The seven-billion-dollar media franchise that is The Fast and the Furious paved the way for a new form of serialized storytelling that balanced new distribution practices and expansion into international markets with a savvy awareness of representational politics. In Fast and Furious Franchising, Dan Hassler-Forest illuminates the films’ improbable success and the crucial role the movies play in the history of the global entertainment industry. Here, Hassler-Forest joins Charles Acland, Mark Bould, and Ida Yoshinaga in conversation.

Dan Hassler-Forest is assistant professor of media and culture studies at Utrecht University. He is author of several books, including Fast and Furious Franchising: How the Serialized Blockbuster Remade Hollywood; Janelle Monáe’s Queer Afrofuturism: Defying Every Label; Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism; and Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age.

Charles Acland is professor of communication studies at Concordia University Montréal. Acland is author of American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder, and editor of Residual Media.

Mark Bould is professor of film and literature at University West England in Bristol, United Kingdom. Bould is founding co-editor of Science Fiction Film and Television journal and author of many books including The Anthropocene Unconscious and co-editor of The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction.

Ida Yoshinaga is assistant professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology. She is co-editor of Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction and sits on editorial boards of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Science Fiction Studies journal, and the International Journal of Disney Studies.

REFERENCES:

Welcome to the Family / Barry Hertz

Dialectic of Enlightenment / Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

American Graffiti

Crystal Skull

Frankenstein

Gal Gadot (actress)

Justin Lin (director)

James Wan (director)

Full-Throttle Franchise / editors Joshua Gulam, Fraser Elliott, and Sarah Feinstein

The Hollywood Jim Crow / Maryann Erigha Lawer

Chris Morgan (screenwriter)

George Lucas’s Blockbusting / Alex Ben Block and Lucy Autrey Wilson

Backrooms (film)

Derivative Media / Andrew deWaard

PRAISE:
"Dan Hassler-Forest tackles the notoriously messy world of this blockbuster film series with engaging energy and clarity."
—Fraser Elliott, coeditor of Full-Throttle Franchise

Fast and Furious Franchising: How the Serialized Blockbuster Remade Hollywood by Dan Hassler-Forest is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

How did a largely white state like Minnesota become a springboard for leadership in civil rights? Why did it produce a generation of liberals—Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Donald Fraser, Orville Freeman, and Eugene McCarthy—whose ideals transformed the Democratic party? In Making Minnesota Liberal, Jennifer A. Delton delves into the roots of Minnesota politics, starting with the 1940s, for an answer that punctuates the relationship between antiracism and American politics in the twentieth century. Here, Delton is joined in conversation with David Baum.

Jennifer A. Delton is professor of history at Skidmore College and author of several books, including Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, now out in paperback, and The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism.

David Baum has taught at several colleges and universities, including NYU, Skidmore College, Union (NY) College, the American University in Iraq-Salaimani, and West Texas A&M University.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
"We long ago recognized 1948 as a pivotal year in American politics. Delton shows us how and why, rightly bringing back into sight the radicals of the era of the Great Depression."
—Nell Irvin Painter

"This is not just a Minnesota story. It is an important national story, a story of the organizational and political restructuring that took the United States from the New Deal to—and through—the Cold War and into the Vietnam War and the Great Society."
—Journal of American History

"A tremendously impressive feat of scholarship, it is also short, breezily written, and full of pleasing anecdotes and pen portraits. Delton tells a thoroughly good story."
—American Historical Review

Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Partyby Jennifer A. Delton is now available in paperback from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Addie Liona Walker. Leon A. Belmont. Nova McClure Carr. Romantic Sensation tells the full story of this one ordinary person’s singular life. Assigned a female sex at birth, Addie was born in Massachusetts in 1853 and lived as a woman for twenty-five years. After transitioning in 1878, Addie became Leon and lived as a man for twenty-four years before making a second gender transition and living as a woman, Nova, for the rest of her life. Placing these milestones within the historical context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lizzie Ehrenhalt traces Belmont’s life, from child laborer to husband, from celebrity outlaw to heartthrob, and from stepfather to single mother—and demonstrates how trans, queer, and intersex histories are inseparable from American history. Ehrenhalt is joined here in conversation with Hugh Ryan.

Lizzie Ehrenhalt is an editor and public historian who specializes in the history of gender and sexuality. Ehrenhalt is author of Romantic Sensation: The Queer Lives of Leon A. Belmont, 1853-1927 and coeditor of Precious and Adored: The Love Letters of Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Simpson Whipple, 1890–1918. Since 2013, Ehrenhalt has edited MNopedia, the encyclopedia of Minnesota history produced by the Minnesota Historical Society.

Hugh Ryan is lead historian at the American LGBTQ+ Museum and author of My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond, The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, and When Brooklyn Was Queer.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Theodore Roosevelt
Jules Gill-Peterson’s Substack series

William N. Eskridge Jr.

Elizabeth Reis

Geertje Mak

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:

"Stands as an important reminder that gender transgression has a deep past in the United States."
—Emily Skidmore

"A fascinating primer for understanding the complex evolution of American ideas around gender, sexuality, trans/queer identity, and the body."
—Hugh Ryan

Romantic Sensation: The Queer Lives of Leon A. Belmont, 1853-1927 by Lizzie Ehrenhalt is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.