Passing
Edith Maud and Winnifred Eaton, sisters from the turn of the century, dealt with racial ambiguity throughout their lives, learning to navigate how others interpreted them in vastly different ways.
Longform
Living in Multiple Worlds: Immigration in Lucky Boy and The House of Broken Angels
When you immigrate, you bring an entire world along with you, a fifth limb impossible to detach, though internal and external forces demand its removal. Immigrants enter into a state of constant negotiation, deliberating what stays and what goes within their sociopolitical space.
The Other America
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.
Monstrous Masculinity: Frankenstein at Two Hundred
When I first read Frankenstein, I knew that Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the blazing eighteenth-century feminist, so I was expecting a text reflecting that parentage. But her women characters were . . . well, dead. Her book was all about men.
Disappointment City: Roberto Arlt’s 1930 Trip to Rio de Janeiro
When I moved to Rio de Janeiro and read Arlt for the first time, I began to grasp that the distance between expectation and reality, between hope and disappointment, animates and haunts the experience of the outsider to a foreign country.