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The Enduring Allure of Literary Provence
Paris is almost always bound to show up in English-language literature about France, but there’s one other locale that has thoroughly captured the imagination of writers—Provence. Perhaps you’ve read...
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Therefore
Spic, Richie said in the cafeteria, and I don’t remember why. After, as we walked back to our fourth grade classroom, I pushed him down when he turned his back. He got up. We talked shit and started...
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Writing From Exile
Lately, I’ve been considering what it means to write from exile. But it hasn’t been until very recently that I’ve seriously considered what it might mean to write from exile within my own country. In...
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Kinship and Trauma
In the spring of my freshman year, my body began to give out. Uncontrollable convulsions took over, leaving me unable to walk in the worst moments. I could vaguely sense when these convulsions were...
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James Baldwin in the Archive
In 1948, the 24-year-old James Baldwin was working on a manuscript tentatively titled Ignorant Armies. The novel drew on the true story of Wayne Lonergan, a bisexual white man who had murdered his...
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The Impossible Citizen in Jill Magi’s SPEECH
Abu Dhabi-based poet and artist Jill Magi creates the “impossible citizen” in her latest poetry book, SPEECH. Her narrator is an investigator and an admirer of the world, who moves between unnamed...
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The Shape of Nations
I was introduced to postcolonial theory in my junior year of college. The institution I went to was, at the time, quite traditional in its focus on the Western canon. There was the occasional...
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The Terror of Racial Intimacies
1. What does it mean to examine the possibilities of deep friendship—love, even—through the lens of a queer interracial reckoning with our silences? To opt for a kind of witness that exposes the...
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Picturing The Fire Next Time
Published in 1963, The Fire Next Time brings together two essays by James Baldwin. “Letter from a Region in My Mind” originally appeared in the New Yorker in November 1962 and serves as the main text...
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Reading Baldwin after Harvey: Why Climate Change is a Social Justice Issue
In the wake of Harvey, I’m reading the title essay from James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Press) with my freshmen. The first lines go, “On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the...
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