The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs
Joshua L. Reid

Drawing on deep archival and oral history, Josh Reid (Snohomish) upends the way we understand First Nations sovereignty and relationships to space and marine life. It is a stunning example of community-engaged and politically vibrant scholarship.   –  Jason M. Colby, Professor and Chair, Department of History

 "Makah history … reveals that this tribal nation has continuously exploited marine space and borderlands networks to chart a traditional future." (p. 18)

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston's 1937 novel was a celebration of African American oral tradition and artistry. Contrary to mainstream views, Hurston, a novelist and anthropologist, saw African American culture in pluralist terms: long-enduring, creative and adaptive, healthy, historically embedded, no worse or better than other cultures, and with possible African retentions surviving across the "Middle Passage." The protagonist of the novel learns to participate in this oral tradition: – Christopher Douglas, Professor of English  

"She got so she could tell big stories herself from listening to the rest."

Les damnés de la terre
Frantz Fanon

This book was my revolution : it changed my way of looking at « my world » and gave me the duty, the courage either to change it or to refuse it. – Hélène Cazes, Professor, French Literature

« Monde compartimenté, manichéiste, immobile, monde de statues : la statue du général qui a fait la conquête, la statue de l'ingénieur qui a construit le pont. Monde sûr de lui, écrasant de ses pierres les échines écorchées par le fouet. Voilà le monde colonial. »

Days of Distraction
Alexandra Chang

This novel is about the tech world, about post-college romance, too, but what it does exceptionally well is show a white person what it's like to live in a world, not necessarily of overt racism, but of microaggression, where one is consistently defined by one's race (in this case Asian-American). – Andrew Murray, ATP, Department of English

"Then again, J [the narrator's boyfriend] is third-generation Irish. We watch Hell on Wheels, an American Western set in the post-Civil War 1860s. Whenever the Irish characters are discriminated against on the show, I feel more connected to J. I want to say something about it, but when I look at him, it does not appear that he identifies with the beaten Irish man on the computer screen."

Do Muslim Women Need Saving?
Lila Abu-Lughod

Abu-Lughod opens with a question I've asked myself many times during my research: how can the lives of the Muslim women one comes to know be so at odds with dominant Western images of "the Muslim woman"? The book offers scholarly, personal, and grassroots reflections on Muslim women's lives in all their diversities, and insight into a long tradition of corrosive stereotypes about Islam. – Elizabeth Vibert, Department of History

“I am surprised by how easily people presume that Muslim women do not have rights. ... Generalizing about cultures prevents us from appreciating or even accounting for people’s experiences and the contingencies with which we all live.” Lila Abu-Lughod

Blue Bear Woman (original: Ourse bleue)
Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau, translated by Susan Ouriou & Christelle Morelli

Blue Bear Woman, a masterpiece of a novel, is a feast of storytelling as well as it plays an important role in the resurgence of Indigenous peoples in Eeyou Istchee, in northern Québec. – Pierre-Luc Landry (he/they), Assistant Professor, Department of French

« Je regarde de tout mon être, les rives de la Eastmain couronnées de forêts, pensant à leur noyade prochaine sous des millions de mètres cube d'eau. Une tristesse infinie m'accable. »

Written on Water
Eileen Chang, translated by Andrew F. Jones

This collection of translated essays by Eileen Chang features the author's incredibly perceptive, humorous and personal observations about gender, social class, love, and art; it makes me feel like 1940s China is not so far away. The book also includes the talented Chang​'s original illustrations! – Angie Chau, Assistant Professor, Department of Pacific and Asian Studies

"In a time of political chaos, people were powerless to improve the external conditions governing their lives. But they could influence the environment immediately surrounding them, that is, their clothes. Each of us lives inside our own clothes." (from "A Chronicle of Changing Clothes")

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African
Olaudah Equiano

This 1789 autobiography is not just a stunning narrative of one man's experience of slavery – it also demonstrates how hard Black people have had to fight to get white audiences to believe their testimony. – Erin E. Kelly, Associate Professor, Department of English

"O, ye nominal Christians! Might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God?"

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong

This book taught me to read slowly, reflectingly. It repeatedly stopped me in my tracks with expressions of the human experience that are both brutal and beautiful in their honesty and insight. – Alexandra D'Arcy, Department of Linguistics

"They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it."

