The cultural front is not necessarily the flank of any movement. Can’t say it better than this:

In the words of Rickke Manazala, “culture is essential to sustaining our work.” Culture is not an adjunct, an add-on, something pigeon-holed and secondary. All throughout the USSF, from the puppets at the opening day march to the Indigenous drummers and singers at the final plenary, this truth was made manifest.

The leadership of the USSF understood that narrow “correct politics” or efficient organization alone do not do it. As Lillian Cotto Morales said, “we need to know one another as people so we can then talk politics and strategy.”

That’s from Ted Glick’s ZNet Commentary, “The U.S. Left Turns a Corner.”

Also of note:

“The left needs to start appealing to people’s hunger for hope and attraction to fantasy life. What’s more, Duncombe said, they have to let go of the belief—”naive at best, arrogant at worst”—that intellectual arguments should be enough to win people over, and that spectacle, as the Bush administration employs it, is something to which they shouldn’t have to resort, a tawdry means to an end.” – Stephen Duncombe 

An emphasis on culture also accords with Noam Chomsky’s point that: 

“Caricature is an art, and not an easy one.  But when well done, a very important one.  As for dealing with Orwell’s problem, I try to do it in the ways I know how to pursue; 1000s of pages by now.  No doubt there are other ways, maybe better ways.  But others will have to find what works for them.”

And what works for them, for us, must be in large part what works for others. We might ask ourselves what the cultural component of our work is, at any place and time, and what it needs to be.

No US antiwar movement, per the recent article by Alexander Cockburn? How about serializing an overt anti Iraq War novel? 

Why hasn’t this happened, long since, at a progressive news site? News and culture.

Is it due to lack of resources? Or is it due to what James Petras nailed years ago in “The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited”?: 

“The singular lasting, damaging influence of the CIA’s Congress of Cultural Freedom crowd was not their specific defenses of U.S. imperialist policies, but their success in imposing on subsequent generations of intellectuals the idea of excluding any sustained discussion of U.S. imperialism from the influential cultural and political media. The issue is not that today’s intellectuals or artists may or may not take a progressive position on this or that issue. The problem is the pervasive belief among writers and artists that anti-imperialist social and political expressions should not appear in their music, paintings, and serious writing if they want their work to be considered of substantial artistic merit. The enduring political victory of the CIA was to convince intellectuals that serious and sustained political engagement on the left is incompatible with serious art and scholarship.”

An activist “propagandistic” progressive partisan antiwar novel is the sort of thing that should be published in left news periodicals in serial form, just as Upton Sinclair’s partisan novels were – novels eventually turned into book form that people carried to work. Probably serialization should be done before book publication but seems to me just as useful to do it after book publication. Of course, I understand resource constraints may prevent any such publication, as we run into the same crunch at Mainstay Press. I wrote the fact-heavy anti Iraq War novel Homefront in the first six months of the March 2003 ground invasion of Iraq, then added a bit before its 2006 publication. Early on, the narrator was a reporter, but I later reduced her role. Still the novel reads as an investigative drama into the crime of the Iraq invasion and occupation. (I wrote two Vietnam-centered antiwar novellas in years prior to the ground invasion of Iraq. Homefront is the sort of antiwar novel for Iraq that was never written (or if written, never gained much of any prominence at all) for Vietnam, or Korea, or even WWII. The same holds for the antiwar fiction I wrote about Vietnam which I adapted to complete the Iraq invasion/occupation trilogy with Homefront. The trilogy is short enough that it ought to be combined into a single novel.) Homefront is perhaps more reminiscent to parts of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia than anything, though the main homage is to digging out the facts of the matter. The lack of progressive partisan fiction is one reason the antiwar movement in the US is as flat as it may be. It’s possible that Homefront’s like hasn’t been seen since Johnny Got His Gun in the 1930s (though Homefront is more explicit and detailed about ruling power), it seems to me. The culture has been that decapitated that long. Noam Chomsky: 

“Caricature is an art, and not an easy one.  But when well done, a very important one.  As for dealing with Orwell’s problem, I try to do it in the ways I know how to pursue; 1000s of pages by now.  No doubt there are other ways, maybe better ways.  But others will have to find what works for them.”

