Essays & Speeches

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa presents the US-Mexico border as a space ripe for sociocultural, psychological, and historical deconstruction. Speaking from her own experiences growing up in South Texas, Anzaldúa redefines the boundaries between practice and theory, personal history and cultural critique, poetry and prose. Writing in both Spanish and English (and omitting translations at times), Anzaldúa writes as a Chicana woman, in the Chicano language, envisioning a new consciousness borne out... Read Borderlands La Frontera Summary

Written in 2013, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is a nonfiction book by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. The work examines modern botany and environmentalism through the lens of the traditions and cultures of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Through a series of personal reflections, the author explores the connection between living things and human efforts to cultivate a more sustainable... Read Braiding Sweetgrass Summary

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Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work, written by Dave Isay with Maya Millett and published in 2016, is a collection of brief, first-person narratives about the value and meaning of work. These stories were collected through the oral history project of StoryCorps, a nonprofit organization that records, archives, and shares stories of life in America. StoryCorps and its founder and president, Dave Isay, have received many grants and awards for the organization’s work, including... Read Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work Summary

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Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is a genre-bending meditation on race, racism, and citizenship in 21st-century America. Published in 2014, Citizen combines prose, poetry, and images to paint a provocative portrait of the African American experience and racism in the so-called “post-racial” United States. Claudia Rankine is an essayist, poet, playwright and the editor of several anthologies; she is currently the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. Citizen is the winner of... Read Citizen: An American Lyric Summary

Henry David Thoreau’s “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” more commonly known as “Civil Disobedience,” originated as a Concord Lyceum lecture given in January 1848 as the Mexican-American War was winding down. The essay and its central thesis—that following one’s conscience trumps the need to follow the law—have profoundly impacted global history, political philosophy, and American thought, notably influencing both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.The text was originally published in an 1849 essay... Read Civil Disobedience Summary

The all-time best-selling published work in American history, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense helped ignite a revolution that changed the world. Released in January 1776, the pamphlet condemned the arbitrary rule of Britain’s King George III and his Parliament, and it urged colonists to rise up against their oppressors and replace colonial rule with a democratic republic of free and equal citizens. Common Sense helped inspire rebel leaders to declare American independence six months later.An e-book... Read Common Sense Summary

Atul Gawande’s Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science is a collection of essays that weaves narratives from Gawande’s personal experience as a surgical resident together with research, philosophy, and case studies in medicine. Published in 2002, Complications became a 2002 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction. Gawande, a Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Fellow, is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at... Read Complications Summary

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Culture and Imperialism is a nonfiction book published in 1993 by the Palestinian American author and academic Edward Said. Originating from a series of lectures that Said delivered in 1985 and 1986, Culture and Imperialism is an expansion of the ideas set out in his groundbreaking earlier work, Orientalism. Considered one of the founders of the field of post-colonial studies, Said looks at how the formerly colonized margins influence the metropolitan centers, and vice versa... Read Culture and Imperialism Summary

... Read Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions Summary

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Discourse on Colonialism is an essay written originally in French by Aimé Césaire and published in 1950. This seminal work by Césaire opens with a thesis that Europe currently suffers from two problems. The first problem is the state of the proletariat and colonialism and the second is its moral hypocrisy. Throughout the essay, Césaire elaborates on this thesis by identifying the proletariat as the colonized laborer and the bourgeois as the European academic, scholar... Read Discourse on Colonialism Summary