South African literature has long struggled to become drought-resistant: its plotlines, and even its paper production, presuppose abundant water.
Tag: Women
“Winning Is Not Uncomplicated”: Louisa Thomas on Sports
"The real value, the biggest value, of sport to me is that it is this gigantic arena for feeling."
What if Black Women Were Free?
The transnational struggles of Black women throughout history are different experiments in the practice of freedom.
Pay Attention When They Tell You to Forget
Remember that anti-Black violence has been the central dynamic of US history—and how Black women have struggled with this violence for centuries.
Binging the Borderlands
Contemporary TV series that take on Latinx life have increasingly embraced the complexity of their subject matter.
The Poetics of Abolition
For poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, as for the Black Romantics, history is the repetition of anti-Black violence that has yet to be abolished.
Can Novels Make Amends?
Novelists from George Eliot to Mary Gordon ask readers to confront our lives as ethical dramas that run only once, and with great consequence.
What Is the Genre of Rape?
While some progress has been made, TV is still trying to figure out how to tell the stories of male-identified rape survivors.
Shirley Hazzard, Poet of Aftermath
Hazzard was given to lingering in the fraught silences that follow great tumult, taking the time to find something worth saying.
How to Step Out of Comfort Zones
Caribbean authors—and the “disorderly” women of whom they write—can reveal how important it is to seek out one’s true self.
Science Turned Upside Down: Carolyn Merchant’s Vision of Nature, 40 Years Later
The Death of Nature wrote a new narrative of science that explored the costs of modernity for nature and humankind.
Beyond the Objectivity Myth
It is no exaggeration to say that Evelyn Fox Keller and her compatriots made possible not only my work but entire generations of scholarship on science.
Building Black Futures in Italy
When will new generations of Afro-Italians finally be heard and recognized as full and active members of Italy’s culture and society?
Longing for the Writer’s Space
How should readers and scholars look on the tangible traces writers leave behind?
The Kardashians’ Multiracial White Supremacy
The many faces of the Kardashians are the many faces of the monstrous hydra of blackface. They must be critiqued to a cultural halt.
Public Thinker: Annette Joseph-Gabriel on Black Women, Frenchness, and Decolonization
"The women in my book really disrupted France’s ideas about citizenship, about who belongs. I’d like us to be similarly disruptive."
Facing Our Demons
I May Destroy You explores how sexual violation is entangled in relations of visuality.
The Metalyrical Moment
Three recent poetry collections have cemented the rise of what we might call the “metalyrical”: poetry that interrogates the conditions of its own expression.
When the Revolution Left Kate Millett Behind
What was happening in the streets of Iran—what one white feminist couldn’t see—was a revolution, looking for different freedoms than the West.
Public Thinker: Marcia Chatelain on Feminism, Fast Food, and First Gens
“Being in community with people and teaching and learning outside of the confines of our classroom: I still actually really believe in that.”