20 years after the publication of ‘Purple Hibiscus,’ a generation of African writers have followed in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s footsteps

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Torino, Italy, October 2021. Image: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty

BY SIMON LEWIS

Twenty years ago, in October 2003, 26-year-old Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the North American publishing scene with her debut novel,“ Purple Hibiscus.”

Since then, Adichie’s literary fame has only grown: She’s published two more novels and a collection of short stories, while two of her TED talks have garnered tens of millions of views. In September 2023, she published her first children’s book – a joyful celebration of mother-daughter love – under the nom de plume Nwa Grace-James.

But the October 2003 publication of “Purple Hibiscus” didn’t just signal the start of a single author’s brilliant career. It also forged a path for a whole new generation of African novelists who had come to America as immigrants or students and who have been mining that experience in their writing.

The struggles to get published by prior generations of African authors are almost legendary. Thirty years apart, Chinua Achebe and Tsitsi Dangarembga have both described how close their manuscripts of “Things Fall Apart” (1958) and “Nervous Conditions” (1988) came to being lost. Achebe’s only copy of the manuscript was a handwritten draft. He sent it to a typing agency in London that nearly dismissed it as a joke. Dangarembga’s manuscript sat unread in the basement of a British publishing house for years. Only when the writer stopped by the offices during a work trip to London did the editors agree to read it.

Through attending American MFA programs, however, Adichie and her contemporaries were able to tap into the networks of agents and found their work snapped up by American publishers.

Writers born in Africa who studied at American universities – Teju Cole, Yaa Gyasi, Uzodinma Iweala, NoViolet Bulawayo and Akwaeke Emezi, to name just a few – have followed in Adichie’s footsteps.

“Purple Hibiscus” has been to these writers what Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967) was to aspiring Latin American writers during the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s, and what Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” (1981) was to the proliferation of Indian writers in English from the 1980s on.

While it would be reassuring to think that the current surge of African novelists represents a wider American interest in all things African, the success of these novels may also have to do with the fact that so many are actually set in the U.S.

The recurrent theme of immigration to the U.S. gives many of these works direct – and instructive – relevance to U.S. readers. As Black outsiders in the U.S., African immigrants have a particularly acute insight into the way race and racism affect daily life in this country. One of the common features of these novels is the way in which they explore the tension of racial solidarity and mutual misunderstanding between African immigrants and Black Americans.

When I first started teaching African literature, I often had difficulty finding books in print. Now my problem is deciding who to leave out of my syllabus. Here is a very brief list of some of the books that I would consider must-reads.

1. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Americanah” (2013)

As its title suggests, Adichie’s fourth novel, “Americanah,” is arguably the definitive novel of contemporary African immigration to America.

It tells the story of Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman overstaying her student visa, and how she negotiates the new Black identity forced on her by the blunt instrument of American race-construction.

In a brilliant metafictional move, Adichie has Ifemelu achieve internet fame by writing a blog dedicated to non-American Blacks: “Dear Non-American Black,” Ifemelu writes, “when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t ‘black’ in your country? You’re in America now.”

Ifemelu’s experience of racism is simultaneously hurtful and baffling to her. On the one hand, her illegal status makes her both psychologically and physically vulnerable. But at times American racism is almost comical; Ifemelu doesn’t understand why an innocent reference to eating watermelon might be misconstrued, for instance, and she is totally bewildered by a shop assistant’s attempt to avoid distinguishing between two shoppers by reference to their skin color.

2. Yaa Gyasi, “Homegoing” (2016)

Ghanaian-born Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel takes the form of a series of skillfully interwoven stories set on either side of the Atlantic.

Beginning with two half sisters, Effia and Esi, in the Gold Coast in the middle of the 18th century, the stories trace the two sets of the sisters’ descendants through six subsequent generations in West Africa and the U.S. In the final two stories we meet the young teenager Marjorie, who, as the American-born daughter of Ghanaian parents, struggles to come to terms with her identity as one of Ifemelu’s “Non-American Blacks.” She finds herself ostracized by her Black classmates for “acting white” but is unable to enjoy a normal relationship with a white classmate. One of the only Black teachers at her high school tells her, “You’re here now, and here black is black is black.”

3. NoViolet Bulawayo, “We Need New Names” (2013)

When “We Need New Names” appeared, Nigerian novelist Helon Habila accused NoViolet Bulawayo of peddling “poverty-porn” by pandering to American stereotypes of Africa.

However, for Bulawayo’s teenage protagonist Darling, it’s American culture that is dangerously dysfunctional – and personally discombobulating. Darling finds American high school ridiculously easy, is horrified by the laxness of American parenting and is generally unimpressed by the urban blight she sees around her in the city she calls Destroyed, Michigan.

Late in the novel, her mentally ill countryman Tshaka Zulu is shot to death by police when off his meds and ranting in his home language. You might think that such a violent, tragic event would be a major plot driver. Sadly, it seems to exemplify just one more random peril – little different from being hit by a car or struck down by cancer – that many Africans coming to America have to endure.

4. Uzodinma Iweala, “Speak No Evil” (2018)

Even wealth and class status offer no protection from such perils.

In Uzodinma Iweala’s “Speak No Evil,” the main character, Niru, is the high-achieving son of high-achieving Nigerian parents in supposedly cosmopolitan Washington, D.C. The first three-quarters of the book appear to be exploring Niru’s dilemma: how to come out as gay to his conservative parents.

It turns out that Niru’s gayness – an invisible characteristic, after all – is not the problem; his Blackness is. When he gets in a row outside a bar with his best friend, Meredith – an equally well-off, well-connected, high-flying white female classmate – someone calls the cops. In the space of a paragraph the inevitable has happened: Shots are fired. “You’re safe,” someone says to Meredith. “He can’t hurt you.”

By extraordinary coincidence, Adichie grew up in the very house that Chinua Achebe had lived in on the campus of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. She, and the other writers of her generation, grew up in the house of fiction that Achebe and his generation established. The writers of that older generation were concerned with the material and cultural despoliation of colonialism. In Achebe’s words, their task was to let their African readers know “where the rain began to beat” them.

Today’s African writers demand readers’ attention by letting them know that for African and African-descended people in the U.S., although the winds may have shifted, the storm is far from over.

South Africa’s Surveillance Law Is Changing But Citizens’ Privacy Is Still At Risk

BY JANE DUNCAN

In a ringing judgment for the right to privacy, the South African Constitutional Court declared sections of the country’s main communication surveillance law unconstitutional in February 2021.

The court gave parliament three years to pass a new law remedying the areas of unconstitutionality. The February 2024 deadline for these amendments is looming fast.

The Regulation of Interception of Communication and Provision of Communication Related Information Act (Rica) was intended in part to protect privacy, combat crime and promote national security. It requires all cellphone sim cards in the country to be registered, and prohibits interception of people’s communications without their consent, except under certain conditions.

