University of Minnesota Press University of Minnesota Press

Antoine Volodine is the primary pseudonym of a French-Russian writer of many books. The meditative, postapocalyptic noir Mevlido’s Dreams, translated by Gina M. Stamm, is an urgent communiqué from a far-future reality of irreversible environmental damage and civilizational collapse that asks what it means to love and care for others at the end of the world. Here, Stamm is joined in conversation with Joshua Armstrong about translating this key work in Volodine’s post-exotic fictional universe.
Gina M. Stamm is assistant professor of French at the University of Alabama.

Joshua Armstrong is associate professor of French at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Mevlido’s Dreams: A Post-Exotic Novel is available from University of Minnesota Press.

“Translator Stamm does an admirable job of rendering Volodine’s serpentine prose in English, and the noirish, surrealist story turns into an unlikely romp as it riffs on the absurdity of 20th-century political institutions and pop culture.” —Publishers Weekly
“Certainly the strangest and arguably one of the most accomplished contemporary writers of fiction in French, Antoine Volodine has created a vast and perplexing universe of bad dreams in several dozen works under a variety of pseudonyms over the past forty years. Mevlido’s Dreams provides a new pathway into Volodine’s labyrinth, which for all the horrors it recounts is always cast in stylishly crafted prose.” —David Bellos, Princeton University

Joanna Brooks’s ancestors were among the early waves of emigrants to leave England for North America. Her book Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants reveals the violence and dislocation that propelled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration, and follows American folk ballads back across the Atlantic to find histories of economic displacement, environmental destruction, and social betrayal at the heart of the early Anglo-American migrant experience. A tenth-anniversary edition of the book has just been released, which includes a new preface and develops a haunting historical perspective on the ancestors we thought we knew. Here, Brooks is joined by Desmond Hassing in conversation.
Joanna Brooks is an award-winning scholar and writer whose work tends to catastrophes of human belonging in American history. The author or editor of ten books on race, religion, colonialism, and social movements, her writing has been featured in the BBC, NPR, the Daily Show, CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post.

An enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and a San Diego native, Dr. Desmond Hassing is a conceptual artist, scholar, and activist who focuses on educating Western subjects on the intentionally disremembered subject of the Indigenous Peoples of North America. Hassing is founder of the Indigenous Peoples Reading Room, a planned open-access scholarship archive, and creator of The National Indian Project, an annotated bibliography of Native American, First Nations, and Pacific Islander representations in DC/National comic books of the same period. Hassing is lecturer in the Department of American Indian Studies at San Diego State University.

Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants is available from University of Minnesota Press.
“A surprising, bold, and altogether brilliant contribution to our understanding of why people crossed the Atlantic to live in a strange new world.”—Marcus Rediker

Everything Is Police is a new book by Tia Trafford, who argues that institutional and interpersonal policing have been central to colonial modernity, the result of which is a situation where we cannot practically experience or even imagine worlds free from policing. Trafford is joined here in conversation with Melayna Lamb.

Tia Trafford is reader in philosophy and design at University for the Creative Arts in London. They are author of Everything Is Police and The Empire at Home, and coeditor of Alien Vectors.

Melayna Lamb is lecturer at the University of Law, UK, and author of A Philosophical History of Police Power.
EPISODE REFERENCES:
Frank B. Wilderson III
Rinaldo Walcott
The Empire at Home / Tia Trafford
Jared Sexton
Tapji Garba
Sylvia Wynter
Frantz Fanon
Sara-Maria Sorentino
Saidiya Hartman
David Marriott
Biko Mandela Gray
Sylvia Wynter
Sara-Maria Sorentino
Mute Compulsion / Søren Mau
Immanuel Kant
William Wimsatt on generative entrenchment
Red, White & Black / Frank B. Wilderson III
The First Black Slave Society / Hilary Beckles
Sean Capener
Paul Gilroy
Stuart Hall
John Locke
Slavery is a Metaphor / essay by Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino, published in Antipode
Taija McDougall
Petero Kalulé
Everything Is Police is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

EL Putnam’s new book Livestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter considers how livestreaming constitutes new patterns of being together that are complex, ambivalent, and transformative. Digging into how humans and technology co-evolve, Putnam and Noel Fitzpatrick engage in conversation about relation and hyper-individualism, glitch and switchtasking, activism and hidden labor and performance and more.
EL Putnam is an artist-philosopher and assistant professor of digital media at Maynooth University, Ireland. Putnam is author of Livestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter in the University of Minnesota Press Forerunners series and The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption.

