Featured authors and texts

Bibliography

Author biographies and text summaries were written by Emeline Boehringer, Maggie Borowitz, Bridgette Davis, Heather Glenny, Zahra Nasser, and Zsofi Valyi-Nagy.

Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004)

A scholar of Chicanx, feminist, and queer theory, Gloria Anzaldúa is known for her writings on in-betweenness, linguistics, and borderlands, inspired by her own upbringing along the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. Anzaldúa primarily published poetry and hybrid prose-poetic essays that are often autobiographical. In Borderlands/La Frontera, her most famous work, Anzaldúa examines the effects of Spanish colonialism on the Chicanx identity and experience, primarily through the lenses of race, gender, and sexuality. She often incorporates her own lived experiences as a queer Chicana who struggled to navigate between her ancestral ethnic identity and her place in the U.S. Anzaldúa received a B.A. in English, Art, and Education from University of Texas–Pan American in 1968, and went on to receive an M.A. in English and Education from the University of Texas, Austin. She co-edited the canonical feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, originally published in 1981. Anzaldúa received the Lesbian Rights Award in 1991, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Award in the same year. –ZN

“Movimientos de rebeldía y las culturas que traicionan” (Movements of Rebellion and the Cultures that they Betray) is the second chapter of Gloria Anzaldúa’s widely read book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. It features both Spanish and English writing to mimic the frustrations Anzaldúa experienced with language barriers growing up. The chapter displays the themes she is best known for: internal strife caused by inhabiting two different cultures, the process of decolonizing the Chicanx experience, and strained personal relationships to one’s family and ancestry due to hetero-patriarchy. The text features autobiography and history, focusing on how Anzaldúa’s womanhood and lesbian identity complicated her ability to be accepted within Chicanx communities, both in the U.S. and in Mexico. Borderlands/La Frontera was named one of the 38 best books published in 1987 by Library Journal, and has left an indelible mark on the fields of both gender studies and linguistics. –ZN

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

Hannah Arendt was a humanist political philosopher best known for her writings on the political and ethical world. Born into a Jewish-German family, Arendt was forced to flee National Socialist persecution in 1933. After 8 years in Paris, she immigrated to the United States in 1941, where she established a major influence on the New York intellectual scene and held academic positions at various universities, including at UChicago as a member of the Committee on Social Thought. Informed by her experiences living under and observing National Socialist rule, her work focuses on themes including authority, citizenship, agency, power, evil, and freedom. Her philosophy cannot be easily characterized within traditional categories of conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. As a result, she remains a dynamic, individual voice in Western philosophy. Her writing on totalitarianism is continually taken up in today’s political and academic climate. –HG

Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is a work of social and political philosophy that studies the state of modern humanity. The book focuses on human action and agency, questioning the ability of humanity as a whole to manage the consequences of its own increasing technological and individual power. Arendt challenges the common dichotomy between an “active life” and a “contemplative life,” and instead offers three types of human activity––labor, work, and action––as they have transformed across Western history. She tracks changing understandings of what it means to experience a “political life” and perform political action. While dynamic and contentious, the work remains a relevant influence on contemporary Western political philosophy. –HG

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

Simone de Beauvoir was a French theorist, writer, and activist who had a significant impact on feminist thought. Beauvoir was born into a middle-class family in Paris and spent most of her life there. Deeply religious as a child, she attended Catholic schools but became an atheist in her teens. Beauvoir studied mathematics and literature, then philosophy as an undergraduate, and then completed her master’s in philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1928. She continued her postgraduate studies at the École Normale Supérieure, where she befriended fellow existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who became her lifelong partner. In 1947, Beauvoir visited Chicago, where she fell in love with the author Nelson Algren, to whom she continued to write from Paris for four years. Beauvoir was already an established essayist and novelist when she published The Second Sex in 1949, just after French women had won the battle for suffrage. Beauvoir’s work asserted the political and philosophical validity of controversial social issues, from abortion and contraception to nonmonogamy and bisexuality, bringing together her existential philosophy and reflections on her own lived experience. –ZVN

The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir’s foundational feminist text, is a two-volume tome that reflects on growing up female in a world organized around men. Beginning with a simple question––“What is a woman?”––Beauvoir problematizes established understandings of gender difference, locating them in cultural rather than biological factors. “One is not born but rather becomes a woman,” Beauvoir writes, arguing that there is no “essence” of womanliness that determines how someone born a woman should live the rest of their life. The cultural process of becoming a woman, Beauvoir suggests, is normalized by patriarchal society. Men are seen as human subjects, free to live their lives, while women are considered the “Other,” always second to men. Beauvoir encouraged women not to accept this Otherness, this “unfreedom.” The Second Sex unabashedly addressed a range of controversial topics in great detail, including abortion and contraception (which was not legalized in France until 1967), marriage as an institution, and the unpaid labor of household chores and compulsory maternity. First translated into English in 1953, The Second Sex was republished in the 1960s, becoming a sort of textbook for second-wave feminist thinkers and activists. –ZVN

Lauren Berlant (b.1957) and Michael Warner (b.1958)

Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner are considered among the primary founders of queer theory. Berlant is a literary and cultural theorist whose writing focuses on the affective components of belonging and citizenship in the United States. Berlant is currently the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at UChicago, where they have been teaching since 1984. Michael Warner is a literary and social critic who writes on a wide breadth of topics including colonial and antebellum America, social theory, media studies, queer theory, and politics. Warner is Seymour H. Knox Professor of English, Professor of American Studies, and Chair of the Department of English at Yale University, where he has been teaching since 2007. Together, their work investigates notions of public and private space and how these norms can be overcome in projects of queer world-building. –HG

Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s “Sex in Public” is an essay published in the UChicago-published literary journal Critical Inquiry. The paper looks to different forms of “publics” to discuss how sex permeates public spaces and media, disguised only thinly by notions of privacy and the de-politicizing of sexuality. They argue that by relegating sex as private—outside of politics and the public sphere—heterosexual norms become dominant and destructive. The authors provide examples of how this rhetoric of privacy harms both queer and non-queer life, and they encourage creating and supporting sensational forms of living. The essay has remained a foundational text in queer and social theory. –HG

Anne Carson (b.1950)

Anne Carson is a critically-acclaimed poet, essayist, professor, and translator of ancient Greek poetry. Carson was introduced to ancient Greek by a high-school Latin instructor in her hometown of Toronto, Ontario. She would go on to study classics at the University of Toronto, where she earned her BA, MA, and PhD. Today, Carson is a revered translator of ancient Greek, as well as an author in her own right. Her prose blends classical Greek influences with her own unique, genre-bending verse style. As of 2016, Carson had published 20 books of prose, poetry, screenplay, and translation that often consider love, desire, and sexual longing. For this extensive body of work, Carson has earned numerous accolades, including the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, the MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, and the Lannan Literary Award. Carson currently teaches in New York University’s creative writing program, where she continues to be a preeminent scholar and translator. In 2019, Carson gave three public lectures at the University of Chicago as a part of the Critical Inquiry & Pearl Anderson Sherry Memorial Poetry Series. –EB

Sappho (c. 630–c. 570 BCE)

Archaic Greek poet Sappho is one of the most well-known female poets of antiquity. Her personal history is not-well known, though she was likely born into a wealthy family on the Greek island of Lesbos, where she lived and ran an academy for unmarried young women. Her school was devoted to the cult of Aphrodite and Eros, the Greek goddess and god or love, passion, desire, and sex—themes that likewise define her poetry. During her lifetime, Sappho is thought to have written around 10,000 lines of lyric poetry, meant to be sung with the accompaniment of a lyre. Her fame in the ancient world lasted long after her death, and she was canonized as one of the Nine Lyric poets held in high regard by scholars in Hellenistic Alexandria. Only 650 of Sappho’s lines still survive today, almost all of which exist as incomplete fragments. These fragments are characterized by Sappho’s verse style, and often describe intimate experiences of love and passion, especially that between women. As opposed to other Greek poets who wrote epic narratives, Sappho uniquely speaks directly to the reader. She remains a widely-read and studied poet today. –EB

Autobiography of Red is a verse novel by Anne Carson based on the ancient Greek myth of Geryon and the Tenth Labor of Herakles, as written by the poet Stesichorus in his sixth-century BC poem Geryoneis. It is a powerful, contemporary portrait of a young boy growing into himself through the pain and passion of young love. Stesichorus (c. 630 – 555 BC) was an esteemed Sicilian poet known for epic poetry. In Geryoneis, Stesichorus tells the story of the tenth of twelve tasks given to the mythic hero Herakles by King Eurystheus. This task requires Herakles to travel to the island of Erytheia far to the west and seize cattle belonging to the giant monster Geryon. Carson’s novel is the “autobiography” of Geryon himself, though, in Carson’s world, Geryon becomes a young artist who escapes an abusive family and falls in love with the transient Herakles. The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and is a popular bestseller. –EB

If Not, Winter is a collection of translations of Sappho’s fragments by Anne Carson. Sappho, one of the most well-known female poets of antiquity, lived on the Greek island of Lesbos in the 6th Century BCE. Most of the around 10,000 lines that the Archaic Greek poet is thought to have written are lost today. 650 fragments survive, all but one of which exist as incomplete fragments written on papyrus. Whereas earlier translations sought to fill in the blanks in Sappho’s oeuvre, Carson preserves and exactly copies lacunae in Sappho’s writing. All spaces and breaks from existing fragments are preserved as they appear in the records of Sappho’s poetry that survive, and are paired on each page with the original Greek. Carson’s radical choice to preserve the fragmentary nature of Sappho’s poetry lends the text a haunting visual appearance and produces a profound, stark reading experience. If Not, Winter is widely regarded as a masterpiece of contemporary translation because of Carson’s refreshingly spare translation and subtle poetic liberty. –EB

Aimé Césaire (1913–2008)