What Chomsky says here of progressive partisan caricature in fiction is true of progressive partisan fiction generally, which was widely understood and acted upon by progressive news publications of the 1930s – a period that was the “most intensively political period of the century,” Terry Eagleton notes in passing in his recent article on the contemporary political decline of leading literary writers. Progressive partisan fiction is badly needed, always has been. Pakistan has banned all fiction from India; it fears the power, the influence of all imaginative writing so much, while accepting some nonfiction. We should take stock of the power and influence of progressive partisan fiction, and seek to perpetuate it.

John Freeman asks, “Has the Novel Been Murdered by the Mob?”

Not by a long shot. 

Novels serve as basis and fuel for TV shows, niche films and popular movies, and of course for readers in schools and universities, as well as in general.

by Terry Eagleton 

For almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life. One might make an honourable exception of Harold Pinter, who has wisely decided that being a champagne socialist is better than being no socialist at all; but his most explicitly political work is also his most artistically dreary.

The knighting of Salman Rushdie is the establishment’s reward for a man who moved from being a remorseless satirist of the west to cheering on its criminal adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. David Hare caved in to the blandishments of Buckingham Palace some years ago, moving from radical to reformist. Christopher Hitchens, who looked set to become the George Orwell de nos jours, is likely to be remembered as our Evelyn Waugh, having thrown in his lot with Washington’s neocons. Martin Amis has written of the need to prevent Muslims travelling and to strip-search people “who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan”. Deportation, he considers, may be essential further down the road.  

The uniqueness of the situation is worth underlining. When Britain emerged as an industrial capitalist state, it had Shelley to urge the cause of the poor, Blake to dream of a communist utopia, and Byron to scourge the corruptions of the ruling class. The great Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough was known as Comrade Clough for his unabashed support of the revolutionaries of 1848. One of the most revered voices of Victorian England, Thomas Carlyle, denounced a social order in which the cash nexus was all that held individuals together. John Ruskin was the great inheritor of this moral critique of capitalism; and though neither he nor Carlyle were “creative”, they influenced one of the mightiest of English socialist poets, William Morris. In Morris’s entourage at the end of the 19th century was Oscar Wilde, remembered by the English as dandy, wit and socialite; and by the Irish as a socialist republican.

The early decades of the 20th century in Britain were dominated by socialist writers such as HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw. When Virginia Woolf writes in Three Guineas of “the arts of dominating other people … of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital”, she places herself to the left of almost every other major English novelist.

Not all rebukes were administered from the left. DH Lawrence, a radical rightist, denounced “the base forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition”. Possession, he thought, was a kind of illness of the spirit. High modernism, however politically compromised, questioned the fundamental value and direction of western civilisation. The 1930s witnessed the first body of consciously committed left writing in Britain. Taking sides was no longer seen as inimical to art, but as a vital part of its purpose.

In the postwar welfare state, however, the rot set in. Philip Larkin, the period’s unofficial poet laureate, was a racist who wrote of stringing up strikers. Most of the Angry Young Men of the 50s metamorphosed into Dyspeptic Old Buffers. The 60s and 70s – the second most intensively political period of the century – produced no radical of the status of a Brecht or Sartre. Iris Murdoch looked for an exciting moment as though she might fulfil this role, but turned inwards and rightwards. Doris Lessing was to do much the same.

 It was left to migrants (Naipaul, Rushdie, Sebald, Stoppard) to write some of our most innovative literature for us, as the Irish had earlier done. But migrants, as the work of VS Naipaul and Tom Stoppard testifies, are often more interested in adopting than challenging the conventions of their place of refuge. The same had been true of Joseph Conrad, Henry James and TS Eliot. Wilde, typically perverse, challenged and conformed at the same time.  

The great communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid died just as the dark night of Thatcherism descended. Rushdie’s was one of the few voices to keep alive this radical legacy; but now, with his fondness for the Pentagon’s politics, we need to look elsewhere for a serious satirist.

