Interview and song – video

Detroit video tribute

Joe Emersberger’s story Segundo’s Revenge is an accomplished and valuable story. It’s artistic and readable, informative and educational. Though pointed and factual in urgent ways, it exhibits as well ambiguity of life and art. The story exemplifies quality propaganda and quality art, which writers on the left have sometimes noted can coexist well, contrary to what liberals and conservatives often decry or dismiss. Stories are invariably propagandistic or political in various ways. What makes Segundo’s Revenge special for progressive social change is that it works both as propaganda and as art, both implicitly and explicitly. Liberal works often function as propaganda mainly implicitly, though sometimes explicitly in part. Liberals often claim that overt propaganda is neither desirable nor aesthetic.

Not all art needs ambiguity to be aesthetic – this story happens to have it as a secondary or tertiary feature, some might argue primary. Segundo’s Revenge is artistic as well beyond ambiguity; for one, it is aesthetic in ways directly tied into the norms of the story and its structure – about which a great deal could be shown. Overall, the story is full of life, an end in itself, and a great tool. Paradoxically, the story’s utility both enhances the art (including the aesthetics) and makes the art often disappear in the face of its normative and educational power. Segundo’s Revenge is complex but simple. It is a pointed and purposeful and agitating creature, a remarkable work of art and education, both welcoming and working. Continue reading →

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in his critical work Decolonising the Mind (1986) below. His masterpiece novel Wizard of the Crow (2006) goes hand in glove with it. Wizard of the Crow is the equal of any of the Victorian novel greats.

In the Preface of Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ notes:

“Inevitably, essays of this nature may carry a holier-than-thou attitude or tone. I would like to make it clear that I am writing as much about myself as about anybody else. The present predicaments of Africa are often not a matter of personal choice: they arise from an historical situation. Their solutions are not so much a matter of personal decision as that of fundamental social transformation of the structures of our societies starting with a real break with imperialism and its internal ruling allies. Imperialism and its comprador alliances in Africa can never never develop the continent.”

The University of Iowa is home to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the leading, or the leading, graduate creative writing centers in the US, nationally and internationally renowned. But let’s consider all the creative writing programs across the US and the faculty and grad students, and let’s think of all the literary journals, and let’s consider in addition all the novelists in the US, and the publishers. How many explicit investigative novels about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, for example, have been written? And published? How many have been taught? Virtually none. The novel is a popular vehicle. The US conquest of Iraq, of greater Oila, is one of the great crimes and calamities of the time for which the US is responsible. Academics, intellectuals have an obligation to solicit, foster, produce, publish, teach, and otherwise disseminate such work. Essentially, they don’t. That’s a culture that is complicit.

Historian Paul Street recounts in “Cowardice Pays: Reflections on Academic Abdication and a Paul Krugman Lecture in Iowa City“:

“Academic co-optation” is not just a “cynical” radicals’ fantasy. It really exists across the middle and upper reaches of “higher-education,” where engaged radical sentiments and activism are commonly seen as naïve and un-professional and where cowardice can pay quite handsomely. And if it can explain the conservatism and indifference of state university professors deep in the heartland, imagine how far it can go with a heralded, Nobel Prize-winning Princeton academic who also holds down cherished column space at the nation’s leading newspaper of record?