Aimé Césaire was a celebrated poet, playwright, politician, and philosopher. Born on the northeast coast of Martinique, Césaire was then educated in Paris, where he studied Black American writers of the Harlem Renaissance and ethnologies of African culture. In the 1940s, he returned to Martinique where he began a political career dedicated to decolonization. He was Mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945 as a member of the Communist Party, which he later abandoned to establish the Martinique Independent Revolution Party. Amplifying his anti-colonial activism in government, his poems and plays interrogate the paradox of Black identity under French colonial rule. Often vehemently political, his works centralize the struggle for French West Indian rights and helped establish Negritude, a Francophone literary movement aiming to affirm the cultural identity of Black Africans. Césaire’s literary style is known for its complex symbolism, baroque detail, and expressive surrealism. He remains a foundational voice in contemporary anti-colonial scholarship, literary theory, and ongoing movements for political liberation. –HG

Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism is a book of essays first published in 1950 describing the implicit hypocrisy and brutality of colonialism. This foundational anti-colonial text refutes Western logics of “progress,” highlighting how colonizing powers label colonized communities “savage” or “uncultured” as a strategy of domination. The titular essay reminds readers that decolonization is a process needed not only in society, but also within the mind and consciousness. Through irony and declarative statements, Césaire reveals the systemic nature of racism. The essay played a major role in establishing Negritude, promoting the demand that both society and individuals must work to reaffirm the value of African cultural identity. Immediately influential in anti-colonial liberation struggles and in Francophone political and philosophical thought in the 1950s, the essay became one of Césaire’s most famous works. Upon its translation into English in 1975, the essay figured prominently in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and anti-war movements in the U.S, and continues to inform anti-colonial and anti-racist movements today. –HG

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963)

W.E.B. Du Bois was an influential sociologist, educator, poet, author, editor, and leader in the civil rights and Pan-African movements. Born in Massachusetts, DuBois received a BA from Fisk University as well as an MA and the first PhD earned by an African American from Harvard University. Du Bois taught at multiple historically black colleges throughout his career prior to his repatriation to Ghana at age 95. From detailing the conditions of black labor to advocacy for a liberal arts education for black students, Du Bois’ works address the social, economic, and historic oppression of black people world-wide and seek their equal treatment in a world of white domination. Specifically, his work from all genres presented refutation to the myths of black racial inferiority and actively sought to build a racialized ethic of black uplift. His work points to the heterogeneity, depth, and inherent dignity of black life and in this way inspires black sociologists, writers, and activists world-wide today. –BD

The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903.

The Souls of Black Folk is W.E.B. Du Bois’ first book of collected essays published for a broad audience following his dissertation study, The Philadelphia Negro. The important framework undergirding this compilation is that “the problem of the twentieth century is the color line”. With this assertion, Du Bois places racism, instead of racial difference or inferiority, as the moral hazard around the world. In this work, Du Bois applies the key idea of “double consciousness” from American transcendentalists to the experience of black people. He argues that life in a black body requires two fields of vision at all times—attention to how one views oneself and how the world views one. The Souls of Black Folk holds a critical place in social science as one of the early works in the field of sociology and as a key text in African-American history. –BD

Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil by W. E. B. Du Bois, 1920.

Darkwater is Du Bois’ seventh major publication and his first in a series of three autobiographical works after he turned fifty years of age. In this compelling collection of credos, poetry, song, memoir, narrative, and essay, Du Bois uses these diverse genres to engage in a critical reflection on the character of labor and its conflicts across differences in race, gender, and geography. To do so, Du Bois uses spiritual and religious language, emotional rhetoric, and details of his personal experience to invite readers to bear witness to an underlying dissonance between stated western democratic values and discrimination in opportunity and outcome. Writing on the conditions of women, the value of a classical education for black youth, and the necessity of labor unions for racial and gender equality, Du Bois lays out the broad political implications of the color-line that he had previously written on in economic, social, and moral terms. –BD

Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)

Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist turned highly influential political philosopher and activist. Born in French occupied Martinique, he was taught and mentored by prolific French poet Aimé Césaire at Lycée Schoelcher, the most prestigious high school on the Carribean island. Fanon would go on to join the Free French forces in World War II, and has written about the racism he experienced as a Black soldier in an unwelcoming Europe. Fanon witnessed the psychological ravages of colonialism firsthand from his clients in Algeria, which led him to theorize about the sociological bases of neurological disorder and join the struggle for Algerian sovereignty. His writings primarily consider the ways in which Blackness is constructed and otherized. Fanon’s first major work, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) is one of the most widely read texts of anti-colonial theory and remains a highly canonical work of critical race studies. Fanon lost his battle with leukemia in Bethesda, Maryland, just after completing Wretched of the Earth (1961); he was laid to rest in Algeria, which would achieve independence from France a year after his passing. –ZN

