As a child, Johanna would endlessly reread a series of novels about a heroic space captain who went to foreign planets and kidnapped innocent aliens to force them to crew her ship.
I have kind of an intuition that "Art is everything! Art is life! Literature endures" is not the attitude that can sustain close attention to art in times of (political, personal, personal-political) crisis. I guess that is a way of saying, I do think literature is a false god, if it's treated like a god. (Similar to romantic love, or politics for that matter.) But some level of this intuition probably comes from other (religious) beliefs… so I'd have to think about it.
On the other hand I feel like there's another question kind of implicit here which is—does Johanna's community of aesthetes… have Johanna's back? Or are they like, well, that passport stuff sounds like a pain but it's not like you were planning to travel.…
I guess we will find out whether it's possible to find solace in literature in a time of political crisis.
As for having Johanna's back, these aesthetes surely do not. They're a group formed in reaction to the kind of people who, whatever their faults, have actually been there for trans people.
If someone isn’t free to travel, it’s more than a pain. They are being held hostage, when they used to be free. Hostages are captive and can be used as pawns.
I can't help but think of Melville as aware of the monstrosity of slavery during his time, and I suspect that "Benito Cereno" was an abolitionist tract. Still, it's not explicitly abolitionist, even if it probably should be! I have trouble thinking of Melville as anything but a radical humanist at minimum, especially in the sections of Moby Dick about Queequeg.
Anyway, that's all to say that once the current regime cancels H1-B visas and you feel called to write about the stupidity of banning the best and brightest people from the all over the globe (but mostly the largest countries on the globe) from coming here, feel free! This does not need to be a politics-free space...even if most of the debates in the last ten years feel wildly disconnected from reality, whether they're about prison abolition or how trans people aren't real.
I love and believe in literature and its eternal power. I also have a sister who is transgender, who I love and believe in. Your writing reassures me that I can have both. Great art won't save my sister from discrimination and legal repression, but art also helps me (and her, I believe) see that we can endure.
I don't know how many of us there are, but there are certainly people out here who want both Johanna and her project.
Late to the table, sorry. Of course Trump's electoral victory wasn't either a landslide or a popular mandate. But it sure feels like a vibe shift, doesn't it, if by that is meant a fundamental uplifting and overturn of administrative structures and social accommodations earlier taken for granted. One cannot safely comment favorably about some of the changes even if they may seem deserving because it's clear at least to this commentator that history's trajectory is towards the dictatorship implicit in a unitary presidency.
Yeah, I think a lot of people are just holding their breath. If you're right-of-center, you're hoping for the best. But most people suspect this isn't going to turn out that well.
This post was such a thoughtful and probing commentary on the "vibe shift" and also the religious belief in literature. Thank you so much, Naomi. Literature has been my religion for all of my 83 years. But reading is the "god". So I read philosophy, books about art, and so on. There are certain books that give me great comfort and understanding and that have, in the past, helped get me through challenges in my life. I don't think that people who really love reading will be influenced that much by the "vibe shift" in the long run. ps I am of the personal belief that people who are vehemently anti-trans have a problem with their own identity. They should take care of that and leave other people alone. I identify as female, the gender I was born with. I am all for people transitioning if they so desire. During the last election, the phrase came up from the Midwest: "Mind your own damn business."
I am so delighted to find a writer who is so brilliant and such a keen and careful reader! Your comments are very inspirational, Naomi, and inspires one to think about the work you are reviewing and commenting about!
Just wanted to say I love your work and I'm rooting for you. Whether or not you shift what you're writing about, you are *making* literature here, and there's nothing false about that. Upgrading to paid now <3
I really sympathize with the position of being aesthetically anti-woke while still believing in many of those same ideas. In left-wing circles, I frequently encounter the sentiment "Okay, we might be cringe sometimes, but ~surely~ the cringe is massively outweighed by us being in the right, right? What's the point of drawing attention to this when our rights are under threat?".
But at least for me, it doesn't work like that. You can't just "cancel out" an aesthetic offense by being right. They're two completely different axes! I would struggle to look the other way even if I was twice as sure about left-wing beliefs.
HOWEVER, it's hard to aesthetically object to wokeness without feeling like an intellectual "pick me" of some sort. Even if you know that you believe certain things, there's always going to be this question of how much you've distorted (even in your own mind!) for the sake of seeming more based or refined. No wonder most people who start out just being aesthetically anti-woke eventually suffer from audience capture and just swallow the whole package. On some level I envy conservatives who don't have to deal with that dissonance.
And of course there are limits to how much nuance can be preserved over the Internet. Trying to thread the needle for such a charged topic is less likely to actually convey your views and much more likely to just polarize the entire audience against you. Or maybe just make them confused.
I tried to capture my True Nuanced Feelings about "woke literature" in this recent piece...
