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Eighteenth-century natural historians created a peculiar, and peculiarly durable, vision of nature—one that embodied the sexual and racial tensions of that era. When plants were found to reproduce sexually, eighteenth-century botanists ascribed to them passionate relations, polyandrous marriages, and suicidal incest, and accounts of steamy plant sex began to infiltrate the botanical literature of the day. Naturalists also turned their attention to the great apes just becoming known to eighteenth-century Europeans, clothing the females in silk vestments and training them to sip tea with the modest demeanor of English matrons, while imagining the males of the species fully capable of ravishing women.

Written with humor and meticulous detail, Nature’s Body draws on these and other examples to uncover the ways in which assumptions about gender, sex, and race have shaped scientific explanations of nature. Schiebinger offers a rich cultural history of science and a timely and passionate argument that science must be restructured in order to get it right.

Contributors. José F. Aranda, Lauren Berlant, Lawrence Buell, Judith Fetterley, Amy Kaplan, You-me Park, Marjorie Pryse, Gail Wald

No Ordinary Letter reconstructs the intellectual world of rural South African women who, in 1959, mounted determined campaigns across Natal to resist the expanding policies of apartheid. Challenging Bantu Authorities, detrimental agricultural schemes, restrictions on movement, and the extension of pass laws to women, these organizers drew on knowledge rooted in the lived experience of farmwork, household management, and community governance. The book shows how women assessed their political circumstances and crafted strategies—some peaceful, some destructive—to make themselves heard in a system structured to ignore them.

Foregrounding women as thinkers as well as activists, No Ordinary Letter reveals how rural organizers theorized their positions under apartheid law and within patriarchal households and communities. Their repertoire of political understanding encompassed the daily violence of apartheid, local cultures of honor that enabled them to shame others into action, and finely honed skills for navigating the authority of elders, in-laws, and traditional leaders. When the Camperdown Native Commissioner asked why a group had destroyed government property, they replied, “We were really writing a letter to the authorities which they could read. If we had written an ordinary letter, you would not have replied.” Their explanation captures how an underlying logic of violence became a vehicle for extraordinary political communication.

At the same time, the book underscores the profound constraints shaping women’s choices: poverty, state repression, and the multiple patriarchies embedded within both the apartheid state and African communities. These overlapping systems meant that the immediate enforcers of apartheid policy were often African men with their own stakes in patriarchal arrangements. No Ordinary Letter offers a groundbreaking account of how rural women understood, navigated, and contested these entangled structures of power, providing a fresh view on political thought and resistance in apartheid South Africa.

Contemporary French writing on the Maghreb—that part of Africa above the Sahara—is truly postmodern in scope, the rich product of multifaceted histories promoting the blending of two worlds, two identities, two cultures, and two languages.

Nomadic Voices of Exile demonstrates how that postmodern sentiment has altered perceptions concerning Maghrebian feminine identity since the end of the French-colonial era. The authors discussed here, both those who reside in the Maghreb and those who have had to seek asylum in France, find themselves at the intersection of French and North African viewpoints, exposing a complicated world that must be negotiated and redefined.

In looking at the authors whose writings extend beyond a gender-based dialogue to include such issues as race, politics, religion, and history, Valérie Orlando explores the rich and changing landscape of the literature and the culture, addresses the stereotypes that have defined the past, and navigates the space of the exiled, a space previously at the peripheries of Western discourse.

Nomadic Voices of Exile will be useful to a variety of classrooms—women’s studies, Middle East studies, Francophone literature, Third World women writers—and to anyone interested in postcolonial and postmodern theory and philosophy and the history of the Maghreb through literature.