tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/toni-morrison-21624/articlesToni Morrison – The Conversation2022-07-28T12:23:52Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1851142022-07-28T12:23:52Z2022-07-28T12:23:52ZWhat the US can learn from apartheid-era book bans in South Africa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476374/original/file-20220727-481-hcthcx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=16%2C0%2C5590%2C3724&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Books are often targeted when they are sympathetic to the oppressed.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/high-angle-view-of-barbed-wire-with-blank-book-on-royalty-free-image/1158402405?adppopup=true">Eskay Lim / EyeEm via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/beloved-toni-morrison-virginia-governor-race/2021/10/27/e3774afa-3668-11ec-91dc-551d44733e2d_story.html">Beloved</a>.” “<a href="https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10.">The Hate U Give.</a>” “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/us/maus-banned-books-tennessee.html">Maus</a>.” “<a href="https://www.radionetherlandsarchives.org/nadine-gordimer-on-the-ban-of-her-novel-burghers-daughter/">Burger’s Daughter</a>.”</p>
<p>Each of these books has been banned at some point in time, but one stands out. Instead of being banned in 21st-century America, Nadine Gordimer’s “Burger’s Daughter” was banned in 20th century South Africa during apartheid, that country’s period of official white supremacist rule.</p>
<p>So why include it in this list? Despite the decades and distance between bans on this book and the others, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/06/09/rise-book-bans-explained/">rise in attempts to ban and censor books</a> in America in 2022 looks an awful lot like what South African censors did during apartheid. I make this observation as a scholar who specializes in studying literature to better understand the <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sERfeVUAAAAJ&hl=en">intersections of race, oppression and resistance</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Nadine Gordimer sitting." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476124/original/file-20220726-14-n0k1hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C8%2C5365%2C3520&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476124/original/file-20220726-14-n0k1hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476124/original/file-20220726-14-n0k1hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476124/original/file-20220726-14-n0k1hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476124/original/file-20220726-14-n0k1hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476124/original/file-20220726-14-n0k1hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476124/original/file-20220726-14-n0k1hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">During apartheid, the South African government banned ‘Burger’s Daughter,’ a novel by Nadine Gordimer.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/south-african-author-nadine-gordimer-poses-while-in-paris-news-photo/74415501?adppopup=true">Ulf Andersen/Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>When apartheid censors – who operated under the <a href="https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv01538/04lv01828/05lv01829/06lv01957.htm">Directorate of Publications</a> – sought to crack down on what they found offensive, they used terms like “sedition,” “blasphemy” and “obscenity” to justify their acts. In the 2020s in the U.S., people who’d like to censor books use labels like “<a href="https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/education/spotsylvania-school-book-ban-burning-33-snowfish-call-me-by-your-name/65-e38fc873-d85f-433e-9d16-3572682e4572">objectionable</a>,” “<a href="https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2022/5/18/23077850/opinion-utah-legislature-new-law-against-pornographic-books-schools-hb374">pornographic</a>” or “<a href="https://www.military.com/off-duty/2020/04/27/alaska-school-district-votes-ban-2-iconic-military-books.html">dangerous</a>.” Then as now, the criteria used to censor books are so broad and subjective that almost any book could be challenged on practically any grounds.</p>
<p>To my eye, it’s almost as though would-be American censors have taken a page directly from the South African censors’ playbook. And it’s not just that they look similar in their rationale. Rather, in my view, it’s that they set out to squash political dissent and silence social debate. Here are the similarities I see:</p>
<h2>1. Manufactured outrage</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Man running away from policeman and dogs" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476128/original/file-20220726-24-ligjv4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476128/original/file-20220726-24-ligjv4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476128/original/file-20220726-24-ligjv4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476128/original/file-20220726-24-ligjv4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476128/original/file-20220726-24-ligjv4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476128/original/file-20220726-24-ligjv4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476128/original/file-20220726-24-ligjv4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘In the Fog of the Seasons’ End’ by Alex La Guma.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780435901103/Fog-Seasons-End-Guma-Alex-0435901109/plp">AbeBooks</a></span>
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<p>Outrage about the content of books is often disingenuous, misplaced or manufactured. </p>
<p>In 1972, South African author Alex La Guma, who was officially categorized as “coloured” under the country’s racist regime, had already been <a href="https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:420ff1b4-a4e1-3131-88eb-e38ce930c1bf">forced into exile</a>. As a person banned by the South African government, his writing already couldn’t legally be distributed inside the country. Yet, his novel “<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-the-fog-of-the-seasons-end/oclc/434081205?referer=br&ht=edition">In the Fog of the Seasons’ End</a>” was still banned for threatening state security and good order. This bureaucratic overkill speaks to the urge to censor even when it’s absurd – the authorities were banning a book that by their own rules no one could read.</p>
<p>La Guma’s book depicted the death and torture in detention of an anti-apartheid resistance fighter, causing the censors to complain about the book’s “<a href="https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:420ff1b4-a4e1-3131-88eb-e38ce930c1bf">wild writing against the police</a>.” But another of his novels, “The Stone Country,” was banned even though the censors themselves acknowledged that there was nothing in the plot that merited it. This shows their willingness to manufacture a threat where none exists. </p>
<p>In the United States in 2022, there are reports of parents shouting at school board meetings or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/dec/23/us-book-bans-conservative-parents-reading">storming town halls</a>, upset about material their children are exposed to and demanding it be removed from school library shelves and <a href="https://www.audacy.com/kywnewsradio/news/local/central-bucks-school-district-passes-book-policy">classrooms</a>. Are these headline-grabbing moments spontaneous, grassroots and earnest efforts to protect innocent young minds? Or are they highly orchestrated, heavily funded and deliberately manufactured <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/24/us-conservatives-campaign-books-ban-schools">schemes to advance an ultra-conservative agenda at the expense of free speech and expression</a>? It can be hard to tell.</p>
<p>While we cannot know anyone’s intent for certain, we do know that when people act to limit a society’s access to literature and libraries, and therefore to other worlds and possibilities, it makes it easier to limit its political imagination.</p>
<h2>2. White discomfort</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A brown and yellow book cover" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476131/original/file-20220726-34052-i9tudv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476131/original/file-20220726-34052-i9tudv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476131/original/file-20220726-34052-i9tudv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476131/original/file-20220726-34052-i9tudv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476131/original/file-20220726-34052-i9tudv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476131/original/file-20220726-34052-i9tudv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476131/original/file-20220726-34052-i9tudv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Burger’s Daughter’ by Nadine Gordimer.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/321506/burgers-daughter-by-nadine-gordimer/">Penguin Random House</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>South African censors objected that “Burger’s Daughter” brought Afrikaners – that is, South Africans of Dutch descent – into “<a href="https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:04f6fba4-83af-3889-aeec-a77dac1bcb5c">ridicule and contempt</a>,” fundamentally misunderstanding how the whites in the novel are depicted. The censors’ unimaginative defensiveness is much like the language of <a href="https://apnews.com/article/education-kristi-noem-south-dakota-sd-state-wire-52f5992fc6155d4d9c6f2681085bb4e6">white “discomfort”</a> we hear bandied about in current politics. </p>
<p>At the same time as South Dakota tried to pass <a href="https://sdlegislature.gov/Session/Bill/23434/233140">a bill</a> that forbade discussion of any history that causes white discomfort, Florida, in spring 2022, passed the <a href="https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/148/BillText/Filed/HTML">“Individual Freedom”</a> law, which states that “an individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” State Senator Shevrin Jones <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/01/florida-sb-148-racism-discomfort">said, regarding the bill</a>, “This was directed to make whites not feel bad about what happened years ago.”</p>
<h2>3. Euphemism</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv01538/04lv01828/05lv01829/06lv01957.htm">South African Publications Act</a> may sound supportive of publishing but in fact was intended to censor and control it.</p>
<p>Likewise, the various acts and bills being passed in America today often slide through legislatures with deceptively bland names. For instance, <a href="https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1467/BillText/er/PDF">Florida’s “K-12 Education” law</a> requires all school materials be posted and searchable.</p>