There are a number of factors in such renegacy. Money, adulation and that creeping conservatism known as growing old play a part, as does the apparent collapse of an alternative to capitalism. Most British writers welcome migrants, dislike Tony Blair, and object to the war in Iraq. But scarcely a single major poet or novelist is willing to look beyond such issues to the global capitalism that underlies them. Instead, it is assumed that there is a natural link between literature and left-liberalism. One glance at the great names of English literature is enough to disprove this prejudice.

Libertarian socialism – also known as a form of anarchism and/or an ever more fully realized form of democracy may well hold the best hope for humankind, as its various tendencies and manifestations show.

Some of the most central and detailed thought of what may be called the liberation tendency in US literary criticism of the first half of the twentieth century may be found in, for example, the half dozen books and their like below. The books by Sinclair, Calverton, Smith, and Geismar have been buried, in being scandalously neglected by virtually everyone:

1903 Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist
1924 Upton Sinclair, Mammonart
1932 V. F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature
1939 Bernard Smith, Forces in American Criticism
1941 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form
1958 Maxwell Geismar, American Moderns–From Rebellion to Conformity

Rod Dreher’s article “Doleful Pleas of a Father” is thoughtful, but the ending statement by novelist Mario Vargas Llosa that Dreher concurs with is false. Literature is not ideology free. Depending on how or what is written, literature can and often has served to reinforce status quo ideologies, or reactionary ideologies, militant ideologies, etc. Or, conversely, literature can be written to have a libratory effect.

The reading group Dreher joined purposely chose books for discussion that are removed from the present war in Iraq. They did this not because they think Iraq is not important, quite the contrary, but so that they might be able to learn something about war apart from a conflict that is so immediate and affecting on so many personal levels. Such thinking has a certain logic, but it also seems quite baselessly fearful and largely inept. After all, most people in the US oppose the war. You would think they would be more engaged, and less turned off, by novels about the Iraq war, not least a strong antiwar novel.

by Dick Meister 

It was 50 years ago this summer that Americans finally won the unfettered right to read whatever they wanted to read, a half-century since poet Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” went on trial in a San Francisco courtroom. 

Like many works before it, “Howl” had been declared “obscene” by law enforcement authorities who banned its sale. But this time it led to the summer-long trial that cleared “Howl” and virtually ended government book-banning.

…

Knight at the End of the Day

by Mahir Ali

ZNet

SIR Salman Rushdie – it has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it? A faintly ridiculous ring, much like Sir Mick Jagger or Sir Ian Botham, and not a million miles removed from Lord Ahmed or Baroness Uddin. The British honours system is an absurd and undemocratic anachronism that ought to have been abolished decades ago, yet it seems many people in Britain and across the lands once colonized in the name of the crown still covet the silly titles and the right they thereby gain to embellish their names with initials that invoke a non-existent entity: the British empire.
  

Continue reading Sir Salman Rushdie

By Yochi J. Dreazen

Inmates at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, used pebbles to scratch messages into the foam cups they got with their meals. When the guards weren’t looking, they passed the cups from cell to cell. It was a crude but effective way of communicating.

The prisoners weren’t passing along escape plans or information about future terrorist attacks. They were sending one another poems.

For years, the U.S. military refused to declassify the poems, arguing that inmates could use the works to pass coded messages to other militants outside. But the military relaxed the ban recently and cleared 22 poems by 17 prisoners for public release.

An 84-page anthology titled “Poems From Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak” will be published in August by the University of Iowa Press, giving readers an unusual glimpse into the emotional lives of the largely nameless and faceless prisoners there.

…

Jeff Greenfield of CBS News writes in relation to Michael Moore’s new expose film, Sicko:

“…beyond the debate that seems to surround every Moore film -—honest advocacy or distorted propaganda? — lies a different question: can a cultural event such as a movie actually affect political events?

“In the past, plenty of books have—from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” that helped fan abolitionist sentiment before the Civil War, to Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” a century ago that led to federal food regulation, to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” that spawned the environmental movement.

“Even a movie, like 1979’s The China Syndrome” helped trigger increased opposition to nuclear power.