...but I'm not sure how I feel about it. At a certain point in the writing process I felt like I was just glancing over my shoulder all the time, trying to preempt all the ways in which I could be uncharitably thrown into one of the woke / anti-woke bins. It felt restrictive enough that I'm not particularly inclined to venture into that territory again anytime soon.
So I admire your willingness to do that with this piece. I can't imagine what it's like when you actually have a large-ish politically diverse-ish (?) following that you don't want to disappoint. Excited to see where this newsletter goes!
We need more people like you and Naomi to commit to nuance. If I'm going to make anything into a god right now, that might be it. In fact, come to think of it, that might be how I define the term 'god.'
But you're right, committing to it can feel restrictive and exhausting.
Yeah, part of the problem too is that conservatives have preemptively colonized the "nuance space". Like if someone identifies themselves as a "centrist" or "moderate" or "independent thinker", my eyes glaze over as the ContraPoints impression of Dave Rubin faux-centrism (https://youtu.be/EdvM_pRfuFM?t=53) plays in my head.
Honestly, I have to give props to conservatives for running such an effective PR campaign. It's been truly impressive to watch them hijack the centrist / "freethinker" aesthetic while still parroting their same ideological positions. The shift has been gradual enough for me to see the progression, but sometimes I'm still like "man, how in the world did they convince people that being a housewife is countercultural?".
Now there have been ~some~ benefits to the decreasing acceptance of centrism— for the longest time the corrosive neoliberal system of the '90s was able to escape scrutiny under the cover of bipartisan moderation. I like that people are now more willing able to call out the vacuous "ideology" of "I just don't want to ruffle any feathers". But it's also put us in this terrible rhetorical environment where even a term like "centrist" has taken on all kinds of political baggage.
One issue is that the “woke” set had impoverished rhetoric when it came to talking about literature, and used the truism that all art of political to take no further steps toward clearly thinking about art. I had some thoughts on this in another venue: https://bsky.app/profile/nmamatas.bsky.social/post/3lhesb5tncs2q
It is pretty weird to get better lit crit and books coverage from the center-right these days, even (especially?) as so many of that crowd seem to be either former Sanders supporters who went right after being called “Ugh white dude!” once too often (or once) or the vague U of Chicago market liberal types who enjoy getting high and reading fun books but cannot bring themselves to stray to far from Wealthy Uncle politics.
I would suggest that a second issue is that we still tend to confuse producing art with becoming somehow prominent for doing so. So yes a few years ago The Times was covering every important new voice with various marginalizations and since then the dam broke and we get Dimes Square puff pieces again (is DS over? Probably! But Heavy Traffic was profiled just this week!) But 90% of us never get in the Times and keep plugging along for a variety of reasons, only some of which are social or financial. Here you are every week, Naomi! And here I am, reading through instead of skimming as I do with the zillion other (free) substacks to which I have subscribed.
I was tickled by the aside about Melville and Navy discipline. I’m reminded of martial arts. Feudal Japan was ruled by its military in many ways, while China was ruled by its Civil Service, and martial arts was thus for wash-outs, street performers, and yokels. Even today, you join a serious Japanese martial arts dojo and it’s like joining the Army with bowing and uniforms and ranks colored belts and barking! Join a serious Chinese martial arts (that hasn’t been doubly-Orientalized by the expectations of its Americans students for the Japanese experience)…that’s like joining a gang.
That's such a funny observation about the martial arts.
Thanks for reading! I know, it's so impressive both of us are still around no?
Yes to the arts-coverage being better in center-right journals. I at some point decided I wouldn't publish in journals with an anti-trans party line, which is annoying because all the best arts pages are in Compact, Tablet, The Spectator, places like that.
First of all, yes, I can handle you expressing your politics in this space. That is made very easy by the fact that I agree with your right to exist as you are.
The other question is an interesting framing. I find that art can sustain me, but only because I see human creativity as a gift from God and a calling. If it were only something that I liked an awful lot, I don’t think that would go far enough. I have experience with putting other things (money, love, drugs & booze) in the God slot. It did not work.
I understand that you may not believe in God. I found I had no choice. Thank God.
Thanks! Nice to hear from you =] I believe in the Hindu cosmology. I think there is an order to the universe, and what is right will ultimately win out. And that's been a huge consolation to me, yes.
I love it! I can see no reason why your love of literature and writing about literature can’t be an expression of faith and a divine part of your cosmology. Perhaps that would make it sustaining in these horrible times. I certainly find your work to be a beautiful expression and hope you can continue.
As for literature in general - story, imaginative literature - the social, moral, and aesthetic are all part and parcel - it's an art. For research geeks, a few chronological quotations on the role of artists and critics:
(1864) Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare:
Literature is the secretion of civilization, poetry of the ideal. That is why literature is one of the wants of societies. That is why poetry is a hunger of the soul. That is why poets are the first instructors of the people…(257).
