Ella Baker (1903–1986)

Ella Baker spent her life working behind the scenes to organize the Civil Rights Movement. If she could have changed anything about the movement, it might have been to persuade the men leading it that they, too, should do more work behind the scenes. Baker was a staunch believer in helping ordinary people to work together and lead themselves, and she objected to centralized authority. In her worldview, “strong people don’t need strong leaders.” Baker was one of the visionaries who created the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957.

Forough Farrokhzad (1935-1967)

One of the most famous women in the history of Persian literature Farrokhzad remains a feminist icon within Iran. Farrokhzad was a prolific poet, visual artist and filmmaker who tirelessly struggled for human rights in Iran. Her radical feminism and her avowed bisexuality made her a highly controversial figure in Iran. She was a key cultural figure in progressive resistance to the anti-democratic government that was imposed after the 1953 coup in Iran.

Gayatri Spivak (born 1942)
        
Breaking rules of the academy and trespassing disciplinary boundaries have been central to the intellectual projects of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the leading literary theorists and cultural critics of our times. Professor Spivak was born in India. Professor Spivak is a scholar of deconstructive approaches to verbal, visual and social texts. Her most important contribution to the field of literary studies is helping to define, elaborate on, and then complicate the field of postcolonial studies. About two decades ago she raised the question "Can the Subaltern Speak?" whereby she took issue with Western intellectuals' almost confessional account of their inability to mediate the historical experience of the working classes and the underprivileged of society. In rendering visible the complexities of the "Native Informant" in her publications, In Other Worlds, The Post-Colonial Critic, and Outside in the Teaching Machine, Professor Spivak has followed up on this question. Furthermore, through her translations of the Bengali author/activist Mahasweta Devi's fiction work into English, published in Imaginary Maps, she has added another dimension to postcolonial debates about the native informant.

Hanah Arendt (1906-1975)

A political theorist and philosopher, Arendt became a political activist and, beginning in 1933, helped the German Zionist Organization and its leader, Kurt Blumenfeld, to publicize the plight of the victims of Nazism. She also did research on anti-Semitic propaganda, for which she was arrested by the Gestapo. But when she won the sympathy of a Berlin jailer, she was released and escaped to Paris, where she remained for the rest of the decade. Working especially with Youth Aliyah, Arendt helped rescue Jewish children from the Third Reich and bring them to Palestine. After the Holocaust, Salo W. Baron put Arendt in charge of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, the effort to locate and redistribute the shards of Judaic artifacts and other treasures that had been salvaged from a doomed civilization. Arendt broke with traditional conceptions of fascism and argued that Nazism was an example of “the banality of evil”. She felt that tragic systems are often the result of thoughtlessness and conformity. She proposed an engagement with critical thinking as crucial to resisting oppression.

Judith F. Baca (Born 1946)

One of America’s leading muralists, Judith Baca believes that art is a tool for social change and self-transformation, capable of fostering civic dialogue in the most uncivil places. Raised in a strong, all-female household, Baca was especially influenced by the values of her grandmother, a Mexican herbal healer. In 1974, Baca founded the City of Los Angeles’ first mural program, and in 1976 she co-founded the Social and Public Art Resource Center, which promotes community-based, participatory public arts projects.  She says “I want to use public space to create a public voice for, and a public consciousness about people who are, in fact, the majority of the population but who are not represented in any visual way."

INSPIRATIONS

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