Black Skin, White Masks (1952) is Frantz Fanon’s earliest book, and certainly his most influential. Valued by intellectuals and activists alike for its blend of critical theory and auto-theory (autobiographical historical critique) with political philosophy, the work exhibits Fanon’s adeptness in multiple philosophical disciplines, from Hegelianism, to phenomenology, to existentialism. At the same time, Fanon analyzes colonialism and Blackness through events he witnessed and experienced as a Black man on French-occupied land, both in his homeland of Martinique and in Algeria, where he later worked as a psychiatrist. Black Skin, White Masks traces the construction of the Black subject and the consciousness of the colonizer from gendered, pop cultural, psychological, and sociological standpoints. The final chapters include an analysis of Fanon’s own use of philosophical dialectics throughout the text, as well as his aspirations for true, effective Black liberation and a critique of reactionary politics. –ZN

Michel Foucault (1926–1984)

Born to surgeons in Poitiers, France, Michel Foucault is best characterized as a continental philosopher who derived his theories from a critical engagement with history. Foucault defied his family with his adeptness in philosophy and disdain for pursuing medical sciences. In 1945, he enrolled at École Normale Supérieure d’Ulm in Paris, the most renowned institution for the humanities in France; there, he received mentorship from Louis Althusser, a prominent scholar of Marx, and others. Foucault is best known for his writing on the relationship between knowledge and power, and his invention of the term biopower—methods of subjugation and control imposed upon the bodies of inhabitants of a state by its rulers. The term first appeared in the philosopher’s widely contemplated work, The History of Sexuality. Foucault died in Paris in 1984 from complications of HIV/AIDS, becoming the first public figure in France to die an AIDS-related death. He is survived by his partner Daniel Defert, a sociologist and HIV/AIDS activist, who founded France’s first AIDS awareness organization, AIDES, following Foucault’s death. –ZN

The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, by Michel Foucault, originally published in French as La Volonté du Savoir, © 1976 by Éditions Gallimard. English translation by Robert Hurley, © 1978 by Random House, Inc.

The History of Sexuality is a four-volume text charting the characterization, surveillance, and repression of sexuality in the Western world. Its first and most widely read volume, An Introduction, examines how sexuality in the 17th to 20th centuries was largely considered in a scientific manner; this identification, Foucault argues, was driven by bourgeois, capitalist society and its need to sustain traditional ideals of the family unit. With this increased surveillance of the human body came what Foucault terms biopower—methods of disciplining the body and non-heterosexual orientations to ensure ideal standards of productivity and reproduction. The History of Sexuality has become one of the most frequently cited texts in gender and sexuality studies and continental philosophy, influencing the work of several prominent scholars in these fields, including Judith Butler and UChicago philosophers Arnold Davidson and Martha Nussbaum. –ZN

Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793)

Olympe de Gouges was a French playwright and political activist known for her works on both women’s political rights and the abolition of slavery. Born into a lower-middle-class family in southwestern France, Gouges grew up with a bourgeois education. She was forced into an unwanted marriage at age 16, which influenced her faith in the institution of marriage and her beliefs and writing on gender. After just a year of marriage, her husband died and Gouges moved to Paris where she established a theatre company with the help of wealthy comrades. During this time, she wrote plays demanding compassion for enslaved people and linking slavery to the autocratic monarchy in France and its colonial reach. Gouges was a passionate voice for human rights and fully supported the French Revolution. However, she became disillusioned with the revolution after its failure to recognize the full rights of women as citizens. She prolifically published political pamphlets and produced plays on these issues, which ultimately led to her death by guillotine. Gouges’ legacy is most tied to her articulation of the inherent rights of women that went on to influence European calls for full female citizenship and suffrage. –BD

“The Declaration of the Rights of Woman” by Olympe de Gouges, English translation by Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson, © 1979 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, from Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795.

In her political pamphlet, “Declaration of the Rights of Woman,”, Olympe de Gouges responds with a manifesto to the lack of rights for women in the constitution adopted in France immediately following the French Revolution. Her scathing critique is made by using philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous description of the natural rights of man to advance women’s rights. Gouges roots her assertions not in equality to men, but in women’s women’s singular ability to raise children–evidence of a particular feminine courage and strength. In the 17 articles that comprise the text, Gouges seeks to establish women’s rights by arguing that differences between men and women only occur due to “common utility” or societally-structured, repetitive experiences; she then demands rights to equal justice under the law, property, and sovereignty. She also advocates resistance to oppression and calls for female tax-payers to be given representatives in government and a just constitution. Gouges’ work influenced Mary Wollstonecraft and other early feminists’ claims and her work continues to live within modern claims for equitable representation in government and equal rights, pay, property, and bodily autonomy under the law. –BD

Helen Keller (1880–1968)

Helen Keller was an author, political activist, and lecturer well-known as a pioneering humanitarian and co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Born in Tuscumbia, Alabama to Confederate plantation owners, Keller lost her senses of sight and hearing due to severe illness at 19 months old. In 1887, she began what would become a life-long friendship with Anne Sullivan, whom her family hired to teach her to speak sign language. Under Sullivan’s mentorship, Keller eventually learned to read, write, and speak. In 1904, she graduated from Radcliffe College of Harvard University, as the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts. Helen Keller went on to become a world-famous advocate for people with disabilities, and championed women’s suffrage, socialism, birth control, world peace, and labor rights. She has written multiple autobiographical texts that remain widely-read, including The Story of My Life (1903) and The World I Live In (1908). –EB

The World I Live In by Helen Keller, 1908.