“…all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”
(1932) V.F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature:
"In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftsmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape."
(1939) Bernard Smith, Forces in Literary Criticism:
“[T.S. Eliot wrote,] ‘There are two and only two finally tenable hypotheses about life: the Catholic and the materialistic [i.e., Marxist]. It is quite possible, of course, that the future may bring neither a Christian nor a materialistic civilization. It is quite possible that the future may be nothing but chaos or torpor. In that event, I am not interested in the future; I am only interested in the two alternatives which seem to me worthier of interest….’ Eliot chose not only the Catholic hypothesis, but also its political corollaries. His literary opinions were thus given a firm philosophical base to rest upon, and from that fact he drew the reasonable conclusions…[that] ‘Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so far as in any age there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters, so far can literary criticism be substantive. In ages like our own, in which there is no such common agreement, it is then more necessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological standards. The ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.’ To this has esthetic criticism at last come—to a realization that non-esthetic criteria are the ultimate tests of value. Whether they be called philosophical, moral, or social criteria, they are still the ideas that men have about the way human beings live together and the way they ought to live. The quest of beauty had become the quest of reality. It had become, in essence, literary criticism as socially conscious and as polemical as the criticism of the Marxists….
Eliot’s alternative involves a revulsion against democracy; the materialists are partisans of democracy. The literary criticism of his school tends to create a literature that will express the sensibilities and experiences of a few fortunate men. The criticism of the opposing school tends to create a literature that will express the ideals and sympathies of those who look forward to the conquest of poverty, ignorance, and inequality—to the material and intellectual elevation of the mass of mankind….”
(1990) Toni Cade Bambara, Black Women Writers at Work (Claudia Tate, Ed.):
“I start with the recognition that we are at war, and that war is not simply a hot debate between the capitalist camp and socialist camp over which economic/political/social arrangement will have hegemony in the world. It’s not just the battle over turf and who has the right to utilize resources for whomsoever’s benefit. The war is also being fought over the truth: what is the truth about human nature, about the human potential? My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family and the human family is to try to tell the truth. That ain’t easy. There are so few truth-speaking traditions in this society in which the myth of ‘Western civilization’ has claimed the allegiance of so many. We have rarely been encouraged and equipped to appreciate the fact that the truth works, that it releases the Spirit and that it is a joyous thing. We live in a part of the world, for example, that equates criticism with assault, that equates social responsibility with naïve idealism, that defines the unrelenting pursuit of knowledge and wisdom as fanaticism.” “I do not think that literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has potency. So I work to tell the truth about people’s lives; I work to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our community, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinary folks on the block…” “It would be dishonest, though, to end my comments there. First and foremost I write for myself….”
(1990) Audre Lorde, Black Women Writers at Work (Claudia Tate, Ed.):
“I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror of the lives we are living. Social protest is saying that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will find the germ of our answers to bring about change. Because once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not, we will ask, ‘Why don’t they?’ And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably to social change. So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can’t say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.”
(1993) Barbara Foley, “Art or Propaganda,” in Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941:
“The 1930s literary radicals, I have demonstrated, brought various considerations to bear in their definitions of proletarian literature. There was, however, no party line on the subject. As Jack Conroy remarked retrospectively about the debates over what proletarian literature was, ‘We used to talk about it endlessly and never arrived at any definite conclusion’…. Even if writers did not feel bound to one or another definition of proletarian literature, [certain] critics argue, they felt obliged to conform to a rigid didacticism involving stock characters, formulaic plots, and a programmatic optimism. Art had to be a weapon and, as such, an instrument of propaganda. But since art and propaganda are antagonistically opposed, left-wing didactic literature was condemned to mouthing slogans and preaching conversion to the cause.
“In future chapters we will have the opportunity to determine whether proletarian novels were in fact as formulaic and predictable as their detractors charge. What I shall argue in this chapter is that there is very limited validity to the charge that routinely accompanies accusations of political straitjacketing—namely, that Third-Period Marxist critics, as mouthpieces for the party line, sought to impose a specifically propagandistic view of literature upon the writers in the party orbit. I shall show that left-wing literary commentators only rarely promoted the notion that literary works should impart or promote specific tenets of party doctrine; insofar as the critics had a coherent aesthetic theory, this theory was almost exclusively cognitive and reflectionist rather than agitational and hortatory. Indeed, I shall argue that in certain important ways the American approach to questions of representation and ideology was committed—as was the dominant tendency in all Marxist criticism of this period, Soviet and European—to a number of premises about literary form that were bourgeois rather than revolutionary. Literary radicals might applaud proletarian novelists whose works encouraged revolutionary class partisanship…. In general, however, commentators, critics and novelists alike, held back from theorizing—let alone legislating—any of the representational maneuvers specific to this literary weaponry. Their espoused commitment to the notion that all literature is propaganda for one side or another in the class struggle was countered by a deep antipathy to viewing proletarian literature as propagandistic in any of its distinctive rhetorical strategies. The 1930s radicals never fully repudiated the bourgeois counterposition of art to propaganda: to them, proletarian literature contained very different values and assumptions, but as literature, it was just like any other kind of writing. Ironically, to the extent that they were prescriptive in advocating any given set of aesthetic principles, the Marxist critics urged a largely depoliticized conception of mimetic practice that coexisted only uneasily with many of the values and ideas that they congratulated writers for articulating in their texts” (129-131).