Noel Fitzpatrick is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics and the Academic Lead of the European Culture and Technology Laboratory at the Technological University Dublin.
Episode references:
Gilbert Simondon
Bernard Stiegler
Yuk Hui 
Hegel
Kant
Jackson Pollock
Heidegger
Paul Ricoeur
Ayana Evans
Ana Voog
N. Katherine Hayles
Miriam Wolf
Diamond Reynolds and the livestream of Philando Castile’s murder
Safiya Umoja Noble
Christina Sharpe
Saidiya Hartman
Tonia Sutherland
Jacques Rancière
Simone Browne
Èdouard Glissant
Susan Sontag
Sara Ahmed
H. P. Grice
Related works:
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects / Simondon
On the Existence of Digital Objects / Hui
Art and Cosmotechnics / Hui
Oneself as Another / Ricoeur
Memory, History, Forgetting / Ricoeur
Resurrecting the Black Body / Sutherland
Dark Matters / Browne
Regarding the Pain of Others / Sontag
Livestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

Educators who underestimate children’s knowledge about citizenship and immigration status can marginalize or misunderstand these students and their families. In Knowing Silence: How Children Talk about Immigration Status in School, author Ariana Mangual Figueroa models new ways scholars might collaborate with educators, children, and families—and makes audible the experiences of immigrant-origin students in their own terms, ultimately offering teachers and researchers a crucial framework for understanding citizenship in the contemporary classroom. Here, the author is joined in conversation with collaborators Dra. Aurora Chang, Claudia Rolando, and Lumari Sosa Garzón.
Ariana Mangual Figueroa is author of Knowing Silence and associate professor of urban education and Latin American, Iberian, and Latino cultures at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She is a co-principal investigator at the CUNY Initiative on Immigration and Education (CUNY IIE).

Dra. Aurora Chang is associate professor of higher education at Loyola University and incoming Director of Faculty Development and Career Advancement at George Mason University. Chang is founder of Academic Life Simplified.

Claudia Rolando is a graduate of Brooklyn College and an educator in New York.

Lumari Sosa Garzón is a Mexican student in the Macaulay Honors program with a TheDream.US scholarship at Brooklyn College, majoring in psychology and minoring in anthropology. Lumari is a co-author of the Afterword appearing in Knowing Silence.

Episode references:
-Published research of Michael Fix and Wendy Zimmerman (“All under One Roof: Mixed-Status Families in an Era of Reform,” International Migration Review)
-The Struggles of Identity, Education, and Agency in the Lives of Undocumented Students (Dra. Aurora Chang)
-The Undocumented Americans (Karla Cornejo Villavicencio)
-The New York State Youth Leadership Council
-Lives in Limbo (Roberto G. Gonzales)
-concept of Community Cultural Wealth / Dr. Tara Yosso
-Plyler v. Doe, Supreme Court decision, 1982
-The New School’s Parsons Scholars Program

Recommended reference:
-Areli is a Dreamer / Areli Morales
Knowing Silence: How Children Talk about Immigration Status in School is available from University of Minnesota Press.

"No words can express all that I think and feel about this beautiful, brilliant book. Narrated innovatively and with the utmost of care, with rich analyses of language data and thought-provoking insights drawn from a longitudinal and intimate ethnographic research relationship, Knowing Silence will surely make you think, wonder, laugh, cry—and see and hear young people who are growing up in contexts of immigration in new ways."—Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, UCLA
"Using child-centered methodologies, Ariana Mangual Figueroa unveils the critical yet often invisible aspects of students' lives and highlights unintended chilling effects of school practices. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this is an important and compelling contribution to the field."—Carola Suárez-Orozco, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Estado Vegetal is Manuela Infante’s riveting experimental performance art through which plants are charged with an agency capable of uprooting culturally grounded conceptions of the world. The book Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking, edited by Giovanni Aloi, is the first book dedicated to this performance and features essays from scholars and artists, including a fictional continuation of Infante’s work by Mandy-Suzanne Wong. Here, Infante and Wong join Art after Nature series editors Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard in conversation.
Manuela Infante is a Chilean playwright, director, screenwriter, and musician who creates her own performances and tours in America, Europe, and Asia. Her works include Estado Vegetal and Metamorphosis. 

Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. She is an award-winning author whose books include The Box and Drafts of a Suicide Note.

Giovanni Aloi teaches art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is author or editor of many books on the nonhuman and art.

Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and founder of the Green Lantern Press.
A performance of Manuela Infante’s Estado Vegetal (Vegetative State), performed by Marcela Salinas, is available to watch on YouTube.
Art after Nature is a series edited by Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard that explores epistemological questions that emerge from the expanding, environmental consciousness of the humanities.
Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking is available from University of Minnesota Press and includes pieces by Maaike Bleeker, Lucy Cotter, Prudence Gibson, Michael Marder, Dawn Sanders, Catriona Sandilands, Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem, and Mandy-Suzanne Wong.

Episode references:
The Conquest of America / Tzvetan Todorov
Capitalist Realism / Mark Fisher
Horizon / Manuela Infante