Books published by Michigan State University Press

Malcolm X's Michigan Worldview presents Malcolm's subject as an iconography used to deepen understanding of African descendent peoples' experiences through advanced research and disciplinary study.

A marvelous, moving new collection of poems, Requiem, Rwanda has its roots in 2006, when Laura Apol made her first trip to Rwanda. Apol's initial goal was to develop, in conjunction with Rwandan and American colleagues, a project using narrative writing to facilitate healing among young survivors of the 1994 genocide. During the time she spent leading workshops, Apol felt moved to write her own poems, and after the writing-for-healing project ended, she returned to Rwanda several times to continue her creative work. The legacy of the genocide-on the people, on the land itself-makes its presence felt in many of the poems. The poems are also accounts of Apol's relationships with and understandings of people post-genocide-where their stories go, how they reenter their lives, and how a country that has been deeply wounded by its history continues on. These poems don't shy away from exploring the complications of being a white woman, a Westerner, and a witness in this setting: Apol relates her sense of compassion, privilege, horror, guilt, voyeurism, obligation, and love. This new collection is a rich testimonial to the strength of a nation and its people. The collection includes a closing essay, "e;Writer as a Witness."e;

Christian Fundamentalism is a doctrine and a discourse in tension. Fundamentalists describe themselves as both marginal and a majority. They announce the imminent end of the world while building massive megachurches and political lobbying organizations. They speak of the need for purity and separation from the outside world while continually innovating in their search for more effective and persuasive ways to communicate with and convert outsiders. To many outsiders, Fundamentalist speech seems contradictory, irrational, intolerant, and dangerously antidemocratic. To understand the complexity of Fundamentalism, we have to look inside the tensions and the paradoxes. We have to take seriously the ways in which Fundamentalists describe themselves to themselves, and to do that, we must begin by exploring the central role of "e;the church"e; in Fundamentalist rhetoric and politics. Drawing on five fascinating case studies, Superchurch blends a complex yet readable treatment of rhetorical and political theory with a sophisticated approach to Fundamentalism that neither dismisses its appeal nor glosses over its irresolvable tensions. Edwards challenges theories of rhetoric, counterpublics, deliberation, and civility while offering critical new insights into the evolution and continuing influence of one of the most significant cultural and political movements of the past century.

comic masterpiece of medieval French literature, Aucassin and Nicolette is categorized by its anonymous author as a "chantefable", or "song-story", and is the only known work of this kind. This edition includes the thirteenth-century French text and a modern English translation on facing pages.

These original essays, many of which have been translated especially for this volume, draw on anthropology, ethology, geography, history, legal studies, phenomenology, and philosophy to interrogate human-animal relationships.

These recently transcribed and translated stories, first recorded in the 1940s by the Anishinaabe-speaking peoples of the Harbor Springs area of Michigan, draw on the legends, fables, trickster stories, parables, and humor of Anishinaabe culture. Reaching back to the distant past but also delving into more recent events, this book represents a broad swath of Anishinaabe history. Featuring side-by-side Anishinaabe/English translations.

This book asks: How far do cultural mechanisms of controlling violence, which allowed humankind to cross the threshold of hominization - i.e., to survive and develop in its evolutionary emergence - still represent today a default setting that threatens to destroy us? Can we transcend them and escape their field of gravity? Should we look to - or should we look beyond - Darwinian survival?

The culmination of three decades of work by Michigan Natural Features Inventory ecologists, this essential guidebook to the natural communities of Michigan introduces the diverse terrain of a unique state. Small enough to carry in a backpack, this field guide provides a system for dividing the complex natural landscape of Michigan into easily understood and describable components called natural communities. Providing a new way to explore Michigan's many environments, this book details natural communities ranging from patterned fen to volcanic bedrock glade and beyond. The descriptions are supplemented with distribution maps, vibrant photographs, and comprehensive lists of characteristic plant species. The authors suggest places to visit to further study each type of natural community and provide a comprehensive glossary of ecological terms, as well as a dichotomous key for aiding field identification. An invaluable resource, this book is meant to serve as a tool for those seeking to understand, describe, document, conserve, and restore the diversity of natural communities native to Michigan.

This book is the first to examine the intersection of black activism and the migration of Caribbeans and Africans to Paris during the post-World War II period.

Brian McInnes provides a new perspective on Pegahmagabow and his experience through a unique synthesis of Ojibwe oral history, historical record, and Pegahmagabow family stories.

Introducing the central insights of one of the most innovative and prolific rhetoricians of the 20th century, Michael Leff. This volume charts Leff 's development as a scholar, revealing both the variety of topics and the approach that marked his oeuvre, as well as his long-standing critique of the disciplinary assumptions of classical, Hellenistic, renaissance, modern, and postmodern rhetoric.

Joining disciplinary worlds, this book explores this ambitious claim, invoking viewpoints as diverse as evolutionary culture theory, cultural anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, ethology, and philosophy.

This timely book brings together activist scholars from a number of disciplines (political science, geography, sociology, anthropology, and communications) to provide new insights into a growing trend in publicly engaged research and scholarship.

In this fascinating book, Terry O'Connor explores a distinction that is deeply ingrained in much of the language that we use in zoology, human-animal studies, and archaeology-the difference between wild and domestic. O'Connor investigates the history of this relationship, working back through archaeological records.

