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.

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

During the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled energy landscapes and imaginaries in the US. Settling the Boom, a volume of essays, studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains of Williston, North Dakota, are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms. Here, the book’s coeditors Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun are joined in conversation.

Mary E. Thomas is associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at The Ohio State University. She is coeditor of Settling the Boom, coauthor of Urban Geography, and author of Multicultural Girlhood.

Bruce Braun is professor of geography at the University of Minnesota. He is coeditor of Settling the Boom and Political Matter, and author of The Intemperate Rainforest.

Episode references:

Cruel Optimism / Lauren Berlant

Pollution Is Colonialism / Max Liboiron

White Earth (film)

Jessica Christy, Through the Window exhibition

Location of focus:

Western North Dakota, including Willison (Williston Basin) and Dickinson, within the Bakken Formation.

Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil, is available from University of Minnesota Press. This edited collection includes contributions from Morgan Adamson, Kai Bosworth, Thomas S. Davis, and Jessica Lehman.