I don't usually comment because I'm out of my depth on these posts, though I love reading them; literature is not my field. Which is to say, I hadn't encountered many of these quotes before, and they're very thoughtful and compelling!
Thank you for compiling them here, and for sharing the link.
As I started reading, I was pretty certain the Helen Handler series wasn't real, but I really wish it was. You've isolated something in her exchange with Terpsichore. I find myself relating more to Helen, but I recognize the weaknesses of her position. Thanks for sharing.
This seems to be the source of the claim that “trans people can’t get passports.” They’re freezing passport applications that list X as the person’s sex. That has led to delay for some people who recently put in passports with X.
No reason to believe that trans people who accurately list their sex as M or F would be denied a passport. The State Department has made it clear that they want passports to show sex, not gender.
But if X = trans, and someone’s sex is X/trans, then they can’t accurately list their sex on a passport in order to get a passport. And if their current passport is confiscated, because the person in the uniform decides they know better than the individual and the government that previously issued the passport whether that individual’s passport should state sex as M or F or X based on … what? Not the person’s government documentation. Surely you see the uncomfortable, nigh impossible, position this creates for that person?
I think the Johana of this story would be expecting comments like this, and that you’re making them adds just the right note of meta to this discourse.
And I think Naomi is far beyond being impressed by this kind of reactionary middle of the night response I’m having to it. But I want her to keep reading, and writing about reading, and also whatever politics she wants to write about so here I am, ticking up the engagement by one and in the morning I’ll upgrade my subscription.
No one’s sex is X, though. Your sex is M or F regardless of gender identity. The State Department is saying they want your biological sex on your passport application, and you might think they should ask for gender instead, but if you want a passport you’ve gotta fill out the form they give you
I don’t believe this is true, in the case when someone has transitioned and changed their sex characteristics or has intersex characteristics. But I don’t think I can change your mind in the comments here.
"For instance, ten years ago, the party line was that America incarcerated way too many people of color. Johanna hadn't thought much about this until then, but she was convinced by that idea. She continues to believe America incarcerates too many people of color. Let's call this party-line 'wokeness’.”
I remember that. That was before we elected the white guy from Scranton who co-wrote the crime bill. The very bill that tripled the number of people of color in prisons that Clinton turned into for-profit institutions. I betcha Johanna never thought about that. She was too busy wondering why she wasn’t universally loved by everyone from the moment she was born til the moment she died. Most of us get over that stage by high school.
The post bemoans why Johanna has had to shift politically every few years to remain relevant. Since Johanna’s surname is missing, the reader could assume Johanna is a figment of the author’s rendering. The author uses a debatable claim that a decade ago, the party line — which party? — incarcerating way too many people of color. The response to that was the election of a man who got into politics as a Dixiecrat and has always governed in the shadow of racial hypocrisy. It is a fact that he co-wrote one the most damaging pieces of legislation in this country’s history when it comes to incarcerating people of color. That only nullifies the entire thesis laid out here. “The truth will set you free if it doesn’t kill you first.” Sinclair Lewis.
I think you are continuing to misread the post entirely and I'm not sure I'll be able to correct that in this comment section, sorry! I'll be disengaging.
This is obviously untrue and contradicted by evidence in Kanakia's post. Being unable to renew your passport (and having your current document confiscated) is cruel and harmful in ways that shouldn't have to be explained.
Trump does his share of performative actions, and it would be good of all of us to recognize those for what they are, but he mixes those in to distract from the very real and harmful things he does.
I have kind of an intuition that "Art is everything! Art is life! Literature endures" is not the attitude that can sustain close attention to art in times of (political, personal, personal-political) crisis. I guess that is a way of saying, I do think literature is a false god, if it's treated like a god. (Similar to romantic love, or politics for that matter.) But some level of this intuition probably comes from other (religious) beliefs… so I'd have to think about it.
On the other hand I feel like there's another question kind of implicit here which is—does Johanna's community of aesthetes… have Johanna's back? Or are they like, well, that passport stuff sounds like a pain but it's not like you were planning to travel.…
I guess we will find out whether it's possible to find solace in literature in a time of political crisis.