The World I Live In is a collection of 15 essays and one poem by Helen Keller. These essays, previously published in 1905 in Century Magazine with alternate titles, explore Keller’s experience of her physical and interior world. Keller takes touch as a major subject, and describes how, despite her lack of sight or hearing, her heightened sense of touch can provide her with a deep, moving experience of the physical world. She describes her experience of becoming aware of herself with the help of her lifelong teacher Anne Sullivan, as well as her emotional journey to maturity and her perspective on fundamental philosophical questions about life. Keller’s masterful command of language, and rich, poetic philosophical musings have made The World I Live In an enduring, classic American novel. –EB

Antjie Krog (b. 1952)

Antjie Krog is a poet, academic, and writer from South Africa. Born into an Afrikaner family, Krog gained attention with her writing early in life; as a young girl, she wrote a vehement anti-apartheid poem that caused outrage in her conservative community. She published her first book of verse at age 17 and went on to earn a BA degree in English from the University of the Orange Free State and MA in Afrikaans from the University of Pretoria. She then began teaching at a segregated teacher’s training college for black South Africans. Krog later wrote for independent, progressive journals and reported for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. In this role, Krog followed South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)––a restorative-justice court established to expose violence that had gone unquestioned during the Apartheid era. Krog’s experience witnessing the TRCis the subject of her chronicle Country of My Skull (1998). In this book Krog empathetically details the lasting damage of apartheid, the challenges inherent in restorative justice, and the reckoning of a nation with a terrible past in pursuit of a more just, democratic future. Country of My Skull was followed by another book on South African change and growth, A Change of Tongue (2010) Krog’s passionate Afrikaner prose once seen as scandalous, is now widely celebrated as a powerful celebration of democracy and justice. Krog lives and works in South Africa. Her most recent book, Conditional Tense: Memory and Vocabulary, was published in 2013. –BD

Country of My Skill: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa is Antjie Krog’s first of four published books of prose reportage. Known first as a poet, Krog’s work as a reporter following South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) formed the basis of her passionate and moving accounts of South Africa’s public Human Rights Violations Committee hearings. In these hearings, many black South Africans testified to brutal torture sponsored by the state under Apartheid. Country of My Skull includes a significant amount of testimony, though it centers on Krog’s experience as an Afrikaner reporter, struggling to reconcile South Africa’s dark past with hope for its future. The book is widely lauded as a necessary accompaniment to understanding the context and work of the TRC due to Krog’s poetic prose, willingness to bear witness, and refusal to shield her countrymen from the painful atrocity of their past. To read Krog’s work is to read a writer and citizen who is unafraid and unrelenting in her efforts to bring a too-often unheard truth to bear. Country of my Skull has won many literary awards, including the BookData / South African Booksellers’ Book of the Year Prize, and was named one of “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century.” –BD

Fouad Laroui (b. 1958)

Fouad Laroui is a Moroccan economist, mathematician, civil engineer, and writer who currently teaches epistemology and French literature at the University of Amsterdam, after previously teaching econometrics and environmental science in the Netherlands. Born in Oujda, Morocco, Laroui studied in France and Europe, writing for magazines and a French-Moroccan radio network. Laroui’s first novel Les dents de Topographe won the Albert Camus Prize in 1996, and his poetry, novels, plays, and essays have won many prizes since. His works over the past 30 years have consistently centered on the themes of identity in a globalized world, intercultural dialogue and conflict, and the individual versus the group. Laroui’s works often feature a distinctive and absurd sense of humor as well as a meditative repetition of questions and considerations common among expatriates. Laroui now serves Morocco as a member of a special committee organized by the Ambassador to France to design and promote reforms in the country. This formal work follows Laroui’s writing, which expresses deep concerns about destabilization brought on by the Arab Spring and the need for reconstruction and reform in Morocco and the Arab world. –BD

“Dislocation,” along with other short stories in the collection The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers, was translated into English from its original by Emma Ramadan. In this short story, we access the internal monologue of the protagonist, Maati, as he wonders, “what would it be like—a world where everything is foreign?” This question and its repetitive, lengthening answers last Maati’s entire walk from work to his home. Throughout all of Maati’s answers to his own question, we learn more about what it means for him to live in a world where he is seen as foreign, where others’ cultural touchstones are foreign to him, and where his own cultural practices are unknown or invisible. The story unravels one man’s experience of foreignness and, yet, makes this experience knowable. Just when we observe and hear more of Maati’s sense of foreignness, frustration, concern, and loss, however, readers are met with the comforting reminder of home. For Laroui, this seeming paradox—that one can be absolutely at a loss in a foreign place yet comforted at one’s home within it—is palpable. In 2013, The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle, one of France’s most prestigious awards for short stories. –BD

Audre Lorde (1934–1992)

