Category Archives: Ames Highlights

While many artists are recognized posthumously, our fourth Theme Thursday features a woman whose work didn’t receive much acclaim until 30 years after her death. During her life, Frida Kahlo was often thought of as Diego Rivera’s wife. It wasn’t until feminist art  historians began to sing her praises during the 1980s that she became internationally recognized for her surrealist portraits.

The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, with introductions by Carlos Fuentes and Sarah M. Lowe, recreated Kahlo’s personal diary. From the book cover: “Published here in its entirety, Frida Kahlo’s amazing illustrated journal documents the last ten years of her turbulent life. This passionate, often surprising, intimate record, kept under lock and key for some forty years in Mexico, reveals many new dimensions in the complex persona of this remarkable Mexican artist.
Covering the years 1944-45, the 170-page journal contains Frida’s thoughts, poems, and dreams, and reflects her stormy relationship with her husband, Diego Rivera, Mexico’s famous artist. The seventy watercolor illustrations in the journal – some lively sketches, several elegant self-portraits, others complete paintings – offer insights into her creative process, and show her frequently using the journal to work out pictorial ideas for her canvases.

The text entries, written in Frida’s round, full script in brightly colored inks, add an almost decorative quality, making the journal as captivating to look at as it is to read. Frida’s childhood, her political sensibilities, and her obsession with Diego are all illuminated in witty phrases and haunting images.

Although much has been written recently about this extraordinary woman, Frida Kahlo’s art and life continue to fascinate the world. This personal document, published in a complete full-color facsimile edition, will add greatly to the understanding of her unique and powerful vision and her enormous courage in the face of more than thirty-five operations to correct injuries she had sustained in an accident at the age of eighteen. The facsimile is accompanied by an introduction by the world-renowned Mexican man of letters Carlos Fuentes and a complete translation of the diary’s text. An essay on the place of the diary in Frida’s work and in art history at large, as well as commentaries on the images, is provided by Sarah M. Lowe.”

On this third Theme Thursday, we’d like to explore the idea of intersectionality, or the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage. Yes women make $0.77 for every dollar that men make, but a black woman might make $0.63 for every dollar while Latina women make $0.54 for every dollar. To belong to multiple minority groups has a compounding effect.

In 1990, Patricia Hill Collins explored the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and writers in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. From the book cover “In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, originally published in 1990, Patricia Hill Collins set out to explore the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and writers, both within the academy and without. Here Collins provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. Drawing from fiction, poetry, music and oral history, the result is a superbly crafted and revolutionary book that provided the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought and its canon.”

On our second Theme Thursday, we feature the story of one woman whose contributions to scientific discovery were only recognized posthumously: Rosalind Franklin. Rosalind Franklin was an X-ray crystallographer who made significant contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA. Her work was used without her permission, and she received little credit before she died. She passed away before her ccolleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery.

Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, by Brenda Maddox won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology in 2002. From the book’s cover: “In 1962, Maurice Wilkins, Francis Crick, and James Watson received the Nobel Prize, but it was Rosalind Franklin’s data and photographs of DNA that led to their discovery. Brenda Maddox tells a powerful story of a remarkably single-minded, forthright, and tempestuous young woman who, at the age of fifteen, decided she was going to be a scientist, but who was airbrushed out of the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century.”

The annual theme of the 2016-2017 academic year is Women’s Power | Women’s Justice. A shared intellectual theme encourages classes to come together to explore a nuanced, intersectional concept. The Ames Library is happy to support faculty and students with diverse collections and access to materials from across the globe. Each Thursday, we’ll feature one title from our collection, which can be checked out by anyone from IWU. Think there’s something we should have, but don’t? Let your librarian know and we’ll work with you to make our collection as representative as possible.

Read the full description of the IWU annual theme here.

Our first featured book was read by all incoming first year: The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan by Jenny Nordberg.

From the book cover: “In Afghanistan, a culture ruled almost entirely by men, the birth of a son is cause for celebration and the arrival of a daughter is often mourned as misfortune. A bacha posh (literally translated from Dari as “dressed up like a boy”) is a third kind of child – a girl temporarily raised as a boy and presented as such to the outside world. Jenny Nordberg, the reporter who broke the story of this phenomenon for the New York Times, constructs a powerful and moving account of those secretly living on the other side of a deeply segregated society where women have almost no rights and little freedom.

The Underground Girls of Kabul is anchored by vivid characters who bring this remarkable story to life: Azita, a female parliamentarian who sees no other choice but to turn her fourth daughter Mehran into a boy; Zahra, the tomboy teenager who struggles with puberty and refuses her parents’ attempts to turn her back into a girl; Shukria, now a married mother of three after living for twenty years as a man; and Nader, who prays with Shahed, the undercover female police officer, as they both remain in male disguise as adults.

At the heart of this emotional narrative is a new perspective on the extreme sacrifices of Afghan women and girls against the violent backdrop of America’s longest war. Divided into four parts, the book follows those born as the unwanted sex in Afghanistan, but who live as the socially favored gender through childhood and puberty, only to later be forced into marriage and childbirth. The Underground Girls of Kabul charts their dramatic life cycles, while examining our own history and the parallels to subversive actions of people who live under oppression everywhere.”