In honor of International Women’s Day, we wanted to take the time to highlight some of our incredible female authors.

Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature
by Lenora Warren

Lenora Warren tells a new story about the troubled history of abolition and slave violence by examining representations of shipboard mutiny and insurrection in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American and American literature. Fire on the Water centers on five black sailors, whose experiences of slavery and insurrection either inspired or found resonance within fiction: Olaudah Equiano, Denmark Vesey, Joseph Cinqué, Madison Washington, and Washington Goode. These stories of sailors, both real and fictional, reveal how the history of mutiny and insurrection is both shaped by, and resistant to, the prevailing abolitionist rhetoric surrounding the efficacy of armed rebellion as a response to slavery. Pairing well-known texts with lesser-known figures (Billy Budd and Washington Goode) and well-known figures with lesser-known texts (Denmark Vesey and the work of John Howison), this book reveals the richness of literary engagement with the politics of slave violence.

Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives
by Francesca Saggini and Anna Enrichetta Soccio

On the 200th anniversary of the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Transmedia Creatures presents studies of Frankenstein by international scholars from converging disciplines such as humanities, musicology, film studies, television studies, English and digital humanities. These innovative contributions investigate the afterlives of a novel taught in a disparate array of courses – Frankenstein disturbs and transcends boundaries, be they political, ethical, theological, aesthetic, and not least of media, ensuring its vibrant presence in contemporary popular culture. Transmedia Creatures highlights how cultural content is redistributed through multiple media, forms and modes of production (including user-generated ones from “below”) that often appear synchronously and dismantle and renew established readings of the text, while at the same time incorporating and revitalizing aspects that have always been central to it. The authors engage with concepts, value systems and aesthetic-moral categories—among them the family, horror, monstrosity, diversity, education, risk, technology, the body—from a variety of contemporary approaches and highly original perspectives, which yields new connections. Ultimately, Frankenstein, as evidenced by this collection, is paradoxically enriched by the heteroglossia of preconceptions, misreadings, and overreadings that attend it, and that reveal the complex interweaving of perceptions and responses it generates.

Cultivating Peace: The Virgilian Georgic in English, 1650-1750
by Melissa Schoenberger

During the decades following the English civil wars, British poets seeking to make sense of lingering political instabilities turned to Virgil’s Georgics. This ancient poem betrays deep ambivalences about war, political power, and empire, and such poets as Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and Anne Finch found in these attitudes valuable ways of responding to the uncertainties of their own time. Composed during a period of brutal conflict in Rome, Virgil’s agricultural poem distrusts easy stability, urging its readers to understand that lasting peace must be sowed, tended, reaped, and replanted, year after year. Like the ancient poet, who famously depicted a farmer’s scythe suddenly recast as a sword, the poets discussed in Cultivating Peace imagine states of peace and war to be fundamentally and materially linked. In distinct ways, they dismantle the dream of the golden age renewed, proposing instead that peace must be sustained by constant labor.

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973
by Slav N. Gratchev and Margarita Marinova, eds.

Whenever Bakhtin, in his final decade, was queried about writing his memoirs, he shrugged it off. Unlike many of his Symbolist generation, Bakhtin was not fascinated by his own self-image. This reticence to tell his own story was the point of access for Viktor Duvakin, Mayakovsky scholar, fellow academic, and head of an oral history project, who in 1973 taped six interviews with Bakhtin over twelve hours. They remain our primary source of Bakhtin’s personal views:  on formative moments in his education and exile, his reaction to the Revolution, his impressions of political, intellectual, and theatrical figures during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and his non-conformist opinions on Russian and Soviet poets and musicians. Bakhtin’s passion for poetic language and his insights into music also come as a surprise to readers of his essays on the novel. One remarkable thread running through the conversations is Bakhtin’s love of poetry, masses of which he knew by heart in several languages. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973, translated and annotated here from the complete transcript of the tapes, offers a fuller, more flexible image of Bakhtin than we could have imagined beneath his now famous texts.