Audre Lorde was a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” whose writing confronts injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Born in New York City to West Indian immigrant parents, Lorde published her first poem in Seventeen magazine as a high schooler, after her school’s literary journal deemed it “inappropriate.” She graduated from Hunter College and earned an MLS from Columbia University, working as a librarian in New York public schools throughout the 1960s. Lorde spent most of her life in New York, with a stint in Berlin, Germany, in the 1980s as a visiting professor. She participated in many different activist circles, including the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, Black cultural movements, and struggles for LGBTQ equality. She published both prose and poetry that tied the personal to broader political aims, drawing on her experiences as a Black, queer woman navigating predominantly white spaces, including academia. Her canonical text, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” first presented at a conference in 1979, is an early example of intersectional feminism, addressing the shortcomings of second-wave feminism with respect to race, class, gender, and age. –ZVN

“Poetry is not a Luxury” is an essay by Audre Lorde first published in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture in 1977, and reprinted in her collection of speeches and essays, Sister Outsider. In this brief but powerful text, Lorde challenges the assumption that poetry is merely a frivolous leisure activity. For women of color, poetry is more than stringing together rhyming words. It is a “vital necessity of our existence.” Poetry, Lorde writes, “is the way we give name to the nameless,” to intangible and often troubling thoughts. Poetry is a way to access our emotions and communicate them to others. In Eurocentric, patriarchal societies, thoughts are considered more powerful, impactful, and lasting than emotions. “Possibility is neither forever nor instant,” Lorde writes, emphasizing that poetry is an essential step in the formation of ideas. Only by putting words to our emotions can we begin to catalyze action. Without poetry, she argues, change cannot happen. –ZVN

Toni Morrison (1931–2019)

Toni Morrison was a celebrated novelist and Nobel laureate in literature. Morrison grew up in the semi-integrated midwestern town of Lorain, Ohio, before receiving a BA at Howard University and MA in English from Cornell. While writing her novels, Morrison worked as a professor and as an editor for Random House, where she focused on fiction books by Black authors. Morrison’s own essays and novels illuminate a penetrating understanding of the Black female experience in the U.S. Her characters navigate the challenges of finding, articulating, and embracing their cultural identity within a racist and unjust society. Her writing style soars through fantasy, myth, and folklore, tangling readers in complex and vivid personal truths. Among numerous accolades for her works, Morrison was awarded the University of Chicago’s Rosenberger Medal in 1991, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Her novels remain ubiquitous in high school classrooms and the power of her storytelling continues to resonate with ongoing efforts for racial justice in the United States. –HG

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s first published novel. The book, set in Morrison’s hometown of Lorain, Ohio in the years following the Great Depression, follows Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl who believes she would find acceptance, respect, and love if only she had a pair of blue eyes. Morrison illustrates the devastating toll of a society that accepts whiteness as the standard not only of beauty, but of dignity. The themes of racism, conformity, and violence coalesce into an unrelenting portrait of injustice in America, told through a structure of interlocking stories that illuminate the sometimes contradictory experiences of seeing and being seen. Despite, in Morrison’s words, being “dismissed, trivialized, [and] misread” at the time of its publication, the novel has become a foundational masterwork of American literature. –HG

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

Moral philosopher and cultural critic, Friedrich Nietzsche was a defining figure of nineteenth century Western philosophy and critical theory. Born to a staunchly Lutheran family in Saxony, Germany, Nietzsche lived solely among women for much of his life after his father, a pastor, passed when he was five years of age. A precocious young student, Nietzsche’s earliest loves were classical music, theology, and philology; at the University of Leipzig, he befriended acclaimed composer Richard Wagner, whose music would inspire Nietzsche’s earliest work, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1871). At age 24, he was the youngest person ever appointed to teach classical philology at the University of Basel, a post he eventually left when the university refused to comply with his desire to reposition as a philosophy professor. Nietzsche is widely read and remembered for his modernist critique of European morality, developed in his seminal philosophical work, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). Following his death in 1900, Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, began editing his unpublished manuscripts to mirror her anti-Semitic ideologies, directly contradicting her brother’s body of work. –ZN

A widely-studied volume combining Friedrich Nietzsche’s first work and one of his last, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner was translated and commented on by the late German philosopher and Princeton University professor, Walter Kaufmann, in 1967. The two works’ sixteen-year divide is exacerbated by Nietzsche’s intense growth as a scholar between the years they were published; upon its release, many classicists deemed The Birth of Tragedy (1872)— which would be renamed and edited several times by Nietzsche—a poor work of classical thought. Today, the book is considered a highly imaginative interrogation of tragedy and ancient Greece. Penned after his professorship and during his sickest years, Case of Wagner (1888) is a sharp critique of Richard Wagner—who was no longer a friend of Nietzsche’s—directly contradicting the philosopher’s praise of the composer in The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche erases the philosophical worth of Wagner’s music, illustrating it instead as a symptom of widespread nihilism during the rise of National Socialism. –ZN

Plato (428/427 BCE – 348/347 BCE)