<p>Proponents of the law said it was meant to <a href="https://flgov.com/2022/03/28/governor-ron-desantis-signs-historic-bill-to-protect-parental-rights-in-education/">help parents make decisions regarding their children’s education</a>. But in reality, as pointed out by the National Coalition Against Censorship, the mechanism <a href="https://ncac.org/news/florida-censorship-education-laws">could discourage teachers and librarians</a> from taking risks with teaching material that might lead to complaints from parents.</p>
<p>New legislation also sneaks through in euphemistic disguise, such as the wave of so-called “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/03/02/transparency-curriculum-teachers-parents-rights/">transparency bills</a>” which use the language of transparency to embolden public scrutiny. Moreover, <a href="https://pen.org/steep-rise-gag-orders-many-sloppily-drafted/">the bills themselves are not at all transparent</a>. </p>
<p>One bill prohibits the discussion of <a href="https://legiscan.com/IN/text/HB1231/id/2465267">“any controversial subject matter”</a>, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/us/virginia-lincoln-douglas-debates-bill.html">another mixed up two historical figures</a>. Vague wording, undefined terms, contradictory language and factual errors all make them more “sweeping” and “draconian,” as PEN America describes them.</p>
<h2>4. Proxy wars</h2>
<p>Hand-wringing over what’s <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/who-should-decide-what-high-school-kids-read/379609/">“age-appropriate”</a> is often a proxy today for suppressing other, potentially controversial conversations about subjects like sexuality.</p>
<p>In South Africa under apartheid, such a conversation was the mixing of races. “Burger’s Daughter,” for instance, was called <a href="https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:04f6fba4-83af-3889-aeec-a77dac1bcb5c">“indecent”</a> partly because a Black child and a white child play together in it. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Toni Morrison leaning on a rail" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476143/original/file-20220726-34052-1x48wa.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476143/original/file-20220726-34052-1x48wa.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476143/original/file-20220726-34052-1x48wa.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476143/original/file-20220726-34052-1x48wa.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476143/original/file-20220726-34052-1x48wa.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476143/original/file-20220726-34052-1x48wa.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476143/original/file-20220726-34052-1x48wa.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ is a popular book that has been the target of bans.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/nobel-laureate-toni-morrison-photographed-in-manhattan-on-news-photo/1166418809?adppopup=true">Newsday LLC/Newsday via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Here in the U.S., books are also called <a href="https://tn.chalkbeat.org/2022/1/28/22907090/school-library-book-ban-tennessee-legislation">“objectionable”</a> by lawmakers and parents for reasons other than the real ones. Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” for example, gets an “NSC … not suitable material or conduct for minors per existing statute” rating for sections mentioning the “n word,” among other objections, from the Florida Citizen’s Alliance <a href="https://floridacitizensalliance.org/porn-in-schools-report/">2021 Porn in Schools report</a>. </p>
<p>Ironically, the report labels itself as “contain[ing] objectionable and potentially offensive material.”</p>
<p>In January, a school board in Tennessee removed “Maus” from the curriculum in the name of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/27/us/maus-banned-holocaust-tennessee.html">“inappropriate words” and “objectionable language,”</a> including profanity. However, some people, including the graphic novel’s author, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/27/opinions/maus-ban-holocaust-teaching-spiegelman-perry/index.html">Art Spiegelman</a>, believe the real reason it was removed was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/us/maus-banned-books-tennessee.html">disinterest in or discomfort</a> with Holocaust education on the part of Tennessee lawmakers.</p>
<h2>5. Unbanning and other doublespeak</h2>
<p>“Burger’s Daughter” was first banned under the 1974 Publications Act and then unbanned. Gordimer, however, saw the lifting of the ban as a charade to make the apartheid regime look more <a href="https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:04f6fba4-83af-3889-aeec-a77dac1bcb5c">fairminded</a>. </p>
<p>A Virginia court ruling also exposes the murky area between banning and unbanning. In May 2022, a Virginia Beach judge declared two books <a href="https://wjla.com/news/local/virginia-judge-books-obscene-banned-kids-school-district-ban-library-gender-queer-court-mist-fury-sexual-content-barnes-noble-fairfax">“obscene for unrestricted viewing by minors.”</a> Even though schools and bookstores might now be prohibited from distributing the books to young readers without parental consent, the attorney who won the case insists that, “It doesn’t mean the books are banned. It doesn’t mean we’re burning books or infringing on free speech.”</p>
<p>These rulings, in my view, are largely political theater. If proponents of censorship in the U.S. today are thumbing through the South African playbook, they might learn that it’s savvy to sound tolerant, if only for show. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Two mice holding each other in front of a cat swastika" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476137/original/file-20220726-17-f1fbjh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476137/original/file-20220726-17-f1fbjh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476137/original/file-20220726-17-f1fbjh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476137/original/file-20220726-17-f1fbjh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476137/original/file-20220726-17-f1fbjh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1038&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476137/original/file-20220726-17-f1fbjh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1038&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476137/original/file-20220726-17-f1fbjh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1038&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘The Complete Maus’ by Art Spiegelman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/171065/the-complete-maus-by-art-spiegelman/">Penguin Random House</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After all, South African censors were devious enough to figure that banned books were of more use to the anti-apartheid movement because they they’d get notoriety. If the book were no longer banned, then they’d lose much of their appeal. They knew the threat of banning can actually backfire and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/dec/23/us-book-bans-conservative-parents-reading">generate more interest</a> in the books.</p>
<p>Our modern American censors may be cribbing from South Africa’s notes, but they should read to the end of the history book. Despite its repressive tactics, that white minority government could not stay in power, and it was apartheid itself that wound up banned. There’s a lesson for the books.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/185114/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Helen Kapstein does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A scholar of literature sees striking parallels between contemporary book bans in the US and those that took place in South Africa during apartheid.Helen Kapstein, Professor of English, John Jay College of Criminal JusticeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1762252022-04-13T12:14:06Z2022-04-13T12:14:06ZWhen are book bans unconstitutional? A First Amendment scholar explains<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457690/original/file-20220412-16-tgco41.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=3%2C17%2C2238%2C1514&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">There was a surge in book banning in 2021.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/forbidden-knowledge-royalty-free-image/532190567?adppopup=true">valmas/ iStock / Getty Images Plus</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The United States has become a nation divided over <a href="https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05">important</a> <a href="https://www.change.org/p/district-administration-and-school-committee-please-do-not-remove-dedicated-honors-classes-at-bhs">issues</a> in K-12 education, including which books students should be able to read in public school. </p>
<p>Efforts to ban books from <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/books/banned-books-libraries.html">school curricula</a>, remove books from <a href="https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/classics">libraries</a> and keep lists of books that some find inappropriate for students are increasing as Americans become more polarized in their views. </p>
<p>These types of actions are being called “book banning.” They are also often labeled “censorship.” </p>
<p>But the concept of censorship, as well as legal protections against it, are often highly misunderstood.</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A 2021 campaign ad for Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin focuses on a book with what one mother claimed was “explicit material.”</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Book banning by the political right and left</h2>
<p>On the right side of the political spectrum, where much of the book banning is happening, bans are <a href="https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/book-banning-efforts-are-on-the-rise-what-does-the-law-say/#:%7E:text=That%20is%20because%20the%20U.S.,on%20content%20is%20unconstitutional%20censorship.">taking the form</a> of school boards’ <a href="https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/williamson/2022/01/25/williamson-county-schools-committee-removes-book-elementary-curriculum/9217318002/">removing books</a> from class curricula. </p>
