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.

In our fraught and ongoing energy transition, the metrics of finance are largely determining how, when, and where the electricity sector transitions to low-carbon energy sources—if at all. Author Conor Harrison (Brokers of Power) draws from case studies including 2021’s Winter Storm Uri and interviews people working in the electricity and financial sectors to reveal how the various entanglements of private equity, investment banking, and financial modeling are shaping the future and raising the costs of this vital infrastructure. Harrison is joined here in conversation with Shelley Welton.

Conor Harrison is associate professor in the Department of Geography and School of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of South Carolina.

Shelley Welton is Presidential Distinguished Professor of Law and Energy Policy with the Kleinman Center and Penn Carey Law School at the University of Pennsylvania.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Article, New York Times: “His Lights Stayed on During Texas’ Storm. Now He Owes $16,752.”

Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno, The Fall and Rise of American Finance

Brett Christophers, The Price is Wrong and Our Lives in Their Portfolios

Matt Huber

Nikki Luke

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
"It’s hard to think of two more important industries than energy and finance. Not much happens in the world without the supply of both, so it’s surprising that little attention gets paid to the nexus of the two: energy finance. Showing that Wall Street, not Washington, ultimately dictates the pace of America’s energy transition, Conor Harrison busts open the black box."
—Brett Christophers

"This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand why the electricity system looks like it does—and the forces that must be reshaped to accomplish a just and rapid energy transition."
—Shelley Welton

Brokers of Power: The Financialization of the US Electricity System by Conor Harrison is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

An ethnography of Islamic Relief (IR), the largest Islamic NGO based in the West, Racializing the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarians beyond Black, Brown, and White explores how a Muslim organization can do good in a world where racial capitalism permeates all aspects of humanitarianism. Author Rhea Rahman paints a frank, nuanced portrait of the constraints Islamic aid entities face in the effort to disentangle themselves from neocolonialism and Western hegemony. Rahman is joined here in conversation with Arun Kundnani and Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan.

Rhea Rahman is assistant professor of anthropology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She is author of Racializing the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown, and White, and her research has been published in Africa, Religions, and an edited volume of The Anthropology of White Supremacy.

Arun Kundnani is a writer interested in race, Islamophobia, surveillance, police violence, and radicalism. Kundnani is editorial director of Monthly Review and the author of What is Antiracism? (Verso, 2023), The Muslims are Coming! (Verso, 2014) and The End of Tolerance (Pluto, 2007), which was selected as a New Statesman book of the year, and co-author of Homeland Security: Myths and Monsters (Common Notions, 2024).

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a poet, writer, educator, and author of Postcolonial Banter, Tangled in Terror, Seeing for Ourselves, and the play, Peanut Butter & Blueberries. She was the runner-up of the Roundhouse National poetry slam 2017 with her viral poem, This is Not a Humanising Poem. She co-founded The Nejma Collective, a volunteer-led abolitionist group working in solidarity with Muslims and all people in prison.

EPISODE REFERENCES:
Ambalavaner Sivanandan

H. Rap Brown

Yassir Morsi / Radical Skin, Moderate Masks

Steve Biko

Mariame Kaba

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
"A much-needed and overdue book."
—Darryl Li, author of The Universal Enemy

"A richly detailed transnational ethnography . . . trace(s) a historical arc explaining the present and reenvisioning what the future might be."
—Cultural Studies

Racializing the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown, and White by Rhea Rahman is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin argued that organisms do not adapt to their environments, but rather that organisms and environments co-evolve and construct one another. Two new books in the University of Minnesota Press’s Posthumanities series take up this decree in bold, imaginative ways: The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI by Giuseppe Longo and Adam Nocek; and Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution by Jonathan Basile. Here, series editor Cary Wolfe brings all three authors together into a vastly fascinating conversation about experimental biology and theoretical biology; construction and deconstruction; language and interpretation; life sciences and living systems; technoscience and philosophy; and their real-world entanglements.

Cary Wolfe is founding director of 3CT: Center for Critical and Cultural Theory and Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor Emeritus of English at Rice University and fellow at the Berggruen Institute. He is editor of the Posthumanities series at University of Minnesota Press and author of several books, including Jagged Ontologies; Art and Posthumanism: Essays, Encounters, Conversations; and What Is Posthumanism?