Plato is often considered one of the most influential writers in Western political and philosophical thought. Born in Athens, Greece around to a noble family, Plato came to be a highly regarded educator, philosopher, and politician. He was the student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, and in 387 BCE founded the Academy in Athens, one of the first institutions of higher learning in the Western world. Plato’s writings debate the nature of justice, beauty, and equality, but his remarkable depth and range also cover interrelated topics including: mathematics, ethics, aesthetics, politics, theology, cosmology, knowledge, and language. Plato’s self-reflective approach to writing, dialogue format, and distinctive systematic method qualify him as one of the primary founders of Western philosophy as it is known today. His writings on governance and justice remain ubiquitous in contemporary philosophical and political thought. –HG

Plato’s Phaedrus is a dialogue between the fictional character Socrates, based on Plato’s real-life teacher Socrates, and the fictional character Phaedrus, a student of rhetoric. The two come upon each other outside the gates of Athens and begin an intellectual debate in which they broadly discuss the issue of Eros, or love. Their conversation on the problems of love provides a subject around which to debate the proper use of rhetoric. In doing so, they also reveal critical insights on metaphysics, writing, madness, the soul, inspiration, and the relationship between language and reality. Later philosophers draw heavily upon Plato’s work in Phaedrus, including Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, and Heidegger and Derrida in the twentieth century. The text remains relevant to students of philosophy as well as contemporary studies of rhetoric, bias, and inspiration. –HG

Claudia Rankine (b.1963)

Claudia Rankine is a contemporary poet, playwright, and multimedia artist. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Rankine immigrated to New York City in 1970, later earning a BA from Williams College and an MFA in poetry at Columbia University. Her work centralizes issues of racism, intimacy, and social justice. She meditates on concepts of boundaries and borders as she applies a critical eye to the contemporary moment. Her books are often projects of amalgamation; they cross, muddle, and hybridize genres and media. Her writing continually returns to the relationship between personal and collective histories as a mode of understanding the present. Rankine has been the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University in the departments of African American Studies and English since 2018. –HG

Citizen is Claudia Rankine’s fifth volume of poetry. In her provocative book-length poem, Rankine presents accumulating, festering, and ongoing encounters of racial aggression in American daily life. From slights and microaggressions to radical acts of violence, Rankine vividly illustrates instances of racism and tracks the destruction left in their wake. These mounting moments, Rankine argues, often deteriorate one’s ability to speak, perform, and think. Rankine combines poetry, prose commentary, visual art, slogans, film scripts, and quotes from artists and critics to extend beyond the limitations of traditional poetry and, in her own words, dynamically “render visible the Black experience.” Citizen has won several national awards, is the only book of poetry to be a New York Times bestseller in nonfiction, and remains critically poignant in the Movement for Black Lives and continued struggles for racial justice in the United States. –HG

Rūmī (1207 – 1273)

Rūmī (Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Mawlānā) was a 13th Century Sufi mystic born in the Persian Empire. Rumi’s father Bahā al-Dīn Walad, himself a famous theologian and author, led Rumi and his family across the Middle East to modern-day Turkey in 1218. There, Bahā al-Dīn Walad began teaching at a madrahsah (religious school), while the young Rumi studied under Persian sufic poet and theologian Faridduddin Attar. Rumi succeeded his father as a spiritual teacher upon his passing in 1231. In 1244, Rumi met Shams al-Dīn (or Shams-e Tabrizi, a Persian poet), and the two ignited a passionate friendship. Shams’ death in 1247 launched Rumi’s poetry, his poems often describing his ecstatic love for Shams and sorrow at his passing. Frequently taking natural subjects, Rumi’s poetry expresses radiant, spiritual love. Rumi’s followers, known as the Mawlawiyah (whirling dervishes), are known for replicating a whirling dance that Rumi often performed while his poems were sung, and they continue his spiritual legacy to this day. Over the course of his life, Rumi wrote more than 3,000 ghazals (Arabic odes) and more than 2,000 ruba’iyat (collections of Persian quatrains). Rumi’s poetry is noted for its universal appeal, and he is one of the widest-read poets in the United States. –EB

Love is my Savior is a new translation by Nasreen Akhtarkhavari and Anthony Lee of Rumi’s Arabic poems and Arabic lines from Persian poems. These poems are translated from Rumi’s Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, which contains 44,282 lines of poetry written in Farsi, Arabic, Greek, and Turkish dealing with recurring themes of love, prayer, and joy. It is known as one of Rumi’s masterpieces, and describes his passionate, spiritual love for his mentor and close friend Shams al-Dīn, often using symbol and metaphor. Rumi signed many of these poems with Shams’ own name, and the title literally translates to “The Collected Poems of (or for, or by) Shams-e Tabrizi”—a decision scholars often attribute to Rumi’s devotion to Shams. Love is my Savior is the first English translation of 33 Arabic poems and fragments in the Diven-e Shams-e Tabrizi. Akhtarkhavari and Lee’s text showcases Rumi’s command of Persian and Arabic to describe his spiritual love and devotion. –EB

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851)