Scheherazade Goes West
Fatema Mernissi

This book through humor unpacks the manner in which western (specifically French) colonization has created imagined views of 'harem' and a homogenous 'exotic/erotic' Muslim woman in ways that completely erase the strength expressed in the lived experiences of women in Morocco, Egypt, and Turkey. This book transformed the way in which I visualized Islamic feminism and its relationship to empire. – Sikata Banerjee, Professor, Department of Gender Studies

White Teeth
Zadie Smith

Brought the complexities of interracial London to my awareness for the first time – Sara Beam, Department of History

I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
Austin Channing Brown

Austin Channing Brown’s observations of her experiences as one of the very few BIPOC women working in various well-intentioned non-profit organisations was at once eye-opening and disturbingly familiar. Her account shows that it is not enough to mean well; we must be genuinely open to change. – Laurel Bowman, Department of Greek and Roman Studies

The Enemy That Never Was: A History of Japanese Canadians
Ken Adachi

A history book with historic impact, Adachi's work galvanized the activists who held the Canadian federal government to account for wrongdoing during the 1940s. – Jordan Stanger-Ross, Department of History

"I had two aims when I began to write this book. First, having been the victim since childhood of a particularly virulent strain of racism, I wished to reveal the demon in all its scaly ugliness and perhaps exorcise it. Secondly, I wished to set down the nearly century-old story of the Japanese in Canada … particularly against the backdrop of the rattling of sabres in the Far East and the stresses generated by an immigrant group entering an unstable, volatile society." (iv)

A Small Place
Jamaica Kincaid

Read in my early 30s, Kincaid revealed to me that complex (de)colonial theory, its social implications and embodiments, can be powerfully conveyed through creative writing. – waaseyaa’sin Christine Sy, Assistant Professor, Department of Gender Studies

"That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some native—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go—so when the native see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself." (18-19)

Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison

The painful intensity of this book haunted me for years after I first read it at age sixteen. "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." Powerful words. – Magdalena Kay, Department of English

Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger
Rod Owens

As systemic racism, state-sanctioned violence, and social injustice have been revealed so powerfully, this intimate, courageous book recovers rage as a force for healing. From the heart of a gay, black, American Tibetan Lama and former Black Panther, this book emerges from astonishing depths of compassion. – Dr. Chris Goto-Jones, Department of Philosophy

"I let myself cry and admit that I am not trusting many people right now … You should know that I am not in the mood for your shit right now … I must continue living amongst people who let their selfish concerns outweigh the health and freedom of people like me."

Coming of Age in Mississippi 
Anne Moody

A searing memoir of growing up black and female in Mississippi during the 1940s and 50s. At risk to her life, Moody became an early leader in the Civil Rights Movement, participating in the famous Woolworth lunch counter sit-in in Jackson, Mississippi, and working for CORE during the Freedom Summer of 1964. Moody's story is equal parts devastating and inspiring. – Rachel Hope Cleves, Department of History

"Before Emmett Till's murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears. I knew once I got food, the fear of starving to death would leave. I also was told that if I were a good girl, I wouldn't have to fear the Devil or hell. But I didn't know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought."

Are Prisons Obsolete?
Angela Davis

In North America, we take mass incarceration for granted – Davis shows how prisons help us ignore our greater social problems, like racism and wealth inequality. – Audrey Yap, Department of Philosophy

"On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted. It is difficult to imagine life without them. At the same time, there is reluctance to face the realities hidden within them, a fear of thinking about what happens inside them. To think about this simultaneous presence and absence is to begin to acknowledge the part played by ideology in shaping the way we interact with our social surroundings. We take prisons for granted but are often afraid to face the realities they produce. After all, no one wants to go to prison. Because it would be too agonizing the cope with the possibility that anyone, including ourselves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives."

No-No Boy
John Okada

Through the story of Japanese-American experiences during and after WWII, the novel delves into institutional racism that jeopardizes civil rights and the precariousness of liminal identities.  – Sujin Lee, Assistant Professor, Department of Pacific and Asian Studies

"I am not your son and I am not Japanese and I am not American." (p. 16)

An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America
Michael Witgen (Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe)

Witgen's book provided for me an exceptional model for putting Indigenous perspectives of history front and center and revealed the powerful impact of disrupting familiar narratives. – Patrick Lozar, Assistant Professor, Department of History

Felix Ever After
Kacen Callender

Callender offers an endearing and well-written young adult novel about Felix Love’s journey to loving themself, as a queer, Black, trans person. Content warning for some transphobic passages. – Janni Aragon, PhD, HUM Mentor and Director of the Technology & Society Program

