Maria Baldwin’s Worlds: A Story of Black New England and the Fight for Racial Justice

(University of Massachusetts Press, 2019)

By Kathleen Weiler

Maria Baldwin (1856–1922) held a special place in the racially divided society of her time, as a highly respected educator at a largely white New England school and an activist who carried on the radical spirit of the Boston area’s internationally renowned abolitionists from a generation earlier.

African American sociologist Adelaide Cromwell called Baldwin “the lone symbol of Negro progress in education in the greater Boston area” during her lifetime. Baldwin used her respectable position to fight alongside more radical activists like William Monroe Trotter for full citizenship for fellow members of the black community. And, in her professional and personal life, she negotiated and challenged dominant white ideas about black womanhood. In Maria Baldwin’s Worlds, Kathleen Weiler reveals both Baldwin’s victories and what fellow activist W. E. B. Du Bois called her “quiet courage” in everyday life, in the context of the wider black freedom struggle in New England.

At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva

(Bloomsbury, 2020)

By Alice Jardine

An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva.

At the Risk of Thinking is the first biography of Julia Kristeva--one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the world. Alice Jardine brings Kristeva's work to a broader readership by connecting Kristeva's personal journey, from her childhood in Communist Bulgaria to her adult life as an international public intellectual based in Paris, with the history of her ideas. Informed by extensive interviews with Kristeva herself, this telling of a remarkable woman's life story also draws out the complexities of Kristeva's writing, emphasizing her call for an urgent revival of bold interdisciplinary thinking in order to understand--and to act in--today's world.

The Life and Art of Anne Eisner: An American Artist Between Cultures

(Officina Libraria, 2020)

By Christie McDonald

A biography of Anne Eisner: from her early years and art in New York to the Ituri Forest in the Congo with Patrick Putnam, and back again.

This biography traces Anne Eisner's life and art between cultures: from her early years and artistic career in New York, through living at the edge of the Ituri Forest in the ex-Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), to her return to New York.

Eisner came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, with the struggle among artists and intellectuals to combat fascism and create a better world. Leaving behind a successful career as a painter, Anne followed anthropologist Patrick Putnam, with whom she fell in love, to the multi-cultural community of Epulu. As an American woman and painter, her focus on cultural and aesthetic values, her belief in freedom and equality, brought an eccentric perspective to the colonial context. Unanticipated challenges forced her to think about who she was, as she agreed to marry under unfamiliar conditions, became one of the mothers, hosted researchers and tourists, and attempted to care for Putnam in his tragic decline. That her art sustained her throughout as a discipline (sketching, drawing, painting) reveals to what extent Anne was able to express joy in creativity; the beauty of her art testifies to its transformative power.

Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing

(Fordham University Press, 2019)

By Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall

When more than 150 women testified in 2018 to the sexual abuse inflicted on them by Dr. Larry Nassar when they were young, competitive gymnasts, they exposed and transformed the conditions that shielded their violation, including the testimonial disadvantages that cluster at the site of gender, youth, and race. In Witnessing Girlhood, Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall argue that they also joined a long tradition of autobiographical writing led by women of color in which adults use the figure and narrative of child witness to expose harm and seek justice. Witnessing Girlhood charts a history of how women use life narrative to transform conditions of suffering, silencing, and injustice into accounts that enjoin ethical response. Drawing on a deep and diverse archive of self-representational forms―slave narratives, testimonio, memoir, comics, and picture books―Gilmore and Marshall attend to how authors return to a narrative of traumatized and silenced girlhood and the figure of the child witness in order to offer public testimony. Emerging within these accounts are key scenes and figures that link a range of texts and forms from the mid–nineteenth century to the contemporary period. Gilmore and Marshall offer a genealogy of the reverberations across timelines, self-representational acts, and jurisdictions of the child witness in life writing. Reconstructing these historical and theoretical trajectories restores an intersectional testimonial history of writing by women of color about sexual and racist violence to the center of life writing and, in so doing, furthers our capacity to engage ethically with representations of vulnerability, childhood, and collective witness.

Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post Slavery Subjects

(Duke University Press Books, 2010)

By Christina Sharpe

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker’s black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.

Frida Kahlo (Critical Lives Series)

(Reaktion Books, London and University of Chicago Press, 2013)

By Gannit Ankori

Frida Kahlo is a legendary figure in modern art: images of and by Kahlo, both photographs and self-portraits, are recognized world-wide. This book explores the life and art of Frida Kahlo, cutting through ‘Fridamania’ to look closely at the myths, contradictions and ambiguities that riddle her story. Based on detailed analyses of the artist’s paintings, drawings, diary, personal letters, photographs, medical records and first-hand interviews with her surviving relatives and friends, Gannit Ankori examines Kahlo’s life, illuminating the reasons for her posthumous iconic status, and assessing her critical impact on contemporary art and culture.
Throughout Kahlo’s life she was emphatically of her time, deeply immersed in the political, social, scientific and cultural issues that dominated the first half of the twentieth century. Yet as this book reveals Kahlo was also ahead of her time. Many of the themes with which she engaged through her paintings – related to gender, cross-dressing, identity politics, the body, religion – were considered marginal during her lifetime, but are central concerns in the twenty-first century, decades after her death. Kahlo’s art conjures up timeless issues that relate to the human condition and which transcend any biography. 
For anyone interested in Kahlo, this is an original and succinct account of the life, work, and artistic legacy of a hugely popular artist.

Festschrift in Honour of Professor Janet Todd: A Life in Feminist Scholarship

Festschrift in Honour of Professor Janet Todd: A Life in Feminist Scholarship

(Women’s Writing Journal, Vol. 23 no. 3, 2016)
Co-authored by Ruth Perry & Ros Ballaster