<p>Politicians have also proposed legislation banning books that are what some legislators and parents consider <a href="https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/why-toni-morrisons-novel-the-bluest-eye-was-banned-from-classrooms.html/">too mature</a> for school-age readers, such as “<a href="https://time.com/6120915/george-m-johnson-all-boys-arent-blue-book-bans/">All Boys Aren’t Blue</a>,” which explores queer themes and topics of consent. Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s classic “<a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-10-01/banned-book-reinstated-toni-morrison-the-bluest-eye">The Bluest Eye</a>,” which includes themes of rape and incest, is also a frequent target. </p>
<p>In some cases, politicians have proposed <a href="https://www.ottumwacourier.com/news/local-gop-reps-back-prosecution-for-librarians-under-new-bill/article_de3a6128-85df-11ec-9bdd-5394444f04b3.html">criminal prosecutions</a> of librarians in public schools and libraries for keeping such books in circulation. </p>
<p>Most books targeted for banning in 2021, says the American Library Association, “<a href="https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2022/04/national-library-week-kicks-state-america-s-libraries-report-annual-top-10">were by or about Black or LGBTQIA+ persons</a>.” State legislators have also targeted books that they believe make students feel guilt or anguish <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/banned-books-beloved-controversy-critical-race-theory/">based on their race or imply that students of any race or gender are inherently bigoted</a>.</p>
<p>There are also some attempts on the political left to engage in book banning as well as <a href="https://crosscut.com/news/2022/01/kill-mockingbird-hot-seat-wa-school-district#:%7E:text=When%20To%20Kill%20a%20Mockingbird,on%20an%20allegation%20of%20rape.">removal from school curricula</a> of books that marginalize minorities or use racially insensitive language, like the popular “To Kill a Mockingbird.”</p>
<h2>Defining censorship</h2>
<p>Whether any of these efforts are unconstitutional censorship is a complex question. </p>
<p>The First Amendment protects individuals against the government’s “<a href="https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/#:%7E:text=Congress%20shall%20make%20no%20law,for%20a%20redress%20of%20grievances.">abridging the freedom of speech</a>.” However, government actions that some may deem censorship – especially as related to schools – are not always neatly classified as constitutional or unconstitutional, because “censorship” is a colloquial term, not a legal term. </p>
<p>Some principles can illuminate whether and when book banning is unconstitutional. </p>
<p>Censorship does not violate the Constitution <a href="https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1_2_2_4/">unless the government does it</a>. </p>
<p>For example, if the government tries to forbid certain types of protests solely based on the <a href="https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1028/viewpoint-discrimination">viewpoint</a> of the protesters, that is an unconstitutional restriction on speech. The government cannot create laws or allow lawsuits that keep you from having particular books on your bookshelf, unless the substance of those books fits into a narrowly defined <a href="https://www.thefire.org/get-involved/student-network/learn-more-about-your-rights/unprotected-speech/">unprotected category of speech</a> such as obscenity or libel. And even these unprotected categories are defined in precise ways that are still very protective of speech. </p>
<p>The government, however, may enact reasonable regulations that restrict the “<a href="https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1023/time-place-and-manner-restrictions#:%7E:text=CC%20BY%203.0">time, place or manner</a>” of your speech, but generally it has to do so in ways that are content- and viewpoint-neutral. The government thus cannot restrict an individual’s ability to produce or listen to speech based on the topic of the speech or the ultimate opinions expressed.</p>
<p>And if the government does try to restrict speech in these ways, it likely constitutes unconstitutional censorship.</p>
<h2>What’s not unconstitutional</h2>
<p>In contrast, when private individuals, companies and organizations create policies or engage in activities that suppress people’s ability to speak, these private actions <a href="http://cardozolawreview.com/competing-free-speech-values-goldberg/">don’t violate the Constitution</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457693/original/file-20220412-11-ccfxeu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A teenage boy reads a book with the title 'Maus.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457693/original/file-20220412-11-ccfxeu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457693/original/file-20220412-11-ccfxeu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457693/original/file-20220412-11-ccfxeu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457693/original/file-20220412-11-ccfxeu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457693/original/file-20220412-11-ccfxeu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457693/original/file-20220412-11-ccfxeu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457693/original/file-20220412-11-ccfxeu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A school board in Tennessee in February 2022 ordered the removal of the award-winning 1986 graphic novel on the Holocaust, ‘Maus,’ by Art Spiegelman, from local student libraries.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/this-illustration-photo-taken-in-los-angeles-california-on-news-photo/1238025529?adppopup=true">Maro Siranosian/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>The Constitution’s general theory of liberty considers freedom in the context of government restraint or prohibition. Only the government has a <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/state-monopoly-on-violence">monopoly on the use of force</a> that compels citizens to act in one way or another. In contrast, if private companies or organizations chill speech, other private companies can experiment with different policies that allow people more choices to speak or act freely. </p>
<p>Still, private action can have a major impact on a person’s ability to speak freely and the production and dissemination of ideas. For example, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pastor-holds-bonfire-burn-witchcraft-books-twilight-rcna14931">book burning</a> or the actions of private universities in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/opinion/georgetown-tweets-free-speech.html">punishing faculty</a> for sharing unpopular ideas thwarts free discussion and unfettered creation of ideas and knowledge.</p>
<h2>When schools can ‘ban’ books</h2>
<p>It’s hard to definitively say whether the current incidents of book banning in schools are constitutional – or not. The reason: Decisions made in public schools are analyzed by the courts differently than censorship in nongovernment contexts.</p>
<p>Control over public education, in the words of the Supreme Court, is for the most part given to “<a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/393/97/#tab-opinion-1947841">state and local authorities</a>.” The government has the power to determine what is appropriate for students and thus the curriculum at their school. </p>
<p>However, students retain some First Amendment rights: Public schools may not censor students’ speech, either on or off campus, unless it is causing a “<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20-255_g3bi.pdf">substantial disruption</a>.” </p>
<p>But officials <a href="https://ncac.org/resource/first-amendment-in-schools#:%7E:text=School%20officials%20have%20the%20constitutional,when%20selecting%20classroom%20instructional%20materials.">may exercise control</a> over the <a href="https://www.thefire.org/13-important-points-in-the-campus-k-12-critical-race-theory-debate/">curriculum</a> of a school without trampling on students’ or K-12 educators’ free speech rights. </p>
<p>There are exceptions to government’s power over school curriculum: The Supreme Court ruled, for example, that a state law banning a teacher from covering the topic of evolution was unconstitutional because it <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/393/97/#tab-opinion-1947841">violated the establishment clause</a> of the First Amendment, which prohibits the state from endorsing a particular religion. </p>
<p>School boards and state legislators generally have the final say over what curriculum schools teach. Unless states’ policies violate some other provision of the Constitution – <a href="https://adventuresincensorship.com/blog/2019/7/3/huck-finn-and-equal-protection">perhaps the protection against certain kinds of discrimination</a> – they are generally constitutionally permissible.</p>
<p>[<em>Over 150,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletters to understand the world.</em> <a href="https://memberservices.theconversation.com/newsletters/?source=inline-150ksignup">Sign up today</a>.]</p>
<p>Schools, with finite resources, also have discretion to determine which books to add to their libraries. However, several members of the Supreme Court have written that removal is constitutionally permitted only if it is done based on the educational appropriateness of the book, but not because it was intended to <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/457/853/#tab-opinion-1954633">deny students access</a> to books with which school officials disagree. </p>
<p>Book banning is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/07/23/modern-day-book-banning/23a75fec-5fb3-494e-8c7d-328bf1e91620/">not a new problem in this country</a> – nor is vigorous <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/wireStory/activism-grows-nationwide-response-school-book-bans-83179434">public criticism of such moves</a>. And even though the government has discretion to control what’s taught in school, the First Amendment ensures the right of free speech to those who want to protest what’s happening in schools.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/176225/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Erica Goldberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A free speech expert defines censorship and applies that lesson to current political struggles in the US to ban books from public schools and libraries.Erica Goldberg, Associate Professor of Law, University of DaytonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1226132019-09-04T11:52:23Z2019-09-04T11:52:23ZOne skill that doesn’t deteriorate with age<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/290347/original/file-20190830-165972-hnur9b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Reading and writing can prevent cognitive decline.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/old-wrinkled-hand-holding-pen-against-60275515?src=-3-49">AJP/Shutterstock.com </a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When Toni Morrison <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/06/toni-morrison-author-and-pulitzer-winner-dies-aged-88">died on Aug. 5</a>, the world lost one of its most influential literary voices. </p>