Any Known Blood
Lawrence Hill

When I first read this book it changed the way that I saw the world because it gave such moving accounts of the 'ordinary' racism faced by non-white Canadians. The more severe harms of slavery Hill describes in his later work The Book of Negroes are obviously important to recognize as well, but Any Known Blood illustrates the very serious harms that are generated by more mundane instances of racism, and it manages to do so with an amazing mix of sharp insight and deadpan wit. – Scott Woodcock, Department of Philosophy

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
Reni Eddo Lodge

Having read Reni Eddo Lodge’s book few times, I have become more cognizant of some of the complexities surrounding the concept of "race". – Dr. Moustapha Fall, Assistant-Teaching Professor, Department of French

"[...] I’ve written before about this white denial being the ubiquitous politics of race that operates on its inherent invisibility. So I can’t talk to white people about race anymore because of the consequent denials, awkward cartwheels and mental acrobatics that they display when this is brought to their attention. Who really wants to be alerted to a structural system that benefits them at the expense of others? I can no longer have this conversation, because we’re often coming at it from completely different places. I can’t have a conversation with them about the details of a problem if they don’t even recognise that the problem exists [...]"

No Archive Will Restore You
Julietta Singh

Singh's No Archive Will Restore marks a stunning turn in creative nonfiction toward the complex, irresolvable terrain of the body through ongoing meditations on pain, sexuality, race and desire. – Chase Joynt, Filmmaker and Assistant Professor, Department of Gender Studies

"Why this desire for a body archive, for an assembly of history's traces deposited in me? (I worry over how to describe it, how to frame it without sounding banal or bafflingly idiosyncratic.) The body archive is an attunement, a hopeful gathering, an act of love against the foreclosures of reason." (29)

Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe

This remarkable book—a deep human tragedy and a cutting critique of colonial arrogance—allows us to see ourselves without overt judgment; it just tells, and is full of lessons we keep forgetting. My personal context: I taught it while living in Africa for two years.  – G. Kim Blank, Department of English

"A child cannot pay for its mother's milk."

The Hate You Give
Angie Thomas

This book is about systemic racism, police brutality, and the BLM movement. It's also about coming of age and finding a voice. I love this book because it addresses really difficult subject matter through a beautifully told story that is geared towards younger generations - I gave this book to my 13-year old for her birthday last year; she has read it a dozen times and keeps going back to it. – Sonya Bird, Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics

A Small Place
Jamaica Kincaid

Kincaid's bitter outrage caused me to better see the postcolonial world through the eyes of its subalterns. She exposes the bafflement of her island's inhabitants, for whom colonialist racism is simply "rude," tourists who disavow their complicity, and locally minted kleptocrats. – Dr. Lincoln Z. Shlensky, Associate Professor, Department of English

"Do you ever try to understand why people like me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive and cannot forget?"

Royal Commentaries of the Incas (1608)
Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca

This work provides much of what we know about the Inka empire before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532. Of particular interest for me is its discussion of the key role played by the mothers of first-generation mestizos in the preservation of the history of Perú: – Beatriz de Alba-Koch, Department of History; Director, Latin American Studies Program

"As soon as I resolved to write this history, I wrote to my old schoolmates at my primary school and grammar school [in Cusco], and urged each of them to help me with accounts they might have of the particular conquests the Incas made in the provinces their mothers came from, for each province has its accounts and knots [quipus] to record its annals and traditions, and thus preserves its own history much better than that of its neighbours. My schoolfellows earnestly complied with my request, and each reported my intentions to his mother and relatives, and they, on hearing that an Indian [‘un indio’], a son of their own country, intended to write its history, brought from their archives the records they had of their histories and sent me them." —Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca, Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, Abridged, trans. Harold V. Livermore, ed. Karen Spalding (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 7.

Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches
Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde's work not only helped me think about my own feminism differently, but she also had a profound impact on the Black German women's movement in the 1980s. – Helga Thorson, Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies

"We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt." (Audre Lorde: "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism," 1981)

The Plague of Doves
Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe)

Erdrich's novel weaves together several character-narrators whose stories show how we are all bound in a knot of history and obligations to each other. Erdrich's mastery of the word, sentence and story makes this at once an enjoyable read and an important acknowledgement of a dark history. – Corinne Bancroft, Department of English

"When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape."

