When the military dictatorship of Francisco Franco rose to power in 1936, it cracked down on Spain’s oldest language. Basque, tied to its characteristic ethnic group, had been a persistently spoken language in the country for thousands of years prior. Speakers of Basque saw both its speech and the unique cultural practices associated with it as a metric of identity neither belonging to Spain or nearby France, but one distinctly separate and additional to their national status. When Franco’s...

Not far away from my own home in Maryland, there has been a scene of strange juxtaposition in the leadup to the typical festivities that herald America’s birthday. By technicality, it is a momentous event in terms of significance - the country’s semiquincentennial - or its 250th anniversary. While this particular landmark occurrence has gained significant traction - with reenactments, performances, and festivals throughout cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and Los Angeles, there is one...

The acclaimed Nobel-prize winning writer Toni Morrison dealt with narratives that were inherently uncomfortable. Her most well-known work, Beloved, challenged conventional norms in a way that was both thematic and literary. Beloved is the fictional account of a formerly enslaved woman literally haunted by the ghost of her eldest, deceased daughter. Despite employing magical realism, the novel is nonetheless brutally realistic, to a nearly unrelenting degree. Elements of the supernatural are...