<p>But Morrison wasn’t a literary wunderkind. “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11337.The_Bluest_Eye?ac=1&from_search=true">The Bluest Eye</a>,” Morrison’s first novel, wasn’t published until she was 39. And her last, “God Help the Child,” appeared when she was 84. Morrison published four novels, four children’s books, many essays and other works of nonfiction after the age of 70.</p>
<p>Morrison isn’t unique in this regard. Numerous writers produce significant work well into their 70s, 80s and even their 90s. Herman Wouk, for example, was 97 when he published his final novel, “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14546758-the-lawgiver?ac=1&from_search=true">The Lawgiver</a>.” </p>
<p>Such literary feats underscore an important point: Age doesn’t seem to diminish our capacity to speak, write and learn new vocabulary. Our eyesight may dim and our recall may falter, but, by comparison, our ability to produce and to comprehend language is well preserved into older adulthood.</p>
<p>In our forthcoming book, “<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/changing-minds-1">Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging</a>,” my co-author, Richard M. Roberts, and I highlight some of the latest research that has emerged on language and aging. For those who might fear the loss of their language abilities as they grow older, there’s plenty of good news to report.</p>
<h2>Language mastery is a lifelong journey</h2>
<p>Some aspects of our language abilities, such as our knowledge of word meanings, actually improve during middle and late adulthood. </p>
<p><a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10862969509547878">One study</a>, for example, found that older adults living in a retirement community near Chicago had an average vocabulary size of over 21,000 words. The researchers also studied a sample of college students and found that their average vocabularies included only about 16,000 words.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gitit_Kave/publication/271333928_Doubly_Blessed_Older_Adults_Know_More_Vocabulary_and_Know_Better_What_They_Know/links/5665d0f308ae192bbf92726d/Doubly-Blessed-Older-Adults-Know-More-Vocabulary-and-Know-Better-What-They-Know.pdf">In another study</a>, older adult speakers of Hebrew – with an average age of 75 – performed better than younger and middle-aged participants on discerning the meaning of words.</p>
<p>On the other hand, our language abilities sometimes function as a canary in the cognitive coal mine: They can be a sign of future mental impairment decades before such issues manifest themselves. </p>
<p>In 1996, epidemiologist David Snowdon and a team of researchers <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Susan_Kemper/publication/14593027_Linguistic_Ability_in_Early_Life_and_Cognitive_Function_and_Alzheimer%27s_Disease_in_Late_Life_Findings_From_the_Nun_Study/links/0046351854821c5a35000000.pdf">studied</a> the writing samples of women who had become nuns. They found that the grammatical complexity of essays written by the nuns when they joined their religious order could predict which sisters would develop dementia several decades later. (Hundreds of nuns <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-aug-22-la-na-nuns-brains-20100822-story.html">have donated their brains to science</a>, and this allows for a conclusive diagnosis of dementia.) </p>
<p>While Toni Morrison’s writing remained searingly clear and focused as she aged, other authors have not been as fortunate. The prose in Iris Murdoch’s final novel, “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56089.Jackson_s_Dilemma">Jackson’s Dilemma</a>,” suggests some degree of cognitive impairment. Indeed, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Iris-Murdoch#ref664797">she died from dementia-related causes</a> four years after its publication.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/290734/original/file-20190903-175673-12cuetb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/290734/original/file-20190903-175673-12cuetb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290734/original/file-20190903-175673-12cuetb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290734/original/file-20190903-175673-12cuetb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290734/original/file-20190903-175673-12cuetb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=559&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290734/original/file-20190903-175673-12cuetb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=559&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290734/original/file-20190903-175673-12cuetb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=559&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Toni Morrison published her last novel, ‘God Help the Child,’ when she was 84 years old.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/AP-I-FRA-APTOPIX-FRANCE-MORRISON/119f3f56f10049d4a6c9a7304a3e48e8/140/0">AP Photo/Michel Euler</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Don’t put down that book</h2>
<p>Our ability to read and write can be preserved well into older adulthood. Making use of these abilities is important, because reading and writing seem to prevent cognitive decline.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbw076">Keeping a journal</a>, for example, has been shown to substantially reduce the risk of developing various forms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.</p>
<p>Reading fiction, meanwhile, has been associated with a longer lifespan. A <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.07.014">large-scale study</a> conducted by the Yale University School of Public Health found that people who read books for at least 30 minutes a day lived, on average, nearly two years longer than nonreaders. This effect persisted even after controlling for factors like gender, education and health. The researchers suggest that the imaginative work of constructing a fictional universe in our heads helps grease our cognitive wheels.</p>
<p>Language is a constant companion during our life journey, so perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s interwoven into our health and our longevity. And researchers continue to make discoveries about the connections between language and aging. For example, <a href="http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=c96fe951-c06d-48e4-bf96-eb00c2f8f70e%40sdc-v-sessmgr01">a study published in July 2019</a> found that studying a foreign language in older adulthood improves overall cognitive functioning.</p>
<p>A thread seems to run through most of the findings: In order to age well, it helps to keep writing, reading and talking.</p>
<p>While few of us possess the gifts of a Toni Morrison, all of us stand to gain by continuing to flex our literary muscles.</p>
<p><em>Richard M. Roberts, a U.S. diplomat currently serving as the Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Okinawa, Japan, is a contributing author of this article.</em></p>
<p>
<section class="inline-content">
<img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/248895/original/file-20181204-133100-t34yqm.png?w=128&h=128">
<div>
<header>Roger J. Kreuz and Richard M. Roberts are the authors of:</header>
<p><a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/changing-minds-1">Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging </a></p>
<footer>MIT Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.</footer>
</div>
</section>
</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/122613/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>MIT Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.</span></em></p>As we get older, our eyesight may dim and our recall may falter. But our linguistic abilities don’t seem to erode.Roger J. Kreuz, Associate Dean, College of Arts & Sciences, University of MemphisLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1217552019-08-13T09:42:48Z2019-08-13T09:42:48ZHow Toni Morrison’s legacy plays out in South Africa’s universities<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/287682/original/file-20190812-71917-1l6vqmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Toni Morrison's legacy echoes across the world.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA-EFE/Arturo Peña-Romano</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>I first encountered Toni Morrison during my undergraduate years at Rhodes University in South Africa where her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/beloved-morrison-song-of-solomon-bluest-eye.html">Beloved</a> (1987), was taught as part of an American Literature course. </p>
<p>It moved me in ways that no other academic account of transatlantic, African American slavery had. Beloved is set in the 19th century. It tells the story of a runaway slave who commits infanticide rather than seeing her child returned to slavery. As with Morrison’s entire fictional oeuvre, the novel profoundly embodies and humanises black life.</p>
<p>Part of what motivated Morrison – <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/toni-morrison-dead.html">who has died at the age of 88</a> – was <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/11333835?q&versionId=13290453">impatience</a> at how black literature was typically taught as sociology but was considered intellectually and artistically bereft.</p>
<p>In her Tanner lecture series delivered at the University of Michigan in 1988, she <a href="https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/m/morrison90.pdf">defiantly stated</a>, in defence of a generically marginalised African American presence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have always been imagining ourselves … subjects of our own narrative, witnesses to and participants in our own experience … We are not, in fact, ‘other’. We are choices.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The inspiration provided by her fictional writing and critical scholarship around the ideological, artistic and scholarly place of black literature helped carve out an imaginative and actual space for the likes of me – a black African female – within a predominantly white and male, largely Eurocentric literary and intellectual establishment.</p>
<p>Today, I teach at the same university where I first read Beloved and discovered this remarkably talented, intellectually formidable African-American woman novelist. And her work continues to echo. Not just for me, but for the new generation of literature students who cross my path each year. </p>
<h2>A complicated place in the canon</h2>