African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity
by Sharrell D. Luckett

Signaling such recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities. Scholars from the fields of communication, theater, queer studies, media studies, performance studies, dance, visual arts, and fashion design, to name a few, collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes? If we conceive the arts as critical to the legacy of Black activism in the United States, how can we use that construct to inform our understanding of the complicated intersections of African American activism and aesthetics? How might we as scholars and creative thinkers further employ the arts to envision and shape a verdant society?

The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen
by Marcie Frank

Marcie Frank’s study traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel, offering a dramatic new approach to the history of the English novel that examines how the collaboration of genres contributed to the novel’s narrative form and to the modern organization of literature. Drawing on media theory and focusing on the less-examined narrative contributions of such authors as Aphra Behn, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, alongside those of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen, The Novel Stage tells the story of the novel as it was shaped by the stage.

The Art of Time: Levinas, Ethics, and the Contemporary Peninsular Novel
by Nina L. Molinaro

Ethics, or the systematized set of inquiries and responses to the question “what should I do?” has infused the history of human narrative for more than two centuries. One of the foremost theorists of ethics during the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) radicalized the discipline of philosophy by arguing that “the ethical” is the foundational moment for human subjectivity, and that human subjectivity underlies all of Western philosophy. Levinas’s voice is crucial to the resurging global attention to ethics because he grapples with the quintessential problem of alterity or “otherness,” which he conceptualizes as the articulation of, and prior responsibility to, difference in relation to the competing movement toward sameness.

Academicians and journalists in Spain and abroad have recently fastened on an emerging cluster of peninsular writers who, they argue, pertain to a discernible literary generation, provisionally referred to as Generación X. These writers are distinct from their predecessors; they and their literary texts are closely related to the specific socio-political and historical circumstances in Spain and their novels relate stories of more and less proximity, more and less responsibility, and more and less temporality. In short, they trace the temporal movement of alterity through narrative.

The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today
by Judith Nantell

Drawing on the poetry of four major voices in the Spanish lyric of today, Judith Nantell explores the epistemic works of Luis Muñoz, Abraham Gragera, Josep M. Rodríguez, and Ada Salas, arguing that, for them, the poem is the fundamental means of exploring the nature of both knowledge and poetry. In this first interpretive analysis of the epistemic nature of their poetry, Nantell innovatively engages these poets, each of whom has contributed one of their own poems along with a previously unpublished explication of their chosen poem. Each also provides an original biographical sketch to support Nantell’s development of a poetics of epiphany.

Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder
by Jennifer Smith

This volume brings together cutting-edge research on modern Spanish women as writers, activists, and embodiments of cultural change, and simultaneously honors Maryellen Bieder’s invaluable scholarly contribution to the field. The essays are innovative in their consideration of lesser-known women writers, focus on women as political activists, and use of post-colonialism, queer theory, and spatial theory to examine the period from the Enlightenment until World War II. The contributors study women as agents and representations of social change in a variety of genres, including short stories, novels, plays, personal letters, and journalistic pieces. Canonical authors such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Leopoldo Alas “Clarín,” and Carmen de Burgos are considered alongside lesser known writers and activists such as María Rosa Gálvez, Sofía Tartilán, and Caterina Albert i Paradís. The critical analyses are situated within their specific socio-historical context, and shed new light on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, and culture.

Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts: Transnational Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century Greater Mexico
by Cara Anne Kinnally

Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts traces the existence of a now largely forgotten history of inter-American alliance-making, transnational community formation, and intercultural collaboration between Mexican and Anglo American elites. This communion between elites was often based upon Mexican elites’ own acceptance and reestablishment of problematic socioeconomic, cultural, and ethno-racial hierarchies that placed them above other groups—the poor, working class, indigenous, or Afro-Mexicans, for example—within their own larger community of Greater Mexico. Using close readings of literary texts, such as novels, diaries, letters, newspapers, political essays, and travel narratives produced by nineteenth-century writers from Greater Mexico, Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts brings to light the forgotten imaginings of how elite Mexicans and Mexican Americans defined themselves and their relationship with Spain, Mexico, the United States, and Anglo America in the nineteenth century. These “lost” discourses—long ago written out of official national narratives and discarded as unrealized or impossible avenues for identity and nation formation—reveal the rifts, fractures, violence, and internal colonizations that are a foundational, but little recognized, part of the history and culture of Greater Mexico.  