“But there are plenty of counter-examples: 1983’s “The Right Stuff” did nothing for the Presidential campaign of ex-astronaut John Glenn; Howard Stern’s endorsement of John Kerry didn’t keep Bush from winning a landslide among young white men—Stern’s core group. Moore himself acknowledges that his last film, 2004’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” was viewed mostly by people who didn’t like Bush in the first place.”

No coincidence that the more progressive works mentioned here were more effective at fomenting change than the more establishment oriented ones — thus keeping in line with the known poll results of the American populace: they tend to be more progressive, humane than the those who have adopted the ideology of the dominant establishment. And so what if some progressive works have little or no effect. Some do. As with many efforts at catalyzing change, the necessary way to proceed is by trial and error.

Greenfield continues: “More important, Americans—unlike Europeans and Canadians—simply have a different relationship with government. Even though Medicare is a highly popular program, people do not go to government doctors or government hospitals; they have a near-visceral resistance to the idea. (Years ago, I heard a voter say, “I sure hope they don’t ruin Medicare by turning it over to the government.”)”

This is simply false. The anecdote is no doubt accurate but polls show that a majority of Americans have long preferred a government run free universal health care system like Canada’s system. And why not? It’s free to users, less costly to run overall, and more effective. For people who want private care, let them pay for their own. 

Greenfield adds: “Moore himself says that there’s a “pioneer” mentality, an “everyone for himself” individualism, that runs deep in our history. As a man of the Left, he wants to see that changed to a “we’re-all-in-this-together” philosophy. But for most Americans, however angry they are at the cost, inefficiency and –at times — the heartlessness of our system, embracing the idea of a government run system will be a hard pill to swallow.”

Again, false, according to years of polling data. Of course the insurance and pharmaceutical companies and their tag alongs favor the current grossly bloated, inefficient, and deadly current system, replete with wasteful layers of corporate management. And why wouldn’t they? They’re making a killing. 

Lee Siegel reviewing Dave Eggers’ novel What Is the What: 

“Perhaps, having run out of marketable stories to tell about ourselves, we will now travel the world in search of desperate people willing to rent out their lives, the way indigent people in some desolate places give up their children. Perhaps we have picked our psyches clean, and now we need other people’s stories the way we need other people’s oil.”

There are other, far better tendencies in US fiction than what Siegel pans here, including the work of Andre Vltchek and Ron Jacobs at Mainstay Press. Of course, Mainstay novels are of the sort the publishing establishment is loathe to market in the hostile social atmosphere, of which Siegel is symptomatic, and which may account for his not mentioning (as vital viable contrast) such work in his review.

Cross-posted from The Valve: 

The vital concerns of literature (by which I mean reading and writing) have relatively little to do with the language the reading and writing is carried out in. In other words, the vast majority of the vital elements of novels, of poetry (more arguably), of drama, of essays, of scholarship are very largely beyond the originating language. Specific language issues are an important but very specific specialty within the vast domain of the concerns of literature. (Is this even controversial? Did the English language force George Eliot to write Middlemarch and not say Crime and Punishment, or for that matter, within her own language, Wuthering Heights? Of course not. Did the English language cause the flow and feel and sentence structure, etc, in Middlemarch to be at least somewhat different from War and Peace? Of course, but these are relatively marginal elements compared to the nature of the novels as a whole.)

Apart from the humanities, we can consider science and science literature, scientific literature: language is only an obstacle to be overcome by translation or multilingualism both in conducting research and in teaching (again, apart from some very specific linguistic concerns).

Of course the humanities are _somewhat_ different, especially in considering aesthetic issues, but even in this, language differences account for only a fraction of aesthetic issues. And aesthetic issues make up only part of the elements and focus of literature.

Language differences should not be allowed to limit the access that writers and readers – not to mention students – have to literature, and I think the department(s) should be reorganized to ensure this as much as possible, especially since in an ever more globally integrated age (which, incidentally, is not what the corporate-state establishment means by “globalization”), people can benefit from and otherwise need insight into and from the world over – across geographic and language differences both, and more.