As for having Johanna's back, these aesthetes surely do not. They're a group formed in reaction to the kind of people who, whatever their faults, have actually been there for trans people.
If someone isn’t free to travel, it’s more than a pain. They are being held hostage, when they used to be free. Hostages are captive and can be used as pawns.
Please please please write about Moby Dick
I can't help but think of Melville as aware of the monstrosity of slavery during his time, and I suspect that "Benito Cereno" was an abolitionist tract. Still, it's not explicitly abolitionist, even if it probably should be! I have trouble thinking of Melville as anything but a radical humanist at minimum, especially in the sections of Moby Dick about Queequeg.
Anyway, that's all to say that once the current regime cancels H1-B visas and you feel called to write about the stupidity of banning the best and brightest people from the all over the globe (but mostly the largest countries on the globe) from coming here, feel free! This does not need to be a politics-free space...even if most of the debates in the last ten years feel wildly disconnected from reality, whether they're about prison abolition or how trans people aren't real.
Having now read Cereno I really agree--there is no question in my mind that Melville's sympathies were with Babo and the other slaves.
I love and believe in literature and its eternal power. I also have a sister who is transgender, who I love and believe in. Your writing reassures me that I can have both. Great art won't save my sister from discrimination and legal repression, but art also helps me (and her, I believe) see that we can endure.
I don't know how many of us there are, but there are certainly people out here who want both Johanna and her project.
Thank you!
Late to the table, sorry. Of course Trump's electoral victory wasn't either a landslide or a popular mandate. But it sure feels like a vibe shift, doesn't it, if by that is meant a fundamental uplifting and overturn of administrative structures and social accommodations earlier taken for granted. One cannot safely comment favorably about some of the changes even if they may seem deserving because it's clear at least to this commentator that history's trajectory is towards the dictatorship implicit in a unitary presidency.
Yeah, I think a lot of people are just holding their breath. If you're right-of-center, you're hoping for the best. But most people suspect this isn't going to turn out that well.
This post was such a thoughtful and probing commentary on the "vibe shift" and also the religious belief in literature. Thank you so much, Naomi. Literature has been my religion for all of my 83 years. But reading is the "god". So I read philosophy, books about art, and so on. There are certain books that give me great comfort and understanding and that have, in the past, helped get me through challenges in my life. I don't think that people who really love reading will be influenced that much by the "vibe shift" in the long run. ps I am of the personal belief that people who are vehemently anti-trans have a problem with their own identity. They should take care of that and leave other people alone. I identify as female, the gender I was born with. I am all for people transitioning if they so desire. During the last election, the phrase came up from the Midwest: "Mind your own damn business."
Thank you! I really appreciate this and your comments in general, Mary
I am so delighted to find a writer who is so brilliant and such a keen and careful reader! Your comments are very inspirational, Naomi, and inspires one to think about the work you are reviewing and commenting about!
Just wanted to say I love your work and I'm rooting for you. Whether or not you shift what you're writing about, you are *making* literature here, and there's nothing false about that. Upgrading to paid now <3
Thank you! I appreciate that =]
I really sympathize with the position of being aesthetically anti-woke while still believing in many of those same ideas. In left-wing circles, I frequently encounter the sentiment "Okay, we might be cringe sometimes, but ~surely~ the cringe is massively outweighed by us being in the right, right? What's the point of drawing attention to this when our rights are under threat?".
But at least for me, it doesn't work like that. You can't just "cancel out" an aesthetic offense by being right. They're two completely different axes! I would struggle to look the other way even if I was twice as sure about left-wing beliefs.
HOWEVER, it's hard to aesthetically object to wokeness without feeling like an intellectual "pick me" of some sort. Even if you know that you believe certain things, there's always going to be this question of how much you've distorted (even in your own mind!) for the sake of seeming more based or refined. No wonder most people who start out just being aesthetically anti-woke eventually suffer from audience capture and just swallow the whole package. On some level I envy conservatives who don't have to deal with that dissonance.
And of course there are limits to how much nuance can be preserved over the Internet. Trying to thread the needle for such a charged topic is less likely to actually convey your views and much more likely to just polarize the entire audience against you. Or maybe just make them confused.
I tried to capture my True Nuanced Feelings about "woke literature" in this recent piece...
https://synthesizedsunsets.substack.com/p/elevating-wokeness-why-n-k-jemisins
...but I'm not sure how I feel about it. At a certain point in the writing process I felt like I was just glancing over my shoulder all the time, trying to preempt all the ways in which I could be uncharitably thrown into one of the woke / anti-woke bins. It felt restrictive enough that I'm not particularly inclined to venture into that territory again anytime soon.
So I admire your willingness to do that with this piece. I can't imagine what it's like when you actually have a large-ish politically diverse-ish (?) following that you don't want to disappoint. Excited to see where this newsletter goes!