<p>In some ways, perhaps Morrison is even more relevant in South African universities today than she’s ever been. Race is a topic that’s simultaneously sanitised and amplified in the country’s everyday discourse. Morrison’s determined refusal to shy away from race reverberates across the Atlantic, resonating with students who still live the enduring political and economic legacies of <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-slavery-and-early-colonisation-south-africa">racial colonialism</a> and apartheid.</p>
<p>On the face of it, the country’s demands for social redress would seem to align with Morrison’s thinking. But a closer reading shows how her fiction strains against the confines of parochial societal interpretations and exercises. It makes the demand for more than superficial change implemented along purely racial lines. It insists on an interrogation and re-imagining of the entire architecture and workings of race.</p>
<p>This reveals how Morrison’s place in both the African-American and global literary canon is quite complicated. It also makes clear why it is that she appeals to so many of my students, across the (proverbial) divide. Each year I watch students from varied racial, social, cultural, economic and gender (or gendered) backgrounds engage with her novels in my classroom. Their readings are intuitive and discerning. This yields often interesting and vigorous discussions, and even heated debates, that reflect the complexity and applicability of her experiences and intellect – and theirs.</p>
<p>Take her debut novel, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Bluest-Eye">The Bluest Eye</a> (1970). It provides a delineation of racial self-hatred, incest and familial violence that critiques the deleterious effects of white hegemony. But it also controversially explores and confronts the internalised delimiting contours of black counter-narratives.</p>
<p>The book’s feminist focus on the sexual abuse of women speaks to the damaging effects of patriarchal ideologies and practices within black communities. It resonates with all people in South Africa – a country with <a href="https://www.csvr.org.za/pdf/CSVR-Violence-Against-Women-in-SA.pdf">incredibly high</a> rates of gender violence.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37398.Jazz">Jazz</a> (1992) is another Morrison novel whose complex existential narratives require equally complex interpretations. Structurally, it mimics the musical genre’s polyvocal, sometimes cacophonous, intonations to trace the lives of African Americans across time and space. It’s a tough read for two reasons. </p>
<p>First, it requires that students have an appreciation of the technical workings of the artistic cultural form that is jazz. Second, the novel demands from them a critical inquiry into and participatory reading of the experiences of “a people”; of histories that are both outside of and intersect with their own. </p>
<p>This is particularly important at a time when calls are rampant in South African higher education circles for the “Africanisation” of curricula. These calls appeal to contemporary nationalist demands and are in direct contrast to Morrison’s <a href="https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/m/morrison90.pdf">stated intolerance</a> of “lazy, easy, brand-name applications”. Instead, she and her work <a href="https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/m/morrison90.pdf">insisted</a> on the painstakingly “hard work” of non-prescriptive and interrogative, “border-crossing” analysis. </p>
<h2>The measure of a life</h2>
<p>In her 1993 <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/">Nobel Prize speech</a>, Morrison stated: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>And that is the measure of Toni Morrison’s life. Her dense, demanding prose reflects our continued need – in post-apartheid South Africa’s university classrooms, and elsewhere – to meditate critically and consciously upon our own fragile and imperfect existences. Her narratives put forward morally responsive and socially transformative ways of being in the world. Morrison’s legacy, then, is not just to literature: it is to the imperatives of social justice and to the ideals of humanity not yet realised.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121755/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aretha Phiri is an NRF rated researcher and a research fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study </span></em></p>In some ways, perhaps Morrison is even more relevant in South African universities today than she’s ever been.Aretha Phiri, Senior lecturer, Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1215272019-08-07T13:10:08Z2019-08-07T13:10:08ZToni Morrison: American literary giant made it her life’s work to ensure that black lives (and voices) matter<p>The peerless novelist and cultural commentator Toni Morrison, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/toni-morrison-dead.html">who has died aged 88</a>, never accepted the received wisdom about anything. In a writing career that spanned half a century – from the appearance of the first of her 11 novels, The Bluest Eye, in 1970, to that of her last essay collection, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/08/mouth-full-of-blood-toni-morrison-review">Mouth Full of Blood</a>, in February 2019 – she unfailingly cast in new light both aspects of human experience and moments in American history that, in our complacency, we thought we already knew.</p>
<p>Morrison was born (as Chloe Wofford) in the depressed Rustbelt town of Lorain, Ohio, to a family of modest financial means and rich cultural and emotional resources. Her father worked as a welder at the nearby US Steel plant and her mother was a key member of the African Methodist Episcopal church choir. Her grandparents – who had migrated north from Alabama and Georgia – were also a significant presence and influence. The music, storytelling and reading from the King James Bible that characterised Morrison’s childhood were to indelibly shape the values and aesthetics of her own writing.</p>
<p>As the first member of her family to go to college, Morrison attended Howard University in Washington DC between 1949-53 (where she majored in English and minored in classics) – and was shocked by the segregation and “colourism” she encountered. She went on to complete her MA in English at Cornell in 1955 and, after various teaching and publishing jobs, became a trade editor for Random House in 1968. </p>
<p>Here, in the New York office, she reshaped the American literary scene by actively seeking out and promoting the fiction of black authors such as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Toni-Cade-Bambara">Toni Cade Bambara</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leon-Forrest">Leon Forrest</a> and <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/jones-gayle-1949/">Gayl Jones</a>. She also edited the autobiographies of <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/people-african-american-history/davis-angela-1944/">Angela Davis</a> and Muhammad Ali.</p>
<p>Morrison was able to focus full time on her writing after the resounding success of her third novel, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/beloved-morrison-song-of-solomon-bluest-eye.html">Song of Solomon</a>, in 1977. Reputed to be one of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ICSvbzZGVE">Barack Obama’s favourite books</a>, this text – which focused on the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s – is typically Morrisonian in its mock-heroic blending of the Bildungsroman (conventions about an individual’s progression to knowledge through experience), with classical epic paradigms, West African myth and African American folkloric wisdom. </p>
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<p>It is notably untypical, at the same time, in its focus on a male protagonist (the strangely named Milkman Dead – names and naming were always all-important to Morrison), and on friendships and family ties between men.</p>
<p>The novel for which Morrison is best known, <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/8/6/20756895/toni-morrison-obituary-legacy-beloved-editor">Beloved</a>, was to follow in 1987 and next came her arguably underrated (because it was insufficiently understood?) masterpiece, <a href="http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/morrison-jazz.html">Jazz</a> (1992). Each of these continues the intense focus on individuals that both society and history have spurned or overlooked. These are those Morrison has called the “disremembered and unaccounted for”, that she initiated with her examination of the interior life of the abused “ugly” black girl, Pecola Breedlove, in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2016/jan/11/the-bluest-eye-toni-morrison-review">The Bluest Eye</a>. </p>
<p>Both the exploration of an infanticidal, formerly enslaved mother’s quest for atonement in Beloved and the depiction in Jazz of the struggles and triumphs of a middle-aged couple, migrants from rural Virginia, in 1920s Harlem, epitomise Morrison at her uncanny best. Her work is unflinching in her attention to the brutal realities of innumerable black lives and attends equally to their creative resilience – combining broad historical sweep with an intimate knowledge of the individual human psyche.</p>
<h2>Nobel laureate</h2>
<p>Morrison was <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/summary/">awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993</a> and numerous other awards and accolades have followed. She is read, studied and revered in numerous languages all over the world. But our sense of loss at her passing should not blind us to the fact that for far too long she was at once a celebrity and insufficiently acknowledged – particularly in the more conservative wings of academia and the media – as a figure of universal (as opposed to “minority”) significance. </p>
<p>Even now, there persists some resistance to including her work on “high literary” syllabi. She once observed wryly, at a book reading, that she was taught in the African American studies departments, in sociology and even in Law faculties, but rarely in the English departments of elite universities. There continues a failure to recognise the extent of her contribution to intellectual history that both her fiction and her extraordinary essays constitute. </p>
<p>Her reclaiming of modernism as primarily a black experience, as well as her insistence that any distinction between the aesthetic and the political is a false dichotomy, and her illuminations of the way colonialism and imperialism consciously fabricated African culture and history as irrelevant, are among her greatest legacies.</p>
<h2>Public intellectual</h2>