And of course the departmental evolution away from both geographic/national and language insularity is going on, not least in scholarly World Lit courses and other broad international offerings. This trend is obvious in many MFA programs (where aesthetic and comprehensive concerns are often primary), as MFA faculty teach literary works from all over the world, translated from all sorts of languages, and no one necessarily thinks twice about it, except I suppose often about how exciting or intriguing such diversity is. It makes no sense to say these are “English” (&/or American) Department courses, or even “English Language” Department courses when many of the novels have been translated into English (or are even read in the original non-English language, as at the University of Texas El Paso (and elsewhere) which offers a bilingual MFA degree).

Fundamentally question the national basis of “English” (& American) Departments (a very good thing to do, in my opinion) and you’re left with quite possibly no justification for a large “English” Department. On the other hand, easily justifiable at large Department size is a wholesale “Global Literature Department,” or simply “Literature Department” that would include literature written everywhere in any language (translated, typically).

Cross-posted from The Valve: 

In general, many social and individual trends are toward trans-nationalism (i.e., globalization, globalism, global integration) of all sorts. Again, we see this perhaps most strikingly and hopefully in the activity and related activity of the World Social Forum. Meanwhile Europe has integrated in the European Union and continues to do so, as Victor Hugo called for as a member of the French Legislative Assembly over a century ahead of time. South America is making huge strides in continental integration and toward possibly a South American Union. Meanwhile, the United States (officially) is increasingly isolated in its frequent unilateral and intransigent role in the United Nations – not to mention internally, and in the continent, the hemisphere, and elsewhere.

Corporate power, state power – corporate state power remains the dominant force(s) shaping much of the conditions of life in the world. The huge undemocratic features of this rule of force are the greatest threat to liberty, well being, and by now even species survival. The democratic rights that have been won by popular struggles and that have been forced upon corporate-state power are the greatest protectors of liberty and well-being and the greatest hope for their desperately needed expansion. Literature functions sometimes to protect, enable, and advance the corporate-state status quo, which is largely anti-democratic (anti-democracy) rule, and literature sometimes functions to protect, enable, and advance enlightenment ideals and human rights, as some scholars have shown. Literature has a great responsibility to the latter, which should be cultivated, pursued, as it has been to some extraordinarily insufficient degree. Call it the liberation tradition of literature.

Edward Said writes in Culture and Imperialism that “the focus in the destabilizing and investigative attitudes of those whose work actively opposes states and borders is on how a work of art, for instance, begins _as_ a work, begins _from_ a political, social, cultural situation, begins _to do_ certain things and not others….”

“Contamination is the wrong word to use here, but some notion of literature and indeed all culture as hybrid…and encumbered, or entangled and overlapping with what used to be regarded as extraneous elements—this strikes me as _the_ essential idea for the revolutionary realities today, in which the contests of the secular world so provocatively inform the texts we both read and write” (317).

“I keep coming back—simplistically and idealistically—to the notion of opposing and alleviating coercive domination, transforming the present by trying rationally and analytically to lift some of its burdens, situating the works of various literatures with reference to one another and to their historical modes of being. What I am saying is that in the configurations and by virtue of the transfigurations taking place around us, readers and writers are now in fact secular intellectuals with the archival, expressive, elaborative, and moral responsibilities of that role” (319).

The future shape of the study of “English” – of literature written in English (and, why not?, translated into English) will likely and should be shaped by the ever growing international daily use of English, and by international artistic creation in English, and by the exporting of American art, especially perhaps popular songs and movies but also novels and other books in translation, and untranslated. Also by the importation of many works, typically translated but sometimes not in the case of Spanish especially, and other languages.

In other words, English language literature study must globalize because the English language is globalized and globalizing further, and because our human situation both social and individual has globalized and is doing so increasingly – not least “the full human condition” that literature best addresses, illumines.

I don’t know to what extent, if any, trans-Atlantic “English” study accounts for the other languages of non-English literatures that have always been found within the United States and Britain, but I suppose trans-Atlantic English study could serve in some ways as a micro-analogue for the rapidly expanding macro-reality that is global English language literature, art, and culture.