I really liked that post! And this is a great comment as well.
We need more people like you and Naomi to commit to nuance. If I'm going to make anything into a god right now, that might be it. In fact, come to think of it, that might be how I define the term 'god.'
But you're right, committing to it can feel restrictive and exhausting.
Yeah, part of the problem too is that conservatives have preemptively colonized the "nuance space". Like if someone identifies themselves as a "centrist" or "moderate" or "independent thinker", my eyes glaze over as the ContraPoints impression of Dave Rubin faux-centrism (https://youtu.be/EdvM_pRfuFM?t=53) plays in my head.
Honestly, I have to give props to conservatives for running such an effective PR campaign. It's been truly impressive to watch them hijack the centrist / "freethinker" aesthetic while still parroting their same ideological positions. The shift has been gradual enough for me to see the progression, but sometimes I'm still like "man, how in the world did they convince people that being a housewife is countercultural?".
Now there have been ~some~ benefits to the decreasing acceptance of centrism— for the longest time the corrosive neoliberal system of the '90s was able to escape scrutiny under the cover of bipartisan moderation. I like that people are now more willing able to call out the vacuous "ideology" of "I just don't want to ruffle any feathers". But it's also put us in this terrible rhetorical environment where even a term like "centrist" has taken on all kinds of political baggage.
One issue is that the “woke” set had impoverished rhetoric when it came to talking about literature, and used the truism that all art of political to take no further steps toward clearly thinking about art. I had some thoughts on this in another venue: https://bsky.app/profile/nmamatas.bsky.social/post/3lhesb5tncs2q
It is pretty weird to get better lit crit and books coverage from the center-right these days, even (especially?) as so many of that crowd seem to be either former Sanders supporters who went right after being called “Ugh white dude!” once too often (or once) or the vague U of Chicago market liberal types who enjoy getting high and reading fun books but cannot bring themselves to stray to far from Wealthy Uncle politics.
I would suggest that a second issue is that we still tend to confuse producing art with becoming somehow prominent for doing so. So yes a few years ago The Times was covering every important new voice with various marginalizations and since then the dam broke and we get Dimes Square puff pieces again (is DS over? Probably! But Heavy Traffic was profiled just this week!) But 90% of us never get in the Times and keep plugging along for a variety of reasons, only some of which are social or financial. Here you are every week, Naomi! And here I am, reading through instead of skimming as I do with the zillion other (free) substacks to which I have subscribed.
I was tickled by the aside about Melville and Navy discipline. I’m reminded of martial arts. Feudal Japan was ruled by its military in many ways, while China was ruled by its Civil Service, and martial arts was thus for wash-outs, street performers, and yokels. Even today, you join a serious Japanese martial arts dojo and it’s like joining the Army with bowing and uniforms and ranks colored belts and barking! Join a serious Chinese martial arts (that hasn’t been doubly-Orientalized by the expectations of its Americans students for the Japanese experience)…that’s like joining a gang.
That's such a funny observation about the martial arts.
Thanks for reading! I know, it's so impressive both of us are still around no?
Yes to the arts-coverage being better in center-right journals. I at some point decided I wouldn't publish in journals with an anti-trans party line, which is annoying because all the best arts pages are in Compact, Tablet, The Spectator, places like that.
First of all, yes, I can handle you expressing your politics in this space. That is made very easy by the fact that I agree with your right to exist as you are.
The other question is an interesting framing. I find that art can sustain me, but only because I see human creativity as a gift from God and a calling. If it were only something that I liked an awful lot, I don’t think that would go far enough. I have experience with putting other things (money, love, drugs & booze) in the God slot. It did not work.
I understand that you may not believe in God. I found I had no choice. Thank God.
Thanks! Nice to hear from you =] I believe in the Hindu cosmology. I think there is an order to the universe, and what is right will ultimately win out. And that's been a huge consolation to me, yes.
I love it! I can see no reason why your love of literature and writing about literature can’t be an expression of faith and a divine part of your cosmology. Perhaps that would make it sustaining in these horrible times. I certainly find your work to be a beautiful expression and hope you can continue.
God? All Gods are grand or infernal stories.
As for literature in general - story, imaginative literature - the social, moral, and aesthetic are all part and parcel - it's an art. For research geeks, a few chronological quotations on the role of artists and critics:
(1864) Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare:
Literature is the secretion of civilization, poetry of the ideal. That is why literature is one of the wants of societies. That is why poetry is a hunger of the soul. That is why poets are the first instructors of the people…(257).
(1926) W.E.B. DuBois, African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000 (Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ed.):
“…all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”
(1932) V.F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature:
"In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftsmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape."