But Rica had some weaknesses which have been abused by rogue elements in intelligence. The court case was brought by the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism, after the state misused Rica to spy on the centre’s managing partner, Sam Sole, in an attempt to reveal his sources of information.

The justice ministry has produced an amendment bill to meet the court’s deadline.

Having researched issues relating to communication surveillance and its oversight for years, my view is that the amendment bill is flawed. It doesn’t provide enough safeguards against the violation of privacy.

The problem with Rica

In terms of Rica, intelligence and law enforcement agencies must apply to a special, retired judge for interception directions (or warrants) to conduct surveillance to solve serious crimes and protect national security. The judge is appointed by the justice minister.

The court found Rica to be unconstitutional on the following five grounds:

People don’t have to be told that they have been under surveillance.

The appointment and renewal processes for the Rica judge lack independence.

The judge only has to hear from one side: those applying for interception warrants.

Rica does not ensure that intercepted data is safely managed.

Rica fails to recognise that lawyers and journalists have a professional duty to keep their sources and communications confidential.

The court prescribed two interim measures while the law was being redrafted. The first was that within 90 days of an interception direction (warrant) having lapsed, those state agencies applying for surveillance need to inform the surveillance subject that they have been spied on. The second is that applicants must also tell the judge if the surveillance subject is a lawyer or journalist.
Post-surveillance notification

With the proposed amendments, the justice ministry has responded largely by reproducing the court’s first interim measure. However, it has added another clause stating that if notifying someone that they have been surveilled could potentially have a negative impact on national security, then the judge may withhold notification and for such period as may be determined by the judge.

This clause is too broad and does not provide an ultimate deadline for notification. It introduces speculation into the decision-making. That’s because the impact needs merely to be possible. There is no requirement to show a national security threat, merely a possible negative impact.

Independence of the Rica judge

The justice ministry has inserted a requirement for the Rica judge to be appointed by the justice minister, in consultation with the Chief Justice. This is adequate to the extent that it means that decision does not rest with the executive only.

The ministry has also introduced an entirely new position of a review judge, to automatically review the decisions of the Rica judge. It would have been better to build automatic review into the process once surveillance subjects have been notified. That might make the review process more robust as the subject may provide details that shed new light on the Rica judge’s decisions. If the judge’s decision to grant the warrant was misplaced, this could lead to the original decision being overturned or intercepted material being destroyed.

However, given the load of several hundred cases a year, one judge may not be enough, either at the decision stage or the review stage. Consideration should be given to establishing a panel of judges.

Hearing both sides

It is possible that the review judge was introduced to respond to the problem of hearing only from the applicant (the “ex parte” problem). If that is the case, then it is not an adequate response. Both judges will still be making decisions based on the same one-sided secret evidence.

Rather, as amaBhungane argued in the Constitutional Court case, the bill could include a new position of a public advocate, to defend the interests of the surveillance subjects.

The public advocate could be granted security clearance, in line with well-recognised processes involving “cleared counsel”.

Such lawyers have clearance to access the secret evidence the state is relying on. They are on the same footing as the agency applying for surveillance. They will be able to interrogate the case beyond what is provided for in the application.

As has been argued recently, the public advocate could represent the interests of surveillance subjects who decide to take decisions on review following post-surveillance notification.
Confidentiality for lawyers and journalists

Regarding the need for the applicant to inform the judge that a subject is a journalist or lawyer, the ministry has left out an important safeguard from the interim measure provided by Constitutional Court’s judgment. It required the judge to grant the warrant only if necessary, which means that the warrant must be an investigative method of last resort.

On the management of surveillance data, the court required more details in the law on how and where surveillance data must be accessed, stored and destroyed. The justice ministry has failed to provide such detail.

Metadata surveillance

The amendment bill is silent on possibly the most serious surveillance issue, relating to the state’s massive and underregulated surveillance of data about a person’s communication, or metadata. Rica allows the state to use procedures other than those provided for in the act to access metadata.

For example, the state has preferred to use section 205 of the Criminal Procedure Act as it contains much lower privacy standards than Rica. It is thus open to abuse.

One solution is to make Rica the only law governing access to metadata, but retain the procedure whereby the ordinary courts can grant warrants, rather than restricting decision-making to the Rica judge only, to ensure speedy decision-making.

Missed opportunity

The justice ministry had more than enough time for the review of Rica, section 205 and the entire surveillance setup to assess whether they were still fit for purpose.

The failure is an indictment on the ministry’s leadership of the review process. It missed the opportunity to address the growing concerns about unaccountable state spying.

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Book Banning In U.S. Reaches Ominous Levels

More than 3,300 cases were recorded in public schools and libraries during the last academic year.

BY STEPHEN RHODE

O n May 10, 1933, the German Student Union organized a nationwide day of book burning to incinerate all books deemed incompatible with Nazi ideology, including titles by Jewish, half-Jewish, communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal, pacifist and sexologist authors. This history has never been more relevant than during the current Banned Book Week, an annual event sponsored by dozens of organizations committed to the free access of information, from the American Library Association to the National Council of Teachers of English.

This is no ordinary Banned Book Week. In the past, Americans typically lamented scattered examples of small-town libraries and prudish school boards banning books like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Those numbers now feel quaint. Between July 2022 and July 2023, according to a startling new report by PEN America, 3,362 instances of book banning took place in U.S. public school classrooms and libraries, denying students access to 1,557 unique book titles created by 1,480 authors, illustrators and translators. This represented a remarkable 33% increase over the 2021–22 school year. The authors targeted for banning are most frequently female, people of color and/or LGBTQ+ individuals. “Amid a growing climate of censorship,” the report finds, “school book bans continue to spread through coordinated campaigns by a vocal minority of groups and individual actors and, increasingly, as a result of pressure from state legislation.”

More than 40% of all book bans occurred in Florida school districts, the most of any state. PEN America recorded 1,406 book ban cases in Florida, followed by 625 bans in Texas, 333 bans in Missouri, 281 bans in Utah and 186 bans in Pennsylvania. PEN found that overwhelmingly, “book bans target books on race or racism or featuring characters of color, as well as books with LGBTQ+ characters.” In addition,

banned books also include books on physical abuse, health and well-being, and themes of grief and death. Notably, most instances of book bans affect young adult books, middle grade books, chapter books, or picture books—books specifically written and selected for younger Audiences… [More than 60 percent of book bans] occurred in eight states with legislation that has either directly facilitated book bans or created the conditions for local groups to pressure and intimidate educators and librarians into removing books.