Frieda Ekotto is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and currently serves as the chair of the department of Afroamerican and African studies.  Her early work involves an interdisciplinary exploration of the interactions among philosophy, law, literature, and African cinema. Don’t Whisper Too Much was first published by French publishing house L’Harmattan in 2005, and was translated by Corine Tachtiris to make Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of A Young Artiste from Bona Mbella, published by Bucknell University Press in 2019. In February, I was allowed the privilege to ask Professor Ekotto a few of my own questions about her stunning works.

How do you begin a new work? What is your process for beginning a new project?

I would like to write all the time but it is impossible because of my work as a professor.  
Writing fiction is my solace. It really helps me on a daily basis. It is like reading. If I do not read a piece of a story every day, I feel like the world is empty. I have so many ideas, I want to put them down. Therefore, as soon as I have a little bit of time, I articulate an idea in order to come back to it for either a short story or a novel. Writing fiction allows my imagination to fly all around me.

These works were first published in French, and you’ve stated before that the publishing process for Don’t Whisper Too Much had its challenges.  What was that like, and what is your take on how the publishing industry should intersect with the lives and stories of underrepresented groups?

In the novel Don’t Whisper Too Much, I really wanted to talk about love between women. How women can love each other.  It is difficult to talk about love. We usually talk about stories on love and sacrifice in a visual poetry full of sensuality and emotion.  Aesthetically, I wanted to focus on the bodies, the loving body as such: the two main characters Affi and Siliki work on the different movement of the body, disabled body that moves very slowly, dreaming, thinking, loving, speaking and body escaping confinement of sexual body. This will allow me to work on the new framing of presenting the African female body: a different gaze, an African gaze as well as an aesthetic on slowness of the way these bodies move.  These two main characters move slowly with the focus on the face, on specific parts of the body, faces, eyes, private parts. In a closed door I wanted to show intimacy as well as spaces of resistances, an opening to escape confinement as well as conditions of possible freedom, which symbolize the openness, alterity and mostly tolerance. Aesthetically, I seek to invent a writing form to allow openness, possibilities, and forms of breathing necessary for freedom to be.  In other words, create a narrative that renders plausible form of objectivity, a poetic message, something purely fictional that would affect souls. Don’t Whisper Too Much traverses different life stories and histories, trajectories dealing with time and feelings of issues fear and desire.  The characters Affi and Siliki’s stories relate to suffering of many women as well as other humans with alternative voices.

Have the responses from your English readers differed in any way from your original audience?

Yes.  There is a tradition within the Anglo-Saxon world of already well-established homosexual writers. Here my inspiration is James Baldwin. His work is about love and this is what I want to reproduce within the continent of Africa. The translator of this work wrote an excellent article on the process of translating my work. See: Corine Tachtiris “Giving Voice: Translating Speech and Silence in Frieda Ekotto’s Don’t Whisper Too Much.” This piece is useful for teaching. My work is important because it is a different voice, a voice coming from another space. In general,  readers love to discover voices from far away like those coming from Africa. Our continent is a huge one with diversity of cultures and languages, therefore, I want to add my voice to the multiple voices defining ourselves, writing ourselves and our stories in world literature.

Why choose to have Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella together in a single volume?  How do they speak to one another?

Don’t Whisper Too Much is remarkable not just for being arguably the first African novel to deal frankly with women who love women but also in that it is very “non-confrontational” for a general African audience.  There is a lot of love, intimacy, and desire, but nothing that could be called pornographic or even overtly sexual. This was a conscious decision to gain traction with a wider, even more conservative audience. In these two novels, there is a stylistic continuation of what I can do in my work, a specific desire to take a different approach to representing women who love women in an African context. In any case, I think the content of these short stories and their raw power are completely different from the first novel. Yes, my ideas are inflammatory because I want readers to note that this is a different world.