(1939) Bernard Smith, Forces in Literary Criticism:
“[T.S. Eliot wrote,] ‘There are two and only two finally tenable hypotheses about life: the Catholic and the materialistic [i.e., Marxist]. It is quite possible, of course, that the future may bring neither a Christian nor a materialistic civilization. It is quite possible that the future may be nothing but chaos or torpor. In that event, I am not interested in the future; I am only interested in the two alternatives which seem to me worthier of interest….’ Eliot chose not only the Catholic hypothesis, but also its political corollaries. His literary opinions were thus given a firm philosophical base to rest upon, and from that fact he drew the reasonable conclusions…[that] ‘Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so far as in any age there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters, so far can literary criticism be substantive. In ages like our own, in which there is no such common agreement, it is then more necessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological standards. The ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.’ To this has esthetic criticism at last come—to a realization that non-esthetic criteria are the ultimate tests of value. Whether they be called philosophical, moral, or social criteria, they are still the ideas that men have about the way human beings live together and the way they ought to live. The quest of beauty had become the quest of reality. It had become, in essence, literary criticism as socially conscious and as polemical as the criticism of the Marxists….
Eliot’s alternative involves a revulsion against democracy; the materialists are partisans of democracy. The literary criticism of his school tends to create a literature that will express the sensibilities and experiences of a few fortunate men. The criticism of the opposing school tends to create a literature that will express the ideals and sympathies of those who look forward to the conquest of poverty, ignorance, and inequality—to the material and intellectual elevation of the mass of mankind….”
(1990) Toni Cade Bambara, Black Women Writers at Work (Claudia Tate, Ed.):
“I start with the recognition that we are at war, and that war is not simply a hot debate between the capitalist camp and socialist camp over which economic/political/social arrangement will have hegemony in the world. It’s not just the battle over turf and who has the right to utilize resources for whomsoever’s benefit. The war is also being fought over the truth: what is the truth about human nature, about the human potential? My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family and the human family is to try to tell the truth. That ain’t easy. There are so few truth-speaking traditions in this society in which the myth of ‘Western civilization’ has claimed the allegiance of so many. We have rarely been encouraged and equipped to appreciate the fact that the truth works, that it releases the Spirit and that it is a joyous thing. We live in a part of the world, for example, that equates criticism with assault, that equates social responsibility with naïve idealism, that defines the unrelenting pursuit of knowledge and wisdom as fanaticism.” “I do not think that literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has potency. So I work to tell the truth about people’s lives; I work to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our community, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinary folks on the block…” “It would be dishonest, though, to end my comments there. First and foremost I write for myself….”
(1990) Audre Lorde, Black Women Writers at Work (Claudia Tate, Ed.):
“I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror of the lives we are living. Social protest is saying that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will find the germ of our answers to bring about change. Because once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not, we will ask, ‘Why don’t they?’ And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably to social change. So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can’t say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.”
(1993) Barbara Foley, “Art or Propaganda,” in Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941:
“The 1930s literary radicals, I have demonstrated, brought various considerations to bear in their definitions of proletarian literature. There was, however, no party line on the subject. As Jack Conroy remarked retrospectively about the debates over what proletarian literature was, ‘We used to talk about it endlessly and never arrived at any definite conclusion’…. Even if writers did not feel bound to one or another definition of proletarian literature, [certain] critics argue, they felt obliged to conform to a rigid didacticism involving stock characters, formulaic plots, and a programmatic optimism. Art had to be a weapon and, as such, an instrument of propaganda. But since art and propaganda are antagonistically opposed, left-wing didactic literature was condemned to mouthing slogans and preaching conversion to the cause.
“In future chapters we will have the opportunity to determine whether proletarian novels were in fact as formulaic and predictable as their detractors charge. What I shall argue in this chapter is that there is very limited validity to the charge that routinely accompanies accusations of political straitjacketing—namely, that Third-Period Marxist critics, as mouthpieces for the party line, sought to impose a specifically propagandistic view of literature upon the writers in the party orbit. I shall show that left-wing literary commentators only rarely promoted the notion that literary works should impart or promote specific tenets of party doctrine; insofar as the critics had a coherent aesthetic theory, this theory was almost exclusively cognitive and reflectionist rather than agitational and hortatory. Indeed, I shall argue that in certain important ways the American approach to questions of representation and ideology was committed—as was the dominant tendency in all Marxist criticism of this period, Soviet and European—to a number of premises about literary form that were bourgeois rather than revolutionary. Literary radicals might applaud proletarian novelists whose works encouraged revolutionary class partisanship…. In general, however, commentators, critics and novelists alike, held back from theorizing—let alone legislating—any of the representational maneuvers specific to this literary weaponry. Their espoused commitment to the notion that all literature is propaganda for one side or another in the class struggle was countered by a deep antipathy to viewing proletarian literature as propagandistic in any of its distinctive rhetorical strategies. The 1930s radicals never fully repudiated the bourgeois counterposition of art to propaganda: to them, proletarian literature contained very different values and assumptions, but as literature, it was just like any other kind of writing. Ironically, to the extent that they were prescriptive in advocating any given set of aesthetic principles, the Marxist critics urged a largely depoliticized conception of mimetic practice that coexisted only uneasily with many of the values and ideas that they congratulated writers for articulating in their texts” (129-131).