PEN is not the only group tracking these disturbing trends. In a report issued in March 2023, the American Library Association revealed that the number of book challenges in 2022 was nearly twice the then-record total from 2021 and by far the most since the ALA had begun keeping data 20 years ago. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “The last two years have been exhausting, frightening, outrage inducing.”

In addition to the censors’ favorite, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the vast majority of complaints are directed at works with LGBTIQA+ or racial themes, including Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer,” Jonathan Evison’s “Lawn Boy,” Angie Thomas’ “The Hate U Give” and a book-length edition of the “1619 Project,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning report from The New York Times on the legacy of slavery.

The ALA report indicates that bills facilitating the restriction of books have been proposed or passed in Arizona, Iowa, Texas, Missouri and Oklahoma, among other states. In Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has approved laws to review reading materials and limit classroom discussion of gender identity and race, books pulled indefinitely or temporarily include John Green’s “Looking for Alaska,” Colleen Hoover’s “Hopeless,” Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Grace Lin’s picture story “Dim Sum for Everyone!” More recently, Florida’s Martin County school district removed dozens of books from its middle schools and high schools, including numerous works by novelist Jodi Picoult, Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Beloved” and James Patterson’s “Maximum Ride” thriller.

I recently returned from a trip to Europe that included a stop in Bonn, Germany. Our local guide paused in front of the Old City Hall and drew our attention to the cobblestones under our feet. We saw many plaques in the ground commemorating the spines of the books that had been burned on that very spot on May 10, 1933. They bore the names of authors such as Jack London, Karl Marx, Andre Gide, Ernest Hemingway and Sigmund Freud, among many more. It was not only brownshirts who partook in the burning of these books. Students and professors from the nearby college eagerly scoured their shelves and dutifully brought offending titles to add to the pile.

On a previous trip to Germany, I stood in the Berlin Operplatz and looked down through a small transparent platform into an underground space filled with empty white bookshelves, accompanied by a plaque bearing the prophetic words written by Heinrich Heine, a German poet and writer whose radical political views led to many of his works being banned by German authorities.

That was but a prelude,” he famously wrote in 1821. “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people.”

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What Is Indigenous Peoples Day? A Day Of Celebration, Protest And Reclaiming History

Women drummers sing as the march during an Idigenous Peoples Day event, Oct. 9, 2017 in Seattle...(AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)

BY HALLIE GOLDEN AND CHRISTINE FERNANDO

(THE ASSOCIATED PRESS) - From Alcatraz Island to a park in New York City, Native American people will celebrate their centuries-long history of resilience on Monday with ceremonies, dances and speeches.

The events across the U.S. come two years after President Joe Biden officially commemorated Indigenous Peoples Day. An increasing number of states and cities have also recognized it — pivoting from a day long rooted in the celebration of explorer Christopher Columbus to one focused on the people whose lives and culture were forever changed by colonialism.

“This day is about reclaiming histories,” said Kyle Mays, an associate professor of American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s acknowledging the history of dispossession and violence against Indigenous people.”

Here is a look at why it’s called Indigenous Peoples Day, the history behind it and how people celebrate.

WHY IS IT CALLED INDIGENOUS PEOPLES DAY?

Indigenous Peoples Day has been recognized for decades in different forms and under a variety of names to celebrate Native Americans’ history and culture and to recognize the challenges they continue to face.

In 2021, Biden issued the first-ever presidential proclamation of Indigenous Peoples Day. He said in a statement that the day is meant to “honor America’s first inhabitants and the Tribal Nations that continue to thrive today.”

It is typically observed on the second Monday in October, the same day as Columbus Day, a federal holiday established decades ago to recognize Columbus’ sighting in 1492 of what came to be known as the Americas.

“Columbus was a lost explorer who stumbled into this part of the world and brought famine, colonization, the deaths of millions of Indigenous peoples,” said Nick Tilsen, president and CEO of the NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led advocacy group. “For this country to celebrate that history is absolutely disrespectful.”

IS INDIGENOUS PEOPLES DAY A FEDERAL HOLIDAY?

Although it is not a federal holiday, 17 states — including Washington, South Dakota and Maine — as well as Washington, D.C., have holidays honoring Native Americans, some of which are on the second Monday in October, according to the Pew Research Center. Indigenous Peoples Day is typically paired with Columbus Day or replaces the federal holiday altogether. Dozens of cities and school systems observe Indigenous Peoples Day as well.

Earlier this year, Anchorage and Phoenix became two of the latest municipalities to officially designate Indigenous Peoples Day a holiday. And on Monday, several U.S. lawmakers announced they had reintroduced legislation meant to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day as a federal holiday.

WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES DAY?

Its significance for Native Americans has more to do with the fact that it’s the day the U.S. has celebrated Columbus, explained Cliff Matias, cultural director for the New York-based Redhawk Indigenous Arts Council.

“We celebrate our survival of Columbus and all that he brought,” he said.

Matias, whose Indigenous Nations are Taino and Kichwa, said a more suitable day to honor Native people would be the “summer solstice, which is a powerful day for Indigenous people all over the world. It might be some sort of day that we recognize generally correlating with our connection to the planet.”

Still, Tilsen said celebrating on this day is powerful.

“When we celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day in place of Columbus Day, it shows a victory for Indigenous people,” he said. “It represents how we won’t be erased, how we still stand in our power, no matter what they did to try to kill us off and steal our land.”

HOW DO PEOPLE CELEBRATE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES DAY?

Indigenous Peoples Day is meant to recognize the painful history Indigenous people have faced and to celebrate their communities, said Tilsen, who is Oglala Lakota. But it is also “a day of protest and resistance,” he said.

The day is often marked by protests against memorials to Columbus, for environmental justice, for the return of Indigenous lands and in honor of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Tilsen said he often participates in protests a day before celebrating with Native food, performances, art, music and traditional ceremonies.

Recognition of the day itself follows organizing by Indigenous peoples since the 1970s, said Mays, who is Black and Saginaw Anishinaabe. Activists say the effort to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day has been resisted by people who view Columbus as a representative of Italian-American history.

Tilsen said the issue “is not an either-or.”

“Italian-Americans have made so many contributions to America, and that should be celebrated,” he said. “But not like this. There is so much more in Italian-American history that should be celebrated instead.”

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE EVENTS TAKING PLACE THIS YEAR?

As many as 3,000 people are expected to travel to Alcatraz Island early Monday morning to mark its occupation by Native Americans for 19 months, beginning in 1969, in what is often described as the “original land back movement,” said Morning Star Gali, California tribal liaison for the International Indian Treaty Council, which organized the event.

“It really is a celebration of our resilience and our resistance and it’s an effort of reclaiming the visibility of Native peoples, especially for California,” said Gali, a member of the Ajumawi band of the Pit River Tribe.

The event has taken place for more than 45 years and will include a sunrise prayer, traditional dance groups and Indigenous speakers from all over the world.