Jonathan Basile is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto. He is author of Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution; Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality and Virality Vitality.

Giuseppe Longo is Research Director Emeritus at the National Center for Scientific Research in France and the author or coauthor of five books and more than one hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles.

Adam Nocek is associate professor of the philosophy of technology and science and technology studies at Arizona State University. He is coauthor of The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI, coeditor of The Lure of Whitehead, and author of Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Richard Levins

Richard Lewontin

Jean Lassègue

Jacques Derrida

Charles Darwin

Alan Turing

Erwin Schrödinger

Conrad Hal Waddington

James Watson and Francis Crick

Evelyn Fox Keller

Kurt Gödel

François Jacob

William C. Wimsatt

Mary Jane West-Eberhard

Henri Poincaré

Jennifer Doudna

Charles Darwin

Watson and Crick

Galileo Galilei

Friedrich Nietzsche

Carlos Sonnenschein
Ana Soto

Alfred North Whitenead

Ernst Cassirer

Melinda E. Cooper / Life as Surplus

Philip Mirowski

J. Craig Venter

Stuart Kauffman

Natural Lection and The Organism Is a Theory are available in the Posthumanities series from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Set in the counterterrorism courts and maximum-security prisons of Northern Kurdistan, Serra M. Hakyemez’s ethnography Deadly Refusals: Kurdish Decolonization in Times of Counterterrorism examines how prosecuted and imprisoned Kurds from different socioeconomic backgrounds organize in refusal of the criminalization and colonization of their political demands and desires. Based on more than seventeen years of ethnographic research, this book uncovers the mechanisms through which counterterrorism law reproduces the colonial state. Here, Hakyemez is joined in conversation with Nadia Abu El-Haj and William Mazzarella.

Serra Hakyemez is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Hakyemez is author of Deadly Refusals: Kurdish Decolonization in TImes of Counterterrorism.

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

William T. S. Mazzarella is Neukom Family Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College; Faculty Fellow, Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory; and Associate Faculty in the University of Chicago Divinity School.

REFERENCES:

Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment / David Scott

Frantz Fanon

Audra Simpson

Abdullah Öcalan

Jacques Lacan

Nazım Hikmet

Joan Copjec

Hannah Arendt

Walter Benjamin

Eric Santner

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:

"A dazzling book . . . repeatedly opens new paths for understanding what Raymond Williams called the emergent and the oppositional."
—Rosalind C. Morris

"An invaluable archive of the movement."
—Banu Bargu

Deadly Refusals: Kurdish Decolonization in Times of Counterterrorism by Serra M. Hakyemez is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Amid the tumult of change that swept through French society in the wake of World War II, a trio of visionary filmmakers sought to make meaning of the chaos by revitalizing a common method: montage. Revealing Nicole Védrès, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker as more than just groundbreaking auteurs, Ivan Cerecina shows how their collective infusion of montage with avant-garde aesthetics renewed the art of cinema while helping France reckon with its past and imagine its future. Cerecina’s book Assembly Lines is a call to action today as contemporary crises prompt reevaluation of our cultural histories. Here, Cerecina is in conversation with James Leo Cahill.

Ivan Cerecina teaches film studies at The University of Sydney. He is author ofAssembly Lines: Montage in Postwar French Film, and his work has been published in Screen, Camera Obscura, and Framework.

James Leo Cahill is associate professor of cinema and French literature at the University of Toronto. Cahill is author of Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé and general editor of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.

REFERENCES/PEOPLE:

Nicole Vedrès

Alain Resnais

Chris Marker

Sergei Eisenstein
Dziga Vertov

Henri Langlois

André Malraux

Walter Benjamin

REFERENCES/FILM:

Paris 1900 (Nicole Vedrès)

La Vie commence demain (Nicole Vedrès)

Guernica (Alain Resnais)

OTHER REFERENCES:

Steve Ungar / Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave

André Bazin, “On Why We Fight: History, Documentation, and the Newsreel,” in Bazin at Work.

Laure Astourian / The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema

Assembly Lines: Montage in Postwar French Film by Ivan Cerecina and Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé are available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Background track Claude Debussy, courtesy of www.classicals.de.