Summer Reading List

Divided into four categories for your convenience (and mine).

Theory (for my thesis)

• Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain
  

Physical pain has no voice, but when it at last finds a voice, it begins to tell a story

• Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor
  

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of well and in the kingdom of sick.

• Leslie Jamison’s Grand Unified Theory of Pain:
  

The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars

Fiction (for my thesis)

• Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir
  
• Abby Norman’s Ask Me About My Uterus
  
• Siddartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies (s/o to my history professor for the rec!)
  

Theory (for fun)

• Saidiya Hartman’s The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors
  
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (aka the love of my life, the woman who stirred emotions in me I didn’t know I was capable of experiencing) In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics
  

Resisting “elite” methodology for “subaltern” material involves an epistemological/ontological confusion…just as the subaltern is not elite (ontology), so the historian must not know through elite method (epistemology)

• [re-read] Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism
  

• [re-read] Charu Gupta’s Sexuality, obscenity, community: Women, Muslims and Hindu Public in Colonial India
  
• [re-read] Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on colonialism
  

Fiction (for fun)

• Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (thanks for the recommendations, Maya, Eve and Simone!)
  
• Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse
  
• James Salter’s Light Years (the result of a google search for “best books to read after a break-up; thanks google!)