In New York City, Native people, including tribal chiefs, will gather throughout the long weekend at Randall’s Island Park. The ninth annual gathering, a collaboration of 14 Indigenous organizations and area tribes in the New York City metropolitan region, will include prayers and the honoring of the original inhabitants of the city, explained Matias, founder of the event.

There will also be events across Phoenix, including one organized by the Heard Museum called “Growing for the Future,” which will celebrate Indigenous culture with music, film screenings and fry bread. And in Michigan, an Indigenous Peoples Day event at Mid Michigan College is expected to feature leaders from the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe and the state’s lieutenant governor, and is meant to facilitate collaboration between Native people and the broader community.

For people wanting to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day, Tilsen said they should look out for community events and learn more about the Indigenous communities in their areas.

Associated Press writer Anita Snow in Phoenix contributed to this report.

The Splendid Life Of Jimmy Carter – 5 Essential Reads

BY HOWARD MANLY, DAVID SWARTZ, JENIFFER LYNN MCCOY, KIMBERLY PAUL, ROBERT C. DONNELLY AND THOMAS J. WHALEN

In Mark 8:34-38 a question is asked: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

Jimmy Carter never lost his soul.

A person who served others until the days leading to his death, Jimmy Carter did more to advance the cause of human rights than any U.S. president in American history. That tireless commitment “to advance democracy and human rights” was noted by the Nobel Committee when it honored Carter with its Peace Prize in 2002.

From establishing the nonprofit Carter Center to working for Habitat for Humanity, Carter never lost his moral compass in his public policies.

Over the years, The Conversation U.S. has published numerous stories exploring the legacy of the nation’s 39th president – and his blessed life after leaving the world of American politics. Here are selections from those articles.

1. A preacher at heart

As a scholar of American religious history, Asbury University Professor David Swartz believes that a speech Carter gave on July 15, 1979, was the most theologically profound speech by an American president since Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, on March 4, 1865.

Carter’s nationally televised sermon was watched by 65 million Americans as he “intoned an evangelical-sounding lament about a crisis of the American spirit,” Swartz wrote.

“All the legislation in the world,” Carter proclaimed during the speech, “can’t fix what’s wrong with America.”

What was wrong, Carter believed, was self-indulgence and consumption.

“Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns,” Carter preached. But “owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”

2. Tough-minded policies on human rights

Though Carter was considered a weak leader after Iranian religious militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, his overseas policies were far more effective than critics have claimed, wrote Gonzaga College historian Robert C. Donnelly, especially when it came to the former Soviet Union.

Shortly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, for instance, Carter imposed an embargo on U.S. grain sales that targeted the Soviet Union’s dependence on imported wheat and corn to feed its population.

To further punish the Soviets, Carter persuaded the U.S. Olympic Committee to refrain from competing in the upcoming Moscow Olympics while the Soviets repressed their own people and occupied Afghanistan.

Among Carter’s critics, none was harsher than Ronald Reagan. But in 1986, after beating Carter for the White House, even he had to acknowledge Carter’s foresight in modernizing the nation’s military forces, a measure that further increased economic and diplomatic pressure on the Soviets.

“Reagan admitted that he felt very bad for misstating Carter’s policies and record on defense,” Donnelly wrote.

3. Carter’s unexpected liberal foe

Reagan’s win over Carter in the 1980 U.S. presidential race was due in part to Carter’s bitter race during the Democratic primary against an heir to one of America’s great political families – Ted Kennedy.

Kennedy’s decision to run against Carter was “something of a shock to Carter,” wrote Thomas J. Whalen, a Boston University associate professor of social science.

In 1979, Kennedy had pledged to support Carter’s reelection bid but later succumbed to pressure in liberal Democratic circles to launch his own presidential bid and fulfill his family’s destiny.

In addition, Whalen wrote, Kennedy “harbored deep reservations about Carter’s leadership, especially in the wake of a faltering domestic economy, high inflation and the seizure of the American Embassy in Iran by radical Muslim students.”

In response, Carter vowed to “whip (Kennedy’s) ass.”

And did.

But that win over Kennedy came at a high cost.

“Having expended so much political and financial capital fending off Kennedy’s challenge,” Whalen wrote, “he was easy pickings for Reagan in that fall’s general election.

4. A quiet fight against a deadly disease

Guinea worm is a painful parasitic disease that is contracted when people consume water from stagnant sources contaminated with the worm’s larvae.

Clemson University Professor Kimberly Paul has worked as a parasitologist for over two decades.

"I know the suffering that parasitic diseases like Guinea worm infections inflict on humanity, especially on the world’s most vulnerable and poor communities,” she wrote.

In 1986, it infected an estimated 3.5 million people per year in 21 countries in Africa and Asia.

Since then, that number has been reduced by more than 99.99% to 13 provisional cases in 2022, in large part because of Carter and his efforts to eradicate the disease. Those efforts included teaching people to filter all drinking water.

Over time, Carter’s efforts proved tremendously successful. On Jan. 24, 2023, The Carter Center, the nonprofit founded by the former U.S. president, announced that “Guinea worm is poised to become the second human disease in history to be eradicated.”

The first was smallpox.

5. Carter’s brave step in Cuba

In 2002, long after his departure from the White House in 1981, Carter became the the first U.S. president to visit Cuba since the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Carter had accepted the invitation of then President Fidel Castro.

Jennifer Lynn McCoy, now at Georgia State University, was director of The Carter Center’s Americas Program at the time and accompanied Carter on that trip, on which he gave a speech in Spanish that called on Castro to lift restrictions on free speech and assembly, among other constitutional reforms.

Castro was unmoved by the speech but instead invited Carter to watch a Cuban all-star baseball game.

At the game, McCoy wrote, “Castro asked Carter for a favor” – to walk to the pitcher’s mound without his security detail to show how much confidence he had in the Cuban people.

Over the objections of his Secret Service agents, Carter obliged and walked to the mound with Castro and threw out the first pitch.

Carter’s move was a symbol of what normal relations could look like between the two nations – and of Carter’s unwavering faith.

Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

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Millions Of US Children Have Mediocre Reading Skills, But Engaged Parents And A Committed School Curriculum Can Help

BY SHAYNE PIASTA

Reading ability among U.S. students remained low in 2022, with 37% of fourth graders and 30% of eighth graders scoring below the basic proficiency levels for reading set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Although the COVID-19 school shutdowns are responsible for some of the learning loss, the numbers weren’t particular good prior to the pandemic, either – reading scores for U.S. students have been low for decades.

SciLine interviewed Dr. Shayne Piasta, a professor of reading and literacy at The Ohio State University and a faculty associate at the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy. Piasta discussed the various methods of reading instruction and how to get kids to love it.