As for curriculum issues, it seems to me that one practical problem with badly needed reform (needed already decades and decades ago) is that much of the scholarly side of the conventional English department is actually a History department in disguise. The conventional English department is actually basically a niche History department, with of course national English language literature, it’s elements and milieu, as the object of historical focus. In my view, that needed but overly large aspect of English departments should be shrunk, so that something else in particular can grow – be shrunk humanely, respectfully, thoughtfully, by natural attrition if necessary, not forced resignations, or perhaps mainly by encouraging professors to themselves apply more of their historical expertise to the contemporaneous situation (which would also serve to excite students more about important distant historical aspects. Of course a department that pretends to encourage that and doesn’t make moves to structurally realign itself is kidding everyone involved, at best.) The conventional English department has a rather status quo structure at a time when a far more progressive function has never been more badly needed.

What should be “grown” within departments, it seems to me, is much that is badly neglected by English (and other) departments, as I’ve noted in passing and in some detail in my recent posts at this site – liberation literature, to put a handle on it, that goes well beyond what is typically studied, taught, and created. Otherwise, in my view, the vitality of English Departments will continue to be severely compromised, as has been the case, again, for many decades, in fact, always. There’s a reason MFA programs are booming and attract no small percentage of the brightest students. There’s an urgent contemporaneity and vital freedom available there. (Whether or not such opportunity is remotely taken advantage of is another question. MfA programs have their own serious, related, problems, in my view.) So there has been a huge MFA surge. I’ve always felt there could be and should be a similarly sizable scholarly/creative resurgence in the vein I’ve suggested, which is sort of mildly happening university-wide (even in face of backlash), but much more and at much greater degree could be done, needs to be done, ought to be done, in my view.

English language literature departments, literature and writing departments in general (and the other humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences, etc) should develop in congruence with the possibilities and the needs of people socially and individually, in specific locales and the world over. Ascertaining, keeping up with, and helping to create the possibilities, current realities, and needs are crucial and very much in line with what seems to me to be the too-often (often unwittingly, and often ideologically) neglected liberation tradition of literature—a “tradition” that is more of a tendency, not necessarily an overall or wholesale tendency, but one that crops up in bits and pieces here and there, and is integrally, closely, or in concept aligned with other libratory individual and social acts and movements, organizations and various other such tendencies too in other fields and realms of life.

Hollywood Has Joined in on the Exploitation of Iraq with New Film

by Dorothy Woodend

from Alternet

The Situation, a film about western journalists in Iraq, doesn’t convey the horrors of war but instead exploits it.

The other day my mother said she’d just read a great novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called Half of a Yellow Sun. The story, about Biafra’s struggle for independence from Nigeria, chronicles the life and death of one disparate group of people. “It was great because it was actually about something: death, war, survival,” said my mother. “But it didn’t make anyone pathetic.”

Her words echoed in my brain as I watched The Situation, a new film directed by Philip Haas, and written by former war correspondent Wendell Steavenson. The film takes place in current day Iraq (although it was primarily filmed in Morocco) and it makes everybody out to be pathetic. And while this is a major problem, it is not even the film’s greatest flaw.

In the film’s opening sequence, two young Iraqi boys are accosted by an American military patrol. It’s past curfew and instead of sending the boys on their way with a warning, the Americans throw them off a bridge. One of the kids swims to shore, but the other drowns. You might think the plot of the film would hang on this crime and its aftermath, but you’d be wrong. This is merely an aperitif, a little amuse-bouche as it were, for the pottage yet to come.

While the country threatens to dissolve into a seething stew of civil war, insurgency and occupation, a beautiful blond journalist is falling in love with an Iraqi photographer. The real meat of the story is that of Anna Molyneux (Connie Nielsen), a Western reporter eager to carve a career out of the bleeding beast of a dying nation. Anna is hot on the trail of corruption and violence in Iraq; or perhaps, she’s simply hot. Men everywhere take one look at her blond, world-weary beauty and keel over. Quite literally. Her part-time boyfriend is an American intelligence officer named Dan Murphy (Damian Lewis) and the other man in her life is Zaid (Mido Hamada), a fellow photojournalist, and the most sensitive, new age Iraqi man ever conceived in the febrile mind of a screenwriter. It’s a Harlequin romance with a little grit thrown in.