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Nature offers the comforting suggestion of continuity, an awareness of scale; it can be both menacing and welcoming; it’s fertile ground for symbol and simile. However, in times of heightened political tension, poems about trees can feel like a cop-out, or especially irrelevant.
Studies consistently show that women read more than men, and that the publishing industry is dominated by (white) women. So why, then, are male writers still reviewed in prestigious publications at far higher rates than women?
Not all representations of museums overtly highlight the way they structurally rely on certain power dynamics, and yet the adherence to a certain normalizing discourse is always there, lurking, even when the explicit intention of the museum is to reconnect with a lost past.
In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision ruling that immigrants, documented or not, can be detained indefinitely without right to a bond hearing, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way we produce and consume narratives about class and race in contemporary American literature.
In his writings on the experience of cultural otherness, Georges Bataille once observed that the marginalized body exists at the periphery of a community, as it cannot be safely contained within or held outside it. Within the context of Bataille’s work, otherness is defined as a “separation,” a visible rupture between the subject and the…
When it comes to women in traditional domestic fiction, likeability hinges on selflessness. While men in these types of stories are allowed agency over their comings and goings in a household, women are expected to continually give of themselves: bodily, spiritually, and emotionally.
I would argue that there is on one hand literature that allows readers to escape reality, and on the other hand literature that forces readers to see their reality more clearly. Mohsin Hamid has accomplished the latter in his imaginative novel published last year, Exit West, and it is all the more relevant and illuminating…
From Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, the temporality and fragility of flowers provide extensive ground for cultivating figurative meanings.
As Claudia Rankine’s new play The White Card premieres at Boston’s Paramount Theatre, Ploughshares is proud to publish Catina Bacote’s “The Other America,” which investigates police brutality and the failure of community policing in New Haven, Connecticut, discussing Rankine’s Citizen in relation to the author’s experiences.
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