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I compiled a much longer chronology of critical excerpts at link below, most with a strong liberatory focus. Gloria Anzaldúa's excerpt is additionally of particular interest, I think: https://apracticalpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/political-literary-criticism-october.pdf
I don't usually comment because I'm out of my depth on these posts, though I love reading them; literature is not my field. Which is to say, I hadn't encountered many of these quotes before, and they're very thoughtful and compelling!
Thank you for compiling them here, and for sharing the link.
My pleasure. I excerpted and archived a lot of liberatory lit criticism nearly two decades ago at this "socialit" link:
https://apracticalpolicy.org/about/featured-postslinks/socialit/
Plus, a much longer excerpt of the Victor Hugo quote that I didn't get into the PDF:
https://apracticalpolicy.org/2007/11/30/excerpts-1883-1926/
Some strains of liberatory literature criticism and imaginative writing and other art have been overlooked and/or distorted, I think.
As I started reading, I was pretty certain the Helen Handler series wasn't real, but I really wish it was. You've isolated something in her exchange with Terpsichore. I find myself relating more to Helen, but I recognize the weaknesses of her position. Thanks for sharing.
I know! I'm kinda tempted to write these books :)
You should! I would read them.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/23/trump-rubio-x-gender-passport
This seems to be the source of the claim that “trans people can’t get passports.” They’re freezing passport applications that list X as the person’s sex. That has led to delay for some people who recently put in passports with X.
No reason to believe that trans people who accurately list their sex as M or F would be denied a passport. The State Department has made it clear that they want passports to show sex, not gender.
But if X = trans, and someone’s sex is X/trans, then they can’t accurately list their sex on a passport in order to get a passport. And if their current passport is confiscated, because the person in the uniform decides they know better than the individual and the government that previously issued the passport whether that individual’s passport should state sex as M or F or X based on … what? Not the person’s government documentation. Surely you see the uncomfortable, nigh impossible, position this creates for that person?
I think the Johana of this story would be expecting comments like this, and that you’re making them adds just the right note of meta to this discourse.
And I think Naomi is far beyond being impressed by this kind of reactionary middle of the night response I’m having to it. But I want her to keep reading, and writing about reading, and also whatever politics she wants to write about so here I am, ticking up the engagement by one and in the morning I’ll upgrade my subscription.
No one’s sex is X, though. Your sex is M or F regardless of gender identity. The State Department is saying they want your biological sex on your passport application, and you might think they should ask for gender instead, but if you want a passport you’ve gotta fill out the form they give you
I don’t believe this is true, in the case when someone has transitioned and changed their sex characteristics or has intersex characteristics. But I don’t think I can change your mind in the comments here.
"For instance, ten years ago, the party line was that America incarcerated way too many people of color. Johanna hadn't thought much about this until then, but she was convinced by that idea. She continues to believe America incarcerates too many people of color. Let's call this party-line 'wokeness’.”
I remember that. That was before we elected the white guy from Scranton who co-wrote the crime bill. The very bill that tripled the number of people of color in prisons that Clinton turned into for-profit institutions. I betcha Johanna never thought about that. She was too busy wondering why she wasn’t universally loved by everyone from the moment she was born til the moment she died. Most of us get over that stage by high school.
I find this to be a rather mean-spirited and dense misreading of Johanna & the post as a whole, for what it's worth.
The post bemoans why Johanna has had to shift politically every few years to remain relevant. Since Johanna’s surname is missing, the reader could assume Johanna is a figment of the author’s rendering. The author uses a debatable claim that a decade ago, the party line — which party? — incarcerating way too many people of color. The response to that was the election of a man who got into politics as a Dixiecrat and has always governed in the shadow of racial hypocrisy. It is a fact that he co-wrote one the most damaging pieces of legislation in this country’s history when it comes to incarcerating people of color. That only nullifies the entire thesis laid out here. “The truth will set you free if it doesn’t kill you first.” Sinclair Lewis.
I think you are continuing to misread the post entirely and I'm not sure I'll be able to correct that in this comment section, sorry! I'll be disengaging.
All it takes is three sentences.
This is obviously untrue and contradicted by evidence in Kanakia's post. Being unable to renew your passport (and having your current document confiscated) is cruel and harmful in ways that shouldn't have to be explained.
Trump does his share of performative actions, and it would be good of all of us to recognize those for what they are, but he mixes those in to distract from the very real and harmful things he does.