In this lively series of conversations with writer Michel Treguer, Rene Girard revisits the major concepts of mimetic theory and explores science, democracy, and the nature of God and freedom. Girard affirms that "e;our unprecedented present is incomprehensible without Christianity."e; Globalization has unified the world, yet civil war and terrorism persist despite free trade and economic growth. Because of mimetic desire and the rivalry it generates, asserts Girard, "e;whether we're talking about marriage, friendship, professional relationships, issues with neighbors or matters of national unity, human relations are always under threat."e; Literary masters including Marivaux, Dostoevsky, and Joyce understood this, as did archaic religion, which warded off violence with blood sacrifice. Christianity brought a new understanding of sacrifice, giving rise not only to modern rationality and science but also to a fragile system that is, in Girard's words, "e;always teetering between a new golden age and a destructive apocalypse."e; Treguer, a skeptic of mimetic theory, wonders: "e;Is what he's telling me true...or is it just a nice story, a way of looking at things?"e; In response, Girard makes a compelling case for his theory.

Drawing on the latest research in archaeozoology, archaeology, and molecular biology, Animals as Domesticates traces the history of the domestication of animals around the world. From the llamas of South America and the turkeys of North America, to the cattle of India and the Australian dingo, this fascinating book explores the history of the complex relationships between humans and their domestic animals. With expert insight into the biological and cultural processes of domestication, Clutton-Brock suggests how the human instinct for nurturing may have transformed relationships between predator and prey, and she explains how animals have become companions, livestock, and laborers. The changing face of domestication is traced from the spread of the earliest livestock around the Neolithic Old World through ancient Egypt, the Greek and Roman empires, South East Asia, and up to the modern industrial age.

First published in French in 1979, The Ambivalence of Scarcity was a groundbreaking work on mimetic theory. Now expanded upon with new, specially written, and never-before-published conference texts and essays, this revised edition explores Rene Girard's philosophy in three sections: economy and economics, mimetic theory, and violence and politics in modern societies.

As a first step toward building a new understanding, Imagining China tackles the complicated question of how Americans, Chinese, and their respective allies imagine themselves enmeshed in nations, old rivalries, and emerging partnerships, while simultaneously meditating on the powers and limits of nationalism.

In Battling to the End Ren Girard engages Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), the Prussian military theoretician who wrote On War. Clausewitz, who has been critiqued by military strategists, political scientists, and philosophers, famously postulated that "e;War is the continuation of politics by other means."e; He also seemed to believe that governments could constrain war. Clausewitz, a firsthand witness to the Napoleonic Wars, understood the nature of modern warfare. Far from controlling violence, politics follows in war's wake: the means of war have become its ends. Ren Girard shows us a Clausewitz who is a fascinated witness of history's acceleration. Haunted by the French-German conflict, Clausewitz clarifies more than anyone else the development that would ravage Europe. Battling to the End pushes aside the taboo that prevents us from seeing that the apocalypse has begun. Human violence is escaping our control; today it threatens the entire planet.

Michigan State University Press is proud to announce the re-release of Harriette Simpson Arnow's 1949 novel Hunter's Horn, a work that Joyce Carol Oates called "e;our most unpretentious American masterpiece."e; In Hunter's Horn, Arnow has written the quintessential account of Kentucky hill people-the quintessential novel of Southern Appalachian farmers, foxhunters, foxhounds, women, and children. New York Times reviewer Hirschel Brickell declared that Arnow "e;writes...as effortlessly as a bird sings, and the warmth, beauty, the sadness and the ache of life itself are not even once absent from her pages."e; Arnow writes about Kentucky in the way that William Faulkner writes about Mississippi, that Flannery O'Connor writes about Georgia, or that Willa Cather writes about Nebraska-with studied realism, with landscapes and characters that take on mythic proportions, with humor, and with memorable and remarkable attention to details of the human heart that motivate literature.

Why do totalitarian propaganda such as those created in Nazi Germany and the former German Democratic Republic initially succeed, and why do they ultimately fail? Outside observers often make two serious mistakes when they interpret the propaganda of this time. First, they assume the propaganda worked largely because they were supported by a police state, that people cheered Hitler and Honecker because they feared the consequences of not doing so. Second, they assume that propaganda really succeeded in persuading most of the citizenry that the Nuremberg rallies were a reflection of how most Germans thought, or that most East Germans were convinced Marxist-Leninists. Subsequently, World War II Allies feared that rooting out Nazism would be a very difficult task. No leading scholar or politician in the West expected East Germany to collapse nearly as rapidly as it did. Effective propaganda depends on a full range of persuasive methods, from the gentlest suggestion to overt violence, which the dictatorships of the twentieth century understood well. In many ways, modern totalitarian movements present worldviews that are religious in nature. Nazism and Marxism-Leninism presented themselves as explanations for all of life-culture, morality, science, history, and recreation. They provided people with reasons for accepting the status quo. Bending Spines examines the full range of persuasive techniques used by Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic, and concludes that both systems failed in part because they expected more of their propaganda than it was able to deliver.

Parting ways with the Freudian and Lacanian readings that have dominated recent scholarly understanding of Hitchcock, David Humbert examines the roots of violence in the director's narratives and finds them not in human sexuality but in mimesis. Through an analysis of seven key films, he argues that Girard's model of mimetic desire-desire oriented by imitation of and competition with others-best explains a variety of well-recognized themes, including the MacGuffin, the double, the innocent victim, the wrong man, the transfer of guilt, and the scapegoat. This study will appeal not only to Hitchcock fans and film scholars but also to those interested in Freud and Girard and their competing theories of desire.