Within the first few pages of Don’t Whisper Too Much, you write that “Silence permeates every relationship.”  In the introduction of Don’t Whisper Too Much, Lindsey Green-Simms claims that “Writing, then, allows Ekotto to carve out spaces within this confinement to ‘pierce the imperceptible layer of the unsayable and slide through the cracks.’”  What does this mean for you? How does silence affect your work?

As a postcolonial subject, silence is part of how we are in the world. My desire is to write in my mother’s tongue, but this is impossible, so I translate part of what I cannot say into silence. My major question is how to translate Other’s silence.  It is important for me that the voices of ‘Others’ be heard and not silenced by being squeezed into or ignored by so many dominant discourses or what Jean François Lyotard called “master narrative.” This means that our attempts to “explore the ‘Other’ point of view” and “to give it a chance to speak for itself” must always be distinguished from the other’s struggles.  In my case, this means that I speak from the position of a postcolonial subject and that my speech can be localized within the postcolonial context despite the logical inconsistencies propelling it. I also know, however, that it is necessary for me to first master my own language before attempting to appropriate the master’s discursive control over language. Derrida discusses the question of the other’s language in Racism’s Last Word,  pointing out that one must master how to “speak the other’s language without renouncing [our] own.” In other words, translating silence is like facing ‘a wall,’ therefore to speak or to learn how to speak means to find a hole and then the wall will tumble.  In fact, I am only reminding Africans that it is about time to learn how to speak, to find a hole for themselves, for their history to be heard. I am quite aware of the cultural implications for a silenced voice who seeks “to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for)” in this particular global context. But what is crucial to understand here is not that the silence cannot be translated, but instead, that we include the necessary conditions for its translation not to be “only” localizable in the same margins of its contestation of liminality and exclusion. Translating silence is also reformulating agency that not only resists, but one that traces the teleologies of an alternative, a kind of new culture. It is within this space that I can speak of how translation of silence engenders the inscription of my subjectivity. It is also not necessary to translate silence all the time because it is the condition for so many people. Silence protects me and I am always careful how I want to uncover it.

If readers were to take one thing away from your work, what would you want that to be?

I would be very happy if readers understood the humanity of my characters who are dealing with same-sex love. To tell a story is a creative component of human experience.

I strongly believe that literature or other forms of creativity can help change attitudes in the continent of Africa on queer identities. Same-sex desire and sexual relationships between women in Africa have received scant attention in critical and cultural studies. Thus it is extremely important that we examine how homosexuality is used as a discursive tool, both in Africa and in the West that affects lives. Films and literary texts shape ethical reflection and cultural norms.  I think it is extremely important to engage these materials, both to create new language and to expand our understanding of homosexuality beyond its current Western-oriented discourse. These cultural productions encourage and support women who love women to live in relationships of love, without fear of being killed, ostracized, disowned, or beaten. 

We need more writing and other art forms on homosexuality in the continent. The more we talk about it, show images, sing songs or music, produce paintings, etc. we encourage more people to see that it is about showing homosexuals as humans. Since I am speaking out as a woman who loves women, I consider myself a dissident in the continent. Again, my approach to the question of dissidence in Africa engages not only different ways of being female, but also different ways of being queer. 

Hi! My name is Emily and I am currently a senior majoring in Literary Studies and Creative Writing.  After interning with the literary magazine on campus, West Branch, I realized that I am fascinated with all of the detail and hard work that goes into putting a book out into the world, and I am lucky to say that my last semester here on campus is going to be spent with the Bucknell University Press.  

As most book-lovers would say, books have had an enormous impact on my life.  Regardless of genre or audience, books are how we spread knowledge and empathy in our world, and I’ve always wanted to take some part in that creation process.  I want to pursue a career in publishing once I graduate in May, but for now I indulge myself by reviewing and talking about books on my blog. I also write poetry and fiction in my spare time, and would love to publish a book or two at some point in my life.

Some of my favorite books recently have been Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton, and Little Weirds by Jenny Slate. When not reading, I consume a shameful amount of podcasts.