<p>Morrison herself was acutely aware of the complex and sometimes insidious nature of her reception, repeatedly addressing this in interviews and comment pieces. She frequently mentioned the initial New York Times review of Sula, for example, which implied that such a powerful writer ought really to focus her attention on something more important than the lives of black women in the Midwest. In a 1983 <a href="https://www.bookdepository.com/Critical-Essays-on-Toni-Morrison-Nellie-McKay/9780816188840">interview with literary critic Nellie McKay</a>, she famously insisted that she was “not <em>like</em> James Joyce, not <em>like</em> Thomas Hardy, not <em>like</em> Faulkner”. Such comparisons at that time, she believed, obscured her specific commitment to black politics and aesthetics.</p>
<p>Never resting on her laurels, throughout her <a href="https://dof.princeton.edu/about/clerk-faculty/emeritus/toni-morrison">professorship at Princeton</a>, her <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/books/21morr.html">guest curatorship at the Louvre</a> in 2006-07, in her retirement and until the very end, she remained profoundly alert to the way her books and essays were read, (mis)understood and (mis)represented. In her role as public intellectual and fearless social commentator, she was prescient about the racist violence that precipitated the Black Lives Matter movement and prophetic about the regressions that the Trump era has entailed. </p>
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<p>Although her unwavering commitment to social justice and radical change perhaps occasionally led her to overexplain – in the forewords she wrote for the Vintage reissues of the novels in the early 2000s, for example, or in her final novel, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/29/god-help-the-child-toni-morrison-review-novel">God Help the Child</a>, which lacks the pitch perfection of its predecessors – we shall ignore her wisdom about power (and how to subvert it) at our peril.</p>
<p>A recent documentary film, <a href="https://www.theforeignershome.com/">The Foreigner’s Home</a>, depicts Morrison drawing parallels between the trauma undergone by captured Africans transported on the slaving ships’ Middle Passage to the Americas, the experience of black residents of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the current worldwide migrant crisis. The very making of such connections, and the way she deploys her customary stunning oratory to expose uncomfortable truths about the nature of “home” and “homelessness”, epitomises all that will endure about the phenomenon that was Toni Morrison. </p>
<p>Above all, the insights of this film insist, as does her fiction implicitly, and her Nobel Prize lecture explicitly, that the future is “in our hands”. The power and the responsibility for making the world a better place lies not with the great artists whose passing we mourn, Morrison always maintained, but with ourselves – the readers and thinkers who have so much work still to do.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121527/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tessa Roynon was awarded an AHRC Postgraduate Award for her doctoral dissertation on Toni Morrison in 2001. She is a senior research fellow at the Rothermere American Institute and a member of the English Faculty, both at the University of Oxford. Tessa is also the author of two books and numerous articles on Toni Morrison.</span></em></p>With her writing, and her work as a publisher, Morrison brought the African-American experience to the fore in the US and around the world.Tessa Roynon, Teaching and Research Fellow, Rothermere American Institute, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1215572019-08-07T06:00:28Z2019-08-07T06:00:28ZThe most influential American author of her generation, Toni Morrison’s writing was radically ambiguous<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/287138/original/file-20190807-84205-1lq8saf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Toni Morrison photographed in 2010: in both her fiction and non-fiction, she sought to expose the 'national amnesia' underlying often unconscious forms of racism.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Langsdon/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Toni Morrison, who has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/toni-morrison-dead.html">died aged 88</a>, was the most influential and studied American author of her generation. Born as Chloe Wofford in Ohio in 1931, she graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English from Howard University, a historically black college located in Washington DC. She then completed an M.A. at <a href="https://www.cornell.edu/">Cornell</a> on the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, before beginning an academic teaching career.</p>
<p>She married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, in 1958, but after their divorce in 1964 Morrison started working as an editor for Random House in New York. It was here that she began writing fiction, publishing her first novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11337.The_Bluest_Eye">The Bluest Eye</a>, in 1970. It was her third novel published in 1977, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11334.Song_of_Solomon">Song of Solomon</a>, that was her breakthrough work, winning the National Critics’ Book Circle Award.</p>
<p>Her most famous novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11333.Beloved">Beloved</a> followed in 1987. It was a fictionalised account of the 19th-century slave Margaret Garner, who killed her own daughter to save her from slavery. </p>
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<p>Morrison became a well-known figure within the worlds of American academia, publishing and cultural life. In 1990, she gave the Massey lectures at Harvard dealing with the invisibility of the African American presence in American literature. These influential essays were later published as <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37405.Playing_in_the_Dark">Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination</a>. </p>
<p>The following year Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She also held a Chair in the Humanities at Princeton from 1989 until her retirement in 2006 and continued to publish important novels during the latter part of her career. </p>
<p>In her Massey lectures, Morrison spoke of her ambition </p>
<blockquote>
<p>to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open up as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Both her creative and her critical work are designed to remap the contours of American literature and culture. She aims to highlight what was omitted in the conventional forms of liberalism that governed institutional life in America during the second half of the 20th century. </p>
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<p>Her 1993 novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37398.Jazz">Jazz</a>, for example, involves a self-conscious revision of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mythological “Jazz Age.” For Fitzgerald himself, this Jazz Age was centred almost exclusively around white culture. By setting her work in Harlem during the same era, Morrison executes in fictional form the remapping project that she outlined in her Harvard lectures.</p>
<h2>‘The national amnesia’</h2>
<p>Arguing that “the time for undiscriminating racial unity has passed,” Morrison sought, in both her fiction and non-fiction, to expose the “national amnesia” underlying often unconscious forms of racism. </p>
<p>Given such a remarkable career trajectory, it would seem Morrison’s literary reputation at the time of her death could hardly have been higher. Nevertheless, there is a significant gap between Morrison’s status as an Establishment figure and the radical ambiguities of her fiction. The latter, more elusive quality might well sustain her literary reputation more compellingly over time. </p>
<p>In Beloved, Morrison develops a conception of “rememory” (the character Sethe explains in the book this is the act of remembering a memory). Many of her fictions feature ways in which old ghosts haunt contemporary scenes. </p>
<p>The rhetorical reversals that are a common feature of Beloved reflect a condition where past and present, slavery and freedom, are all mixed up together. Indeed, the best of Morrison’s fiction is powerful precisely because it flirts with a pathological quality that avoids one-dimensional, political formulations.</p>
<p>In Tar Baby (1981), the reader is told how the black heroine’s “legs burned with the memory of tar,” despite her degree in art history from the Sorbonne. In Jazz, the heroine finds herself compelled to go back to a department store and “slap the face of a white salesgirl” who had snubbed her, despite recognising this to be self-destructive gesture. </p>
<h2>Fatalistic cycles</h2>
<p>Morrison, who studied classical literature at university, was influenced intellectually by the fatalistic cycles that permeate ancient Greek theatre. Something of this darker mood enters into her own fiction. </p>
<p>This is why Morrison’s novels are more unsettling than was her public persona. Unlike many of her intellectual contemporaries, she retained a traditional faith in aesthetic quality and the literary canon, defending fiction as offering “a more intimate version of history”. </p>
<p>She endorsed Barack Obama as presidential candidate in 2008 by commending his “creative imagination, which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom.” </p>
<p>Yet such polite terms as “creative imagination” find themselves contradicted by the cycles inherent in Morrison’s own imaginative universe. In Sula, for instance, the institution of a “National Suicide Day” epitomizes the kind of in-turned violence typical of her sombre fiction. </p>
<p>Morrison’s art resists classification. This quality of aesthetic elusiveness and ambiguity will make her more disconcerting representations of the psychology of power resonate with future generations of readers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121557/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Giles receives funding from Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>In her creative and critical work, Toni Morrison sought to remap the contours of American literature and culture.Paul Giles, Professor, Challis Chair of English, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1119542019-02-21T22:19:57Z2019-02-21T22:19:57ZA must-read list: The enduring contributions of African American women writers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260101/original/file-20190221-148520-ceix1w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen are on this short list of enduring must-read writers.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Left to right: Nobel Prize, U.S. Library of Congress, Yale archive</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In <em>Mules and Men</em> (1935), anthropologist, creative writer and Harlem Renaissance upstart Zora Neale Hurston relays the evocative folktale “Why the Sister in Black Works Hardest.” Fatigued after the work of Creation, God casts a massive bundle onto the earth. Intrigued by the mysterious object, a white Southern woman during the antebellum era asks her husband to retrieve it. <a href="http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7Ema01/grand-jean/hurston/chapters/Chapter4.html#3">Reluctant to tote the load himself, the master instructs a slave to fetch it</a>. </p>