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist best known for her novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. From early in her life, Shelley was surrounded by progressive political voices, beginning with her father, the philosopher William Godwin, and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, a staunch defender of women’s rights who died shortly after Shelley’s birth. Her parents’ famous politics, alongside the writing of her husband Percey Bysshe Shelley (and the scandalous origin of their romance), often outshine Shelley’s own literary and intellectual contributions in modern scholarship. Her writing dynamically stitches together the concerns of science fiction, Gothic, and Romantic traditions, creating a unique portrait of Western progressive thought in the nineteenth century. In addition to her masterwork, Frankenstein, Shelley was an influential travel writer, literary historian, and editor, often focusing her energy on her husband’s poetry. While Shelley’s other literary works have only recently been given much critical attention, the contribution of Frankenstein continues to be pervasive, holding an unrivaled place in popular culture and literary analysis alike. –HG

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1818.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the most highly adapted and recognizable works of fiction in the Western literary canon. The book follows the story of philosopher-chemist Victor Frankenstein, who, in trying to understand the scientific formula for life, awakens a monster he has made of stitched-together dead body parts. The creature, who is repulsive to Dr. Frankenstein, struggles to understand the society he has been born into, which has both created and rejected him. Often cited as the first work of science fiction in Western literature, the novel engages in traditions of the Gothic, a literary genre that emphasizes mystery and the supernatural, and Romanticism, a genre combining individual emotions, sublimity of the natural world, and creative genius. The narrative provokes questions about the destructive nature of power, learning as a social process, and acceptance in society. Alongside its widely popular commercial mythology, the central issues of Frankenstein—alienation, the sublimity of nature, and socially constructed monstrosity—make it a relevant and provocative read today. –HG

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)

Mary Wollstonecraft was a writer, philosopher, and women’s rights advocate. Her home life, which was colored by instability and frustration, inspired her passionate writing. Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London to an English father and an Irish mother, and was one of seven children. Her father led the family to financial ruin and as a very young woman, Wollstonecraft began to work and struck out on her own. She published her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, in 1787 in order to promote a school for girls that she had recently founded. Calling for rational education and financial independence for women, this book set the tone for her later writings, which fiercely advocated for women’s rights and became important forerunners for twentieth-century feminist texts. In the late 1780s, Wollstonecraft met radical thinkers such as Thomas Paine and William Blake, and published philosophical writings in dialogue with their texts and especially in response to the ongoing French Revolution. Wollstonecraft had two daughters––Fanny and Mary, the latter of whom would later marry Percy Bysshe Shelley and become an important novelist in her own right. –MB

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a philosophical book written in response to the deeply unequal system of public education proposed in France in 1791. It sharply critiques contemporaneous definitions of femininity and argues vehemently for women’s rights. In particular, the author advocates for women’s access to education, entrée to a broader array of professions, equality and respect in marriage, the right to own property, and representation in government. Wollstonecraft builds a logical argument that acknowledges existing societal expectations of women, such as marriage and motherhood, while radically re-envisioning women’s roles as citizens. She extended the arguments of respected revolutionary thinkers on the subject of self-rule to advocate for women’s place as fully independent persons within the parameters of democratic governance. The book was widely read and cited at the time of its publishing, but the turbulence of Wollstonecraft’s later personal life (a child born out of wedlock, multiple attempted suicides) led to negative views of her writing for much of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft began to be recognized as an important forerunner of feminism, and is now acknowledged as one of the earliest proto-feminist philosophers. –MB

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

Virginia Woolf was a British novelist and critic, and is widely seen as one of the most significant modernist writers of the twentieth century. She was born in South Kensington, London into a wealthy family in which she was one of eight children. While her brothers were college educated, she and her sisters were schooled at home. There, she was influenced by the extensive library of her father, who was a writer himself. Her first novel was published in 1915 and by the early 1920s, she began to gain recognition for her stories, essays, and novels. She is known for her innovative experiments with stream of consciousness in her writing, as well as her trailblazing explorations of feminism and androgyny, which continue to shape feminist thought today. Woolf struggled with depression on and off throughout her life. Greatly affected by the fears and horrors of World War II, she died by suicide in the River Ouse in Yorkshire. –MB

In her extended essay A Room of One’s Own, Woolf posits that in order to write fiction, “a woman must have money and a room of her own.” She argues that women writers, and artists more broadly, have been disadvantaged by the limitations that society imposes, such as financial dependence and lack of access to education. She highlights the achievements of women writers who have created important works of fiction in spite of the obstacles in their path, such as Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and George Eliot. The essay was based on two lectures that Woolf gave in October 1928 at women’s colleges at Cambridge. In the published version, her direct address to those students remains intact; she urges young women to seek financial independence and find the time and space to write. Written ten years after women in both the United States and the United Kingdom had gained the right to vote, Woolf’s essay pushed against assumptions that the feminist movement had already achieved its aims. Almost a century later, it remains a foundational piece of feminist thought, especially regarding women in the arts. –MB

Banner image: YOU BE MY ALLY, 2020. LED truck. Text: Sappho, fragment 1 from If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho by Anne Carson, first published by Alfred A. Knopf, © 2002 by the author. Reprinted by permission of the author and Aragi Inc. All rights reserved. Chicago, Illinois, USA. © 2020 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo: Christopher Dilts

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