Below are some highlights from the discussion. Answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

What is meant by the ‘science of reading’? And what are the misconceptions?

Shayne Piasta: The science of reading refers to the accumulated knowledge base we have from scientific research about the reading process, its components, how reading skills develop and how we can best support those who are learning to read.

One of the misconceptions I see is that the science of reading is equated with phonics instruction.

But the science of reading is a knowledge base, not a specific approach. Phonics instruction is a specific approach, whereby one is explicitly and intentionally teaching children all of those important links between letters and sounds, both at an individual letter level – like learning the alphabet – and at higher skill levels, such as learning about some complex spelling conventions that we have in the English language.

Although phonics instruction is a necessary component in learning to read, phonics instruction alone, without attending to other key reading components, such as language, comprehension, and concept and background knowledge, is insufficient.

What critical components are needed for a reading curriculum to be successful?

Shayne Piasta: First and foremost, I would expect a reading program to have a scope and sequence, meaning there is predetermined content of what’s going to be covered. And then that it’s in a particular order, often building from more simple skills or concepts to more complex ones.

This might apply to phonics instruction, where we’re going from simple letter sound correspondences and building up to more complex associations between letters, spelling patterns and how words are pronounced.

Any successful reading program should have a scope and sequence. It should definitely have it for the phonics component, but it should have it for other components as well.

What role does background knowledge play in learning to read?

Shayne Piasta: We’re learning more and more about how critical concept knowledge and background knowledge are for successful reading.

To understand the meaning being conveyed by text, which is the ultimate goal, children use the information they already know to make sense of text. A famous example involves a study in which children read a written passage about baseball. Children who knew a lot about baseball best understood the passage, regardless of reading ability.

This highlights the role of concept and background knowledge as foundations for understanding text meaning, and thus, reading comprehension.

Any reading curriculum should have opportunities for children to build those skills – to learn about our world, to make connections with the world, to make connections across different sources and types of information. This is particularly important given the diversity of classrooms. Educators cannot assume that children share certain knowledge or backgrounds.

Teachers need to provide opportunities to discuss and learn about concepts that children will read about. This includes topics like baseball as well as academic concepts like photosynthesis. And then they bring that conceptual and background knowledge with them when they’re going to read a new piece about a certain topic so they can actually make sense of it.

Again, it’s not phonics only. It’s phonics and these opportunities to support knowledge building as well as language skills.

Are any approaches especially effective for children from marginalized backgrounds?

Shayne Piasta: There are many evidence-based practices for building language for both children who speak English only and those who are English learners. This includes exposing children to more complex grammar during conversations and using routines to improve awareness of new vocabulary words.

The science of reading applies to all learners. Most practices that we would recommend are going to be helpful for students from a range of different backgrounds. That being said, it’s important to be able to identify the strengths and the learning needs of individual children.

How can parents support kids who are learning to read?

Shayne Piasta: For parents, I would recommend focusing on creating positive literacy environments at home. That is, having children see you reading, having children see you writing, and being clear about how literacy plays a role in your everyday life – not just having storybook time together or reading together, but doing activities like making grocery lists together.

Or maybe you could point out, “Hey, I’m reading these instructions so I can put together this piece of Ikea furniture.” So you’re really highlighting all of the important roles that literacy plays in daily life. In doing so, you can help children build positive connections with those reading opportunities so that it’s fun, engaging and something they want to do.

Watch the full interview to hear more.

SciLine is a free service based at the nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science that helps journalists include scientific evidence and experts in their news stories.

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Meet This Year’s MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ Recipients, Including A Hula Master And The Poet Laureate

This undated photo provided by the John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation shows 2023 McArthur Fellow Ada Limon...(John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation via AP Photo)

BY THALIA BEATY

A scientist who studies the airborne transmission of diseases, a master hula dancer and cultural preservationist, and the sitting U.S. poet laureate were among the 20 new recipients of the prestigious fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, known as “genius grants,” announced on Wednesday.

MacArthur fellows receive a grant of $800,000 over five years to spend however they want. Fellows are nominated and endorsed by their peers and communities through an often yearslong process that the foundation oversees. They do not apply and are never officially interviewed for the fellowship before it’s awarded.

Each year, the foundation calls the new class of fellows in advance of the public announcement and fellows described being shocked and stunned by the news after receiving a call from an unknown number, which they had sometimes initially ignored.

Ada Limón, who recently began her second term as the country’s poet laureate, said she first missed a call the day after her grandmother, Allamay Barker, had died at the age of 98. It wasn’t until the foundation emailed her that she called back. She said she wept when she heard the news.

“I felt like losing the matriarch of my family and then receiving this, it felt like it was a gift from her in some ways,” she said, speaking from her home in Lexington, Kentucky.

Limón will be reading poetry to an audience at the University of Montevallo, a public university in Alabama, and speaking to a creative writing class in the hours after this year’s class of MacArthur fellows are announced.

As poet laureate, she commissioned an anthology of poems “ You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, ” to be published in April and also arranged for historic poems to be installed at seven national parks. NASA is planning to send a poem Limón wrote for an upcoming mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa as part of a time capsule. The poem will be engraved on the spacecraft.

“One of the things that feels most emotional and remarkable to me is that this recognition is coming from within the poetry community,” Limón said.

The foundation has run the fellowship since 1981 and selected more than 1,030 recipients. The awards are given to individuals “of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations,” according to the foundation’s website, and the grants are not tied to a specific project or institution. Many past fellows like Octavia Butler, Paul Farmer and Twyla Tharp are luminaries in their fields and Marlies Carruth, who directs the MacArthur Fellows program, emphasized that they hope fellows will support and inspire each other. The foundation also hosts events for current and past recipients.

“The prize is financial, but it’s also access and being part of a community of extraordinary thinkers and doers,” said Carruth. Last year, the foundation raised the award amount from $625,000 to $800,000. The foundation previously increased the award amount a decade ago from $500,000 to $625,000.

The 2023 class of fellows includes Andrea Armstrong, professor at Loyola University New Orleans, College of Law, who created a database of everyone in Louisiana who has died in prison or jail since 2015; Patrick Makuakāne, a master teacher of hula who is dedicated to preserving Hawaiian cultural heritage; and National Book Award winner Imani Perry, who has authored multiple books about the resistance and activism of Black Americans in the face of injustice.

Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer, was in her office when an unknown number called her cellphone, which she did not answer. When the same number called her office line, she picked up with some skepticism, Marr said.

“To think that I’ve actually been selected as one is really mind-blowing,” she said, of the MacArthur fellows.

Before the pandemic, Marr, who is a distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, studied questions about how viruses moved through the air and how much transmission happens by people breathing in the virus versus from contaminated objects.