<p>Soon wearied of the task, the slave then commands his wife to shoulder the burden. She does so, excited at the prospect of exploring the contents. When she opens the package, however, what leaps out at her and Black women for all posterity is none other than hard work.</p>
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<span class="caption">Ann Petry (right) was interviewed after she won a fiction award for ‘The Street.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/2018600204/">All-American news 4 / All American news IV / All-American news reel no. 4/Library of Congress</a></span>
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<p>African American women writers have tackled the hard work of representing a diverse spectrum of lived and imagined experiences, including and especially their own. This labour occurs against the backdrop of centuries-long struggles with racist oppression and gender-based violence, including — but not limited to — slavery’s culture of endemic rape, forced or interrupted motherhood, infanticide, concubinage, fractured families and egregious physical and mental abuse. </p>
<h2>Hard work as groundwork</h2>
<p>Renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass recalls in his 1845 slave narrative how witnessing the serial whippings of his Aunt Hester impacted him “with awful force.” He explains, <a href="http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/abolitn/abaufda3t.html">“it was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle.” </a> </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260041/original/file-20190220-148542-13szrjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260041/original/file-20190220-148542-13szrjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260041/original/file-20190220-148542-13szrjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260041/original/file-20190220-148542-13szrjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260041/original/file-20190220-148542-13szrjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260041/original/file-20190220-148542-13szrjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260041/original/file-20190220-148542-13szrjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>These ordeals also emerge in slave narratives by women. Harriet Jacobs’ <em>Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl</em> (1861) emphasizes such travails. A target of relentless sexual harassment by her much-older master, Jacobs laments, “When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. <a href="https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html">Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”</a></p>
<p>Once emancipated, African American women still faced staggering impediments when pursuing educational, entrepreneurial and employment opportunities. Political participation meant restrictions on voting rights both as women and as people of colour. Racist caricatures impugned everything from a woman’s intelligence and moral capacity to <a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mfsfront;c=mfs;c=mfsfront;idno=ark5583.0022.105;g=mfsg;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1">her skin color, texture of hair and body shape</a>. Stereotypes like the docile Mammy, the Tragic Mulatta, the clownish Topsy, the oversexed Jezebel, the greedy Welfare Queen, the amoral Hoodrat and the Mad Black Woman (still prevalent today) remain testaments to a history of disrespect and erasure. </p>
<p>Hurston’s tale symbolizes the enduring social struggles Black women have faced living in what feminist critic bell hooks has termed <a href="http://imaginenoborders.org/pdf/zines/UnderstandingPatriarchy.pdf">white supremacist capitalist patriarchy</a>.</p>
<p>In addition to influential autobiographers like Maya Angelou, dramatists like Lorraine Hansberry and poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, fiction writers have consistently demonstrated how imaginative art can simultaneously inform, persuade, entertain, catalyze social change and address individual as well as collective concerns. </p>
<p>Here is a short list of pivotal texts by African American women from the past century. These writers are but a small sample of the artists and intellectuals whose output resisted the force of what contemporary feminist critic <a href="https://www.moyabailey.com/">Moya Bailey</a> has termed <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447395">misogynoir</a>, or the corrosive fusion of anti-Blackness and misogyny prevalent in popular culture today. These women have completed the groundwork — and hard work — of envisioning a more just, inclusive society going forward.</p>
<h2><em>Quicksand</em> (1928) and <em>Passing</em> (1929) by Nella Larsen</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>These novellas follow mixed-race women whose uneasy status on the colour line (including the lure of passing as white) complicates their lives in dangerous, even fatal ways. <em>Passing</em> is revolutionary for its depiction of homoerotic tension between two upper-middle-class Black women. <em>Quicksand</em> offers insight into the exoticization of African American women abroad and the contest between art and domesticity as viable avenues for a fulfilling life.</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>Their Eyes Were Watching God</em> (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>This story is the lyrical account of thrice-married Janie Crawford who finds a mature vision of love and fulfillment amid incessant gossip and a difficult family history. The all-Black township of Eatonville, Fla., and the rich “muck” of the Everglades contribute to a portrait of community health, daily striving and resolute self-awareness.</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>The Street</em> (1946) by Ann Petry</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=994&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=994&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=994&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1250&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1250&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1250&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>This social realist novel follows single mother Lutie Johnson as she attempts to make a life for her young son in a predatory urban space. Weathering sexism, racism, classism, poverty and intense personal frustration, Lutie attempts to resist the brutality of the environment that gives the novel its loaded name.</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>The Bluest Eye</em> (1970) by Toni Morrison</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1010&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1010&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1010&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1269&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1269&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1269&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>This book is a searing portrait of a young girl’s coming-of-age and eventual undoing in the years following the Great Depression. Tumultuous family dynamics, psychological trauma and incest, the quest for compassion and self-love, and the toxic myth of Black ugliness coalesce in this first novel by the Nobel Laureate and author of neo-slave narrative <em>Beloved</em> (1987).</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>Kindred</em> (1979) by Octavia Butler</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>Oscillating between the 1970s and the early 19th century, this science fiction odyssey (re)connects a contemporary Black woman writer and her white husband with her ancestors on a Maryland plantation. The novel is buoyed up by the dramatic tension of time travel and the juxtaposition of the pre-civil War <a href="https://www.historynet.com/antebellum-period">Antebellum-era</a> with Civil Rights-era racial attitudes, including those about interracial love and allyship.</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>The Women of Brewster Place</em> (1982) by Gloria Naylor</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>Structured like a narrative quilt, these interconnected experiences of seven women span different generations, professions, class backgrounds and understandings of their place in the world. The eroded apartment complex that links them is the backdrop for unbearable pain as well as the promise of transformation and reconciliation.</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>The Color Purple</em> (1982) by Alice Walker</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>A tale of two sisters, Celie and Nettie, this novel constellates their love and longing via letters and imagined conversations across the Atlantic. Unsparing in its critique of domestic violence and toxic masculinity, yet tender in its treatment of various human weaknesses, the novel underscores Black women’s need for self-regard and mutual care. Not only are these acts revolutionary, but they also offer a glimpse of the divine.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111954/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nancy Kang has received grant funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs program. </span></em></p>Here is a small list of pivotal texts by African American women from the past century.Nancy Kang, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Transnational Feminisms and Gender-Based Violence, University of ManitobaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/787832017-06-05T16:38:51Z2017-06-05T16:38:51ZWhat is wisdom, and is it unwise to pursue it?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172252/original/file-20170605-31050-j4emem.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates is famous for having been called wise in part because he wouldn't label himself wise.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>What is wisdom? </p>
<p>Some would say that I am unwise for seeking to answer such a big question here. That is a useful point – to know what something is, it can help to get clear on what it’s not. Let’s start with that intuitive suggestion: it is unwise to try to answer the question of what wisdom is in the space of an article of 1000 words.</p>
