops and indirectly kill humans and other animals by the millions. This book illuminates the many ways in which human lives affect and are affected by bugs as part of a wider network of species. 14 chapters reveal how knowledge, ideas, and emotions related to bugs are historically and culturally formed. With many bug populations in free fall, how can humans and bugs coexist? This book examines this question and offers a new ethics for this coexistence. Contributors are Michaela Fenske, Minna Santaoja, Concepción Cortés Zulueta, Heidi Mikkola, Laura Hollsten, Sophie FitzMaurice, Otto Latva, Marianne Mäkelin, Taina Syrjämaa, Suvi Rytty, Sanna Lillbroända-Annala, Emily Webster, Karine Aasgaard Jansen, Heta Lähdesmäki, and Tuomas Räsänen.
Interpreting Science at Museums and Historic Sites
Ask not what science can do for you, but what public history can do for science! Interpreting Science in Museums and Historic Sites stresses the untapped potential of historical artifacts to inform our understanding of scientific topics. It argues that science gains ground when contextualized in museums and historic sites. Engaging audiences in conversations about hot topics such as health and medical sciences or climate change and responses to it, mediated by a history museum, can emphasize scientific rigor and the time lag between discovery and confirmation of societal benefit. Interpreting Science emphasizes the urgency of this work, provides a toolkit to start and sustain the work, shares case studies that model best practice, and resources useful to facilitate and sustain a science-infused public history.
Intellectual Property and the Design of Nature
Intellectual property law has been interacting with nature for over two centuries. Despite this long history, this relationship has largely been ignored. Intellectual Property and the Design of Nature fills this gap by bringing together scholars from different disciplines to examine the important role that nature plays in intellectual property law. Based on the idea that many contemporary issues require a better understanding of these historical interactions, the book reflects on the ways intellectual property law has engaged with and understood nature in the past. The varied contributions show how the relationship between nature and intellectual property law is often more complex, permeable, and porous than is commonly recognized. Intellectual Property and the Design of Nature demonstrates the complex and changing role that nature has played in the history of intellectual property law. Each of the chapters casts a new light on these connections. A compelling read for everyone interested in exploring new perspectives in the field of intellectual property.
Existential Threats
Americans have long been enthralled by visions of the apocalypse. Will the world end through nuclear war, environmental degradation, and declining biodiversity? Or, perhaps, through the second coming of Christ, rapture of the faithful, and arrival of the Antichrist—a set of beliefs known as dispensationalist premillennialism? These seemingly competing apocalyptic fantasies are not as dissimilar as we might think. In fact, Lisa Vox argues, although these secular and religious visions of the end of the world developed independently, they have converged to create the landscape of our current apocalyptic imagination. In Existential Threats, Vox assembles a wide range of media—science fiction...