Spiraling Webs of Relation
Dr. Joanne DiNova (Couchiching First Nation)

This book shows clearly how the academy, particularly English as a discipline, attempts (and fails) to oppress Indigenous thought and stories. She argues, in part, that Western philosophies and epistemologies are genocidal and she traces how they became so across 600 years of history. Of more importance, though, is the foundation she lays for an Indigenist criticism of Indigenous stories. It's a compelling argument that shifted how I see my own culture (British-Canadian). – Sara Humphreys, Department of English

'Aboriginal worldview' can be seen to occur in variations among different tribes across the Americas. Moreover, the similarity in worldview occurs among indigenous peoples around the globe, including the indigenous peoples of Northern Europe, the Saami. It will probably be objected that such a claim – that all Aboriginal peoples share a similar worldview – is pan-Indianism[,]" states DiNova, "In a sense it is; however, it can be countered that the western worldview is an exception to a more widespread – though strikingly similar – worldview witnessed among indigenous peoples worldwide. With this in mind, the fact that indigenous peoples in the America share a worldview is not surprising. What is surprising is that the western worldview is so peculiar" (DiNova 4).

Obasan
Joy Kogawa

Amongst many other things, Obasan showed me how past unacknowledged harms live harmfully on, how much the official stories and mythologies ignore or repress. – Iain Higgins, Department of English

"Where do we come from Obasan? We come from cemeteries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth. We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling."

Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality
José Carlos Mariátegui, trans. Marjory Urquidi

Peruvian political theorist Mariátegui (1894-1930) was and is inspiring in arguing for the primacy of Indigenous heritage in the region he renamed "Indo-América," as in his insistence that the dispossession and economic marginalization of the Indigenous was the key element giving rise to what his contemporaries called "the Indian problem": – Matthew Koch, Departments of Hispanic and Italian Studies/History

"we protest against the instinctive attempt of the creole or mestizo to reduce [the ‘Indian problem’] to an exclusively administrative, pedagogical, ethnic, or moral problem in order to avoid at all cost recognizing its economic aspect.… We are not satisfied to assert the Indian’s right to education, culture, progress, love, and heaven. We begin by categorically asserting his right to land."

Kindred
Octavia E. Butler

A powerful, shattering story about slavery and race and the ways in which actions and events have tangible, irrevocable and potentially terrible consequences for generations. – Ewa Czaykowska, Department of Linguistics

"I was back at home–in my own house, in my own time. But I was still caught somehow, joined to the wall as though my arm were growing out of it–or growing into it. From the elbow to the ends of the fingers, my left arm had become a part of the wall."

Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention
Tings Chak

Tings Chak is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and architect. This graphic novel examines the migrant detention system in Canada, one of the fastest growing incarceration sectors in North America's prison industrial complex in an era of militarized borders, state surveillance, and criminalized migration. It also considers the intimate experiences of detainees who can be held in detention centres and maximum security prisons without charges for indefinite periods and the role of architectural design in the control and management of racialized migrant bodies in such spaces. Chak's work was inspired by her grassroots activism in anti-racist, migrant justice, prison abolition, and spatial justice struggles especially as an organizer with No One Is Illegal – Toronto and the End Immigration Detention Network. – Annalee Lepp, Department of Gender Studies

"These spaces are where people without status are expelled to, to buildings and landscapes so banal, that they go unnoticed. Just as the people detained are without papers, so too are the buildings without photos or drawings (or only with highly classified ones) – they, too, are undocumented … Spaces of incarceration are both nowhere and everywhere, blended into the landscape. But their invisibility is no coincidence. We hide the things we don't want to see or that we don't want seen … There are billions of dollars made in the incarceration of human bodies. There are a lot of hands involved in this industry, but there aren't many faces. In these authorless spaces, we hide the casualties of poverty and displacement, we even try to hide the spaces themselves. It is a tyranny without a tyrant ..."

The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty
Aileen Moreton-Robinson

Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s introduction opens with the above quote by her departed uncle (Gami). His words are as relevant to Canada, the US, and New Zealand as they are to Australia (the context in which Moreton-Robinson is writing). How did those places become white possessions? What ideas are at work to maintain them and make it appear not only natural, but also "virtuous," that it should be so? This is what Moreton-Robinson’s book sets out to reveal. The White Possessive does this work by bringing together the fields of whiteness studies, Indigenous Studies and critical race theory into the same analytic frame, exposing their silences and omissions, to show the interdependence between owning property, becoming propertyless and being property. For anyone interested in advancing justice in our own time, these are connections we cannot afford to miss. – Georgia Sitara, Departments of History, Gender Studies, and Social Justice Studies

"The trouble with white people is they think and behave like they own everything."

How the García Girls Lost Their Accent
Julia Álvarez

The power of literature to express the sense of linguistic and cultural alterity I felt as an "alien person" in the USA unravelled in every page. I saw myself reflected in the experiences of Latina women, who, like me, lived in a new language and new country. Eye opening, empowering, therapeutic. – Marina Bettaglio (Hispanic and Italian Studies)