<p>Another example of a lack of wisdom: proclaiming oneself to be wise. The ancient Greek philosopher <a href="http://www.zubiri.org/works/englishworks/nhg/nhg2socrates.htm">Socrates</a> is famous for having been called wise in part because he would not label himself wise. Conversely, had he called himself wise, he probably would not have deserved the label. </p>
<p>More examples of a lack of wisdom: spending too much time playing <a href="http://doodlejump.org/">DoodleJump</a> on one’s phone instead of writing an essay that’s due soon; making mistakes without learning from them (and thereby being akin to a dog that returns to its vomit, as per <a href="http://biblehub.com/proverbs/26-11.htm">Proverbs 26:11</a> in the Bible); <a href="https://unchronicle.un.org/article/ideology-racism-misusing-science-justify-racial-discrimination">believing</a> that skin colour is strongly correlated with intellectual and moral traits; <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/04/da-charges-helen-zille-colonialism-tweets-170402160030644.html">saying</a> in a tweet to a South African audience that colonialism had some good consequences.</p>
<p>Conversely, let us consider some good examples of wisdom. I think the <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=RlGbSSZLUEkC&pg=PT125&lpg=PT125&dq=hugh+prather+questions+are+statements&source=bl&ots=jqyDKtTjSQ&sig=6IpjXBHGmZLYT5xtOSHaBwXO1LU&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=hugh%20prather%20questions%20are%20statements&f=false">suggestion</a> that people’s questions are often implicitly statements is wise, as is the further suggestion that people’s statements are often implicitly requests. There was wisdom in the way that Paris climate change talks in 2015 were conducted, namely, by having drawn on indigenous southern African conflict <a href="https://qz.com/572623/this-simple-negotiation-tactic-brought-195-countries-to-consensus-in-the-paris-climate-talks/">resolution techniques</a> to good effect. I, and I presume readers familiar with their work, appreciate the wisdom of scholar-writer-activists such as <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/orwell_george.shtml">George Orwell</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/21/arthur-koestler-robert-mccrum">Arthur Koestler</a>, <a href="http://www.dianeackerman.com/">Diane Ackerman</a>, <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-bio.html">Toni Morrison</a> and <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1986/soyinka-bio.html">Wole Soyinka</a>.</p>
<p>What do the examples of wisdom have that the others are missing? What is present in wisdom that is absent in folly?</p>
<h2>The nub of the matter</h2>
<p>A <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wisdom/#HybThe">common answer</a> these days from English-speaking philosophers is that wisdom is a matter of knowing what is fundamental and then living well in the light of that. As philosopher <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=R-8SvHlNMXAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">Robert Nozick</a> <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=R-8SvHlNMXAC&pg=PA267&lpg=PA267&dq=Robert+Nozick++Wisdom+is+an+understanding+of+what+is+important,+where+this+understanding+informs+a+(wise)+person%27s+thought+and+action&source=bl&ots=pmoR9aZQwk&sig=3QyR_pXlYsQdzjcLB6XbQNFs6C4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwihucvWpabUAhVFOMAKHZcyAQYQ6AEIIDAA#v=onepage&q=Robert%20Nozick%20%20Wisdom%20is%20an%20understanding%20of%20what%20is%20important%2C%20where%20this%20understanding%20informs%20a%20(wise)%20person's%20thought%20and%20action&f=false">suggests</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Wisdom is an understanding of what is important, where this understanding informs a (wise) person’s thought and action. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>One might add that the actions are undertaken with a strategic awareness of limits and potential obstacles.</p>
<p>This account of wisdom is part of the story, but is incomplete. A wise person has certain beliefs and she makes certain sorts of decisions because of them, but I submit that a person can also be wise or unwise insofar as she exhibits particular feelings. </p>
<p>Contemporary academic philosophers who have written about wisdom have focused nearly exclusively on what is rational, either theoretically and practically, and have failed to acknowledge our emotional side. (If I am right that philosophers haven’t understood wisdom well, then there is some irony in this, for the word “philosophy” comes from the Greek for love of wisdom.)</p>
<h2>Ignorant mindset, wrongful choice, inapt attitude</h2>
<p>Consider that racism, xenophobia and the like are unwise partly insofar as they involve hating people because they belong to a certain group whose members share merely skin deep features. The lack of wisdom consists not merely of the false beliefs that have led to the hatred or the poor choices that xenophobes might make because of their hatred. The hatred itself is unwise, and would be even if it were never expressed or acted upon. </p>
<p>Racism and xenophobia aren’t merely a matter of ignorant mindset and wrongful choice. They can also consist of having a shameful, pathetic attitude towards other people. One is lacking in wisdom to some degree insofar as one feels disgust at interracial romantic relationships.</p>
<p>Hating or being repulsed by other people can be unwise, as can exhibiting such emotions towards oneself. Being humble à la Socrates is one thing, but deeming oneself unworthy and feeling bad about oneself at the core is something else. Of course, it can be appropriate to feel measured guilt for having done particular wrongs one should not have – that, in fact, would be wise! But one would be missing some wisdom if one’s general attitude towards oneself were that one is unimportant or does not merit respect and affection. </p>
<p>Self-hatred often does lead to bad decisions, such as failing to take responsibility for one’s mistakes, being overly sensitive to slights, and lashing out at others (particularly on email, it has seemed to me lately). However, I submit that self-hatred would not merely lead to unwise choices, but also evince a lack of wisdom in itself.</p>
<p>Hatred, disgust and guilt are negative emotions. It can also be intuitively wise or unwise to have certain positive emotions, such as love, pride and gratitude. It would be unwise for you to love a manipulative abuser who will never really love you back. True, it would be unwise in large part because you’d be likely to get hurt, but another part of the foolishness is that the lowlife does not deserve your love. Wouldn’t a wise person love what is truly worth loving?</p>
<h2>Should one seek wisdom?</h2>
<p>It is a tall order to try to become wise. And the bad news of this article is that it appears harder than at least many philosophers have thought. Becoming wise appears to mean not just acquiring knowledge of what is important and choosing well in the light of it, but also exhibiting certain emotions. That’s an extra condition, and, furthermore, it’s unfortunately harder for most of us to control our feelings than it is our decisions.</p>
<p>It’s starting to appear to be unwise to try to become wise, given how difficult it would be to achieve. Does that make any sense? Is wisdom such that it can be unwise to pursue it? </p>
<p>I cannot say here. After all, we knew it would be foolish to try to answer the question of what wisdom is in the space of an article.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/78783/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Thaddeus Metz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It is a tall order to try to become wise. And the bad news is that it appears harder than many philosophers have thought.Thaddeus Metz, Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy, University of JohannesburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/641562016-10-20T19:16:51Z2016-10-20T19:16:51ZFriday essay: why literary celebrity is a double-edged sword<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142285/original/image-20161019-20333-u5msmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A wax model of Ernest Hemingway at Madame Tussauds in New York.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Anton_Ivanov/Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1967, French theorist Roland Barthes famously <a href="http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/Gustafson/FILM%20162.W10/readings/barthes.death.pdf">declared</a> the metaphorical “death of the author” in his essay of the same name. Barthes rejected the Romantic idea of the author as a unique figure of genius. Still, despite his best efforts, this romantic notion of the heroic, solitary wordsmith lives on today. </p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/1319.html">Medieval times</a>, authors were seen as nothing more than craftsmen. But the Romantic poets – Byron, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley – singled out the writer as a figure of “spontaneous creativity”. As academic Clara Tuite <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/210888">has noted</a>, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the Romantic period saw the birth of the literary celebrity, a figure distinguishable from the merely famous author by his or her status as a cultural commodity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This Romantic writer was seen as either a solitary hero, a tragic artist, a melancholy genius - or all three. In the centuries since, famous authors have been both celebrated and panned, adored and ridiculed. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=781&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=781&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=781&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lord Byron (1788-1824), engraved by H.Robinson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Georgios Kollidas</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Since Romantic times, we have often expected writers to be detached from the trappings of celebrity culture, aligning their integrity with an anti-commercial attitude. There is, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Star_Authors.html?id=QFcqYIHCfgAC">argues author Joe Moran</a>, a “nostalgia for some kind of transcendent, anti-economic, creative element in a secular, debased, commercialised culture” that we commonly attach to writers.
Indeed theorist Lorraine York <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Literary_Celebrity_in_Canada.html?id=_5HhaFex8BsC&redir_esc=y">has asked</a> if we can even use words like “fame” and “celebrity” to describe writers, “those notorious privacy-seeking, solitary scribblers”. </p>
<p>One of the first to question the idea