Her expertise became extremely relevant after the outbreak of COVID-19 when she argued that airborne transmission was likely a major way the virus was spreading. She said she hopes this recognition of her work will help her gain access to data to better understand the seasonality of the flu.

Ian Bassin is the co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan organization that helped to shape legislation passed in December 2022 to overhaul the Electoral Count Act. The changes clarify parts of the 1887 law to make it harder for future presidents to seek to prevent the transfer of power.

When he received the call from MacArthur, Bassin was standing in his kitchen and said his mind immediately went to his late grandparents, with whom he wished he could share the news. He said he sees himself as just one of a multitude of organizations and people working to create a more inclusive and resilient democratic system.

“This fellowship feels both like a tremendous opportunity, but also a responsibility because the work of protecting and perfecting our democracy is far from complete,” Bassin said. “And so this just underscores for me the obligation I think I now have to do my part in finishing that work.”

The other recipients of the MacArthur fellowship in 2023 are: E. Tendayi Achiume, a legal scholar examining global migration; Rina Foygel Barber, a statistician who has developed tools to improve the accuracy of predictions made by machine learning models; Courtney Bryan, a composer and pianist whose work draws on contemporary voices and crosses genres; Jason D. Buenrostro, a cellular and molecular biologist who developed new methods and tools to better understand how and when genes are expressed; multidisciplinary artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons whose work often foregrounds histories of the Caribbean; composer and artist Raven Chacon who blends performance and visual art to interrogate European colonialism of the Americas; Diana Greene Foster, a demographer and reproductive health researcher who has documented the impact of access to contraception or abortion on women’s lives; Lucy Hutyra, an environmental ecologist who studies the movement of carbon through urban environments; artist Carolyn Lazard whose multidisciplinary work centers disability and accessibility; Lester Mackey, a computer scientist and statistician whose has helped improve the predictions of machine learning techniques; fiction writer Manuel Muñoz whose stories explore the experiences of the Mexican American community in California’s Central Valley; Dyani White Hawk, a multidisciplinary artist who uplifts Indigenous art practices and aesthetics and their connections to contemporary art; A. Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist studying the impact of climate change on wildfires, drought and forest growth; and Amber Wutich, an anthropologist who studies the impact of water scarcity on communities and how they adapt.

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and non-profits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

Jon Fosse, A Norwegian Master Of Spare Nordic Writing, Wins The Nobel Prize In Literature

Norwegian author Jon Fosse poses for a photo in Grotten, Oslo, Dec. 8, 2015

BY DAVID KEYTON, MIKE CORDER AND JILL LAWLESS

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Jon Fosse, a master of spare Nordic writing in a sprawling body of work ranging from plays to novels and children’s books, won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for works that “give voice to the unsayable.”

Fosse’s work, which is rooted in his Norwegian background, “focuses on human insecurity and anxiety,” Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel literature committee, told The Associated Press. “The basic choices you make in life, very elemental stuff.”

One of his country’s most-performed dramatists, Fosse said he had “cautiously prepared” himself for a decade to receive the news that he had won.

“I was surprised when they called, yet at the same time not,” Fosse, 64, told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK. “It was a great joy for me to get the phone call.”

The author of 40 plays as well as novels, short stories, children’s books, poetry and essays, Fosse was honored “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable,” according to the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize.

Fosse has cited the bleak, enigmatic work of Irish writer Samuel Beckett — the 1969 Nobel literature laureate — as an influence on his minimalist style.

His first novel, “Red, Black,” was published in 1983, and his debut play, “Someone is Going to Come,” in 1992. His major prose works include “Melancholy;” “Morning and Evening,” whose two parts depict a birth and a death; “Wakefulness;” and “Olav’s Dreams.”

His plays, which have been staged across Europe and in the United States, include “The Name,” “Dream of Autumn” and “I am the Wind.” His work “A New Name: Septology VI-VII” — described by Olsson as Fosse’s “magnum opus” — was a finalist for the International Booker Prize in 2022.

Fosse has also taught writing — one of his students was best-selling Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard — and consulted on a Norwegian translation of the Bible.

Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the academy, reached Fosse by telephone to inform him of the win. He said the writer was driving in the countryside and promised to drive home carefully.

Fosse is the fourth Norwegian writer to get the literature prize, but the first in nearly a century. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson got it in 1903, Knut Hamsun was awarded it in 1920 and Sigrid Undset in 1928.

Fosse writes in Nynorsk, one of the two official written standards of Norwegian that is chiefly spoken in and around Bergen, where the writer lives. It is used by just 10% of Norway’s 5.4 million people, according to the Language Council of Norway, but completely intelligible with the other written form, Bokmaal.

Guy Puzey, senior lecturer in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, said Bokmaal is “the language of power, it’s the language or urban centers, of the press,” while Nynorsk is used mainly by people in rural western Norway.

“So it’s a really big day for a minority language,” he said.

In recognition of his contribution to Norwegian culture, Fosse was granted use of an honorary residence in the grounds of the Royal Palace owned by the Norwegian state.

“A great recognition of outstanding authorship that makes an impression and touches people all over the world,” Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “All of Norway offers congratulations and is proud today!”

In a statement released by his publishing house, Samlaget, Fosse said he saw the prize “as an award to the literature that first and foremost aims to be literature, without other considerations.”

The Nobel Prizes carry a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by their creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Winners also receive an 18-carat gold medal and diploma at the award ceremonies in December.

Last year, French author Annie Ernaux won the prize for what the prize-giving Swedish Academy called “the courage and clinical acuity” of books rooted in her small-town background in the Normandy region of northwest France.

Ernaux was just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates. The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers, as well as too male-dominated.

In 2018, the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, which names the Nobel literature committee, and sparked an exodus of members. The academy revamped itself but faced more criticism for giving the 2019 award to Austria’s Peter Handke, who has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes.

Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands, and Lawless from London. Associated Press writer Jan M. Olsen contributed from Copenhagen.

Follow all AP stories about the Nobel Prizes at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

Book review: African thinkers analyse some of the big issues of our time - race, belonging and identity

THE CONVERSATION

Leaders of African American, Latino and Native American communities protest the name of the Washington Redskins, November, 2013. Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty Images

BY ADEMOLA ADESOLA

The subjects of race, identity and belonging are often fraught with contention and uneasiness. Who are you? Who belongs? Who is native, or indigenous to a place? These perennial questions arise around the world.

They are the subject of the book The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race and Belonging, edited by Benjamin Maiangwa, a political scientist at Lakehead University in Canada.

The contributors are academics, mostly early career scholars and doctoral candidates in African and North American universities. They study genocide, peace and conflict, gender, decolonial practices, identity, race and war.

Unavoidably, questions that defy convenient answers pervade the reflections and analyses in the book.

In my own work as a scholar of African literature with an interest in the subjects of conflict, childhood and identity, I underscore the relevance of these questions.

The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race and Belonging assembles voices that urge us to think more critically about how the politics of race and identity hampers healthy interrelations among people.

In a world increasingly divided by supremacist ideologies, the insights in this collection of essays are highly relevant.

What the book’s about

The contributors to the book use a variety of forms of writing. Some of the essays are autobiograpical; some are literary criticism; others scholarly analyses. They re-examine familiar but controversial concepts.

Among them are ideas about naming, indigeneity, land, citizenship, identitarian disparity, diasporic (un)being, immigration and migration, and the political economy of (un)belonging. These are topical ideas that predominate in discourses on nationalism, ethnicity and nation states. Their engagement in this collection helps us to further appreciate how unfixed and complex they are; they are never amenable to any easy analysis.

The volume is structured into three parts: Identity, Coloniality, and Home; Diaspora, Race, and Immigration; and Belonging: Cross-Cutting Issues. Each section has an introduction, a conversation among four of the contributors, an epilogue and an afterword.

This layout attests to the careful editing of the whole. There is an organic flow of engagement with ideas from one chapter to the next. Yet no chapter’s unique argument is overshadowed by another’s.

Critical probing and analysis

The chapters inspired by personal experiences do as much critical probing as those framed by hardcore analyses.

The contributions don’t sound jointly rehearsed, but represent a form of dialogue. Readers will find a kaleidoscope of interrelated but distinct compelling arguments on matters of race, identity and belonging, and the violent and paradoxical patterns they take in the postcolony. This is a notion that is concerned with a particular historical course involving societies that have latterly experienced colonialism, as theorised by the Cameroonian historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe.

As is customary in volumes of this kind, the opening chapter comes from the editor. He welcomes readers with questions that invite them to ruminate on place and identity construction and the way it determines relations.

Such questions, which reverberate throughout the volume, are “What is home? What creates the feeling of belonging or (dis)connection to a place/space or other people? Is home a place, a feeling, other people, or an idea? Is it a destination or a spiritual entity or experience? Who am I in this political space?”

For the reader who has taken their identity for granted thus far, such questions can be jarring and unnerving. They can also provoke deep thoughts.

The construction of race

The chapter underlines the fact that identity is constructed and is fluid. It stresses racial signifiers – indigenous, native, white, black – as markers which mask, confuse, distress and misrepresent.

In some people they produce false triumphalism and superiority and in others they activate demeaning nervousness. As the chapter maintains, cultural essentialism, the product of these markers, distorts cultural facts. It also abjures a cultivation of interest in history and critical mindedness. And it is this matter of invented racial/cultural identity that the conversation in chapter 12 of the book foregrounds.

In that conversation, such constructs as “Black”, “African”, “White” and “immigrant” ricochet from one discussant to another. The conversation makes it clear that there is a kind of under-appreciation of the violence that minoritised people within national boundaries and diasporic spaces experience when designated in certain senses.

Interconnected humanity

With its other chapters, the volume broadens the frontiers of research in the intersecting areas of race, ethnicity, peace, home(lessness), gender and other forms of identity and diasporic formations. It calls for a spiritual reawakening of our identities.

This volume is a force in the promotion and celebration of the dignity of human differences. One can hear again and again the refrain in Maya Angelou’s timeless poem, Human Family:

The humanistic ring in this book results from a conviction that the human or spiritual identity trumps all other ones, including institutionalised discriminatory ways of being and exclusionary policies and regulations, all of which enable the questioning of other people’s humanity.

The contributors’ insistence is on interconnected human relations and, to borrow from the Canadian novelist and essayist, Dionne Brand, on life –

Scholars, students and general readers interested in migration studies, peace and conflict studies, political science, literary studies, African studies, international relations, gender studies, sociology and history will find this work an enlightening resource.

Madonna By Mary Gabriel Review – The Definitive Life Of A Pop Colossus

BY FIONA STURGES

The work of a cultural historian rather than a fan, this meticulous study puts the shape-shifting star in proper context

When Madonna Louise Ciccone arrived in New York from Michigan aged 19 in 1978, she had a small suitcase, a winter coat and $35 in her pocket. In an interview with the broadcaster Howard Stern years later, she would admit that she was frightened: “The massive scale of New York took my breath away … I was poised for survival … But I was also scared shitless and freaked out by the smell of piss and vomit.”

In the ensuing years, Madonna would experience grinding poverty, living in a succession of cockroach-infested apartments where addicts populated the hallways, and often going without food. Yet Whitley Setrakian, Madonna’s roommate at the University of Michigan, where both had studied dance, says: “I’ve never seen her so happy and so sure.” She recalls Madonna telling her: “Every day I’m here in this city I can’t stop thinking about all the days I haven’t been here. I feel like I’m running a race and everyone’s had a head start.”

This self-assurance, ferocious drive and refusal to let circumstances get the better of her echoes through Mary Gabriel’s doorstopper biography. The world is not short of books documenting the life of the queen of pop, though few have attempted it on such a mammoth scale. Coming in at more than 800 pages, the book leaves no stone unturned, and no song, music video, film, TV appearance, friendship or romantic liaison unanalysed, in its quest to understand the woman behind the global icon. This is Our Lady made flesh.

Gabriel, a former Reuters journalist, is the author of 2018’s Ninth Street Women, about five overlooked female artists, including Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, which provides a richly detailed account of the creativity of postwar Manhattan. In A Rebel Life, she delivers a similarly evocative portrait of New York in the late 1970s and early 80s, a grimy, neglected city of chancers and ne’er-do-wells, and a hotbed of art and hedonism. The book is peppered with contextual digressions into the history and politics of the era, from the anti-Vietnam protests and Stonewall to the pill, the Equal Rights Amendment, Roe v Wade and the Aids crisis.

Those who insist Madonna was purely interested in fame may adjust that view when presented with her campaign to educate the world about HIV and Aids at a time when her contemporaries, not to mention politicians, were either silent or loudly disgusted. A full year before the US government began distributing leaflets about Aids, Madonna – who lost scores of friends to the disease, including the artist Keith Haring – was putting pamphlets about safe sex in brochures at her live shows, risking her reputation and career in the process.

Other perceptions of Madonna – that she “stole” her ideas from queer and black culture, that she needs a man in the studio to make her sound good – are deftly dispatched. On her supposed co-opting of the ballroom scene with her 1990 single Vogue, the author notes that two of the scene’s leading lights, Luis Camacho and José Gutierez, appeared in the song’s video and went on to tour with Madonna.

Gabriel’s writing is unfussy and direct – the approach of a cultural historian rather than fan – while delighting in details such as Madonna getting fired from her job at New York’s Russian Tea Room for wearing fishnets, or sticking her tongue in Al Pacino’s ear after meeting him as a bolshy 20-year-old.

The figure who emerges is inevitably contradictory: serious, funny, generous, inconsiderate, hard-working, restless, blinkered, self-possessed, stubborn. This is a story not just of hit records, reinvention and headline-grabbing controversy, but about how a young working-class woman, traumatised by the early death of her ultra-religious mother, rose to become a cultural colossus and thorn in the side of the conservative right and the Catholic church. Underpinning the narrative are the repressive patriarchal systems that Madonna relentlessly challenged and her unwavering belief in the right to self-expression.

Along with music, that self-expression also found an outlet in film, with decidedly mixed results. There can be no better illustration of Madonna’s doggedness than her acting career, where the howling duds (Who’s That Girl?, Body of Evidence, Swept Away, The Next Best Thing) vastly outnumber the critical and commercial smashes (Desperately Seeking Susan, Evita). Yet on she went, determined to prove her critics wrong.

It’s a mark of Gabriel’s skill that she has managed to wrestle this complex, sprawling, eventful life into a book that rarely flags and conveys its subject’s wider significance without tipping into hagiography. We come to understand Madonna the person as well as Madonna the concept: a woman who, for a generation, embodied female artistic, sexual and financial liberation.

“Just as the daughters of second-wave feminism, who had been taught that they were equal to their brothers, started learning that was not the case, they discovered Madonna,” writes Gabriel. “Her look gave them a rebellious way to express their simmering dissatisfaction and emerging defiance … The message wasn’t the 1970s ‘I Am Woman’ but a 1980s ‘I am free.’ But what did freedom look like? It looked like Madonna.”

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The Worldwide Consultations For The Global Synod Reflect Pope Francis’ Efforts Toward Building A More Inclusive Catholic Church

THE CONVERSATION

Participants arrive for a vigil prayer led by Pope Francis and other religious leaders before the 2023 Synod of Bishops assembly. Isabella Bonotto/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

BY DANIEL NSPEED THOMPSON

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

The 16th Synod of Bishops, the first part of which will take place in Rome on Oct. 4-29, 2023, and the second in 2024, will be the culmination of a two-year, worldwide conversation in the Catholic Church.

The term “synod” usually refers to a local or regional meeting of church leaders. The Synod of Bishops was established by Pope Paul VI in 1965 as a permanent body in the Catholic Church, although its members do not meet on a regular schedule. It specifically refers to a meeting of selected bishops from around the world to advise the pope on matters of governance.

The Synod of Bishops was set up after the Second Vatican Council, which was held from 1962 to 1965, to bring reforms and updates to the church. The Second Vatican Council stated that the entire college of all Catholic bishops, under the authority of the pope, also serve as the church’s highest authority. Paul VI instituted the Synod of Bishops as a way for Catholic bishops to exercise this authority. The council also stated that lay Catholics have an active role to play in the church.

As a theologian who studies the Catholic Church, with an emphasis on the period during and after Vatican II, I argue that this upcoming synod reflects Pope Francis’ efforts to advance the reform agenda of Vatican II. He wants all Catholics to take an active role in thinking about the future of their church and wants the bishops to exercise their authority by first listening to the people.

A more open church?

Typically, there are three types of meetings of the Synod of Bishops.

Ordinary general assemblies usually get together every three or four years. The pope can also call an extraordinary meeting to discuss a more pressing topic and problem. Finally, popes have called special meetings of bishops in a certain region. For example, Francis held a special Synod on the Amazon in 2019.

The 16th Synod of Bishops is an ordinary general assembly. At the direction of Francis, its preparation, initiated at a celebration in Rome in 2021, involved a worldwide conversation among Catholics about their church.

Catholics from around the world were invited to meet in their local dioceses, pray together and discuss questions about their church. Some 700,000 Catholics across the U.S. took part in these conversations.

The local churches collected and summarized the results of these meetings. Leaders at the regional, national and, finally, continental levels drafted reports on these conversations.

On the basis of all these earlier documents, in May 2023 the Vatican released its working document called “Instrumentum Laboris” for the upcoming synod.

This meeting is therefore significant because it pictures the Catholic Church not as a top-down hierarchy but rather as an open conversation. For the first time, its voting members will not only be bishops but other Catholics as well. The changes indicate Francis’ intention to give all Catholics a voice in the decision-making process of the church.

As Francis himself puts it, the synod offers an opportunity “of moving not occasionally but structurally towards a synodal church, an open square where all can feel at home and participate.”

Working document

Some 450 people are expected to be in Rome for the first part of the synod. This number will include representatives of religious orders and other Catholic organizations, as well as theologians from Catholic universities.

The pope’s expanded list will include a number of lay men and women. Additionally, representatives from other Christian churches will also attend the synod – although they will not have voting rights.

Those gathered in Rome will meet in both large sessions known as “general congregations” and small working groups, divided by the synod’s official languages – Italian, English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. Its official documents will be issued in Italian and English.

The working document outlines four broad areas of discussion: synodality, communion, mission and participation. The first term refers to the idea that the church as a whole should incorporate the synod’s process of focused conversations, listening and dialogue into its structure. The next two – communion and mission – refer to how a global church can balance unity and diversity in pursuit of its aims. The final term, participation, refers to the ways in which Catholics, both clergy and lay people, can take part in the church. This topic also includes discussion about what institutions and structures the church would need to create to serve its mission.

When participants talk about these topics, they will discuss issues that have divided the church, such as the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people, the role of women in the church, relations between the Catholic Church and other churches, and relations between the church and different cultures, among others.

Francis’ leadership style

This Synod of Bishops reflects Francis’ style of leadership and his vision of the Catholic Church for the future. In his address to the synod held on Oct. 9, 2021, the pope said the success of the mission of the church depends on the closeness of the church to its people and their ability to listen to one another.

The internal enemy of the mission of the church, according to Francis, is “clericalism,” the idea that clergy – priests and bishops – are somehow a spiritually superior class, separate from and above regular lay people. Francis himself has modeled a different version of the papal office by rejecting many customs that he associates with clericalism. For example, he has continued to live in a modest apartment rather than in the Vatican palace.

Through the process of consultation and conversation, Francis intends to combat clericalism in the Catholic Church by offering a different model for how the church can work. As Austen Ivereigh, a British journalist and biographer of Francis, has written: “The opposite of clericalism [for Francis] is synodality, meaning a method and process of discussion and participation in which the whole people of God can listen to the Holy Spirit and take part in the life and mission of the Church.”

After an additional year of conversations with the wider church, participants will gather in Rome again in 2024, when they will continue the discussions and vote on recommendations to the bishops. The bishops will in turn make recommendations to the pope, who will have the final say.

If Francis’ model of the church is persuasive, this synod, I believe, will be the beginning of an ongoing process in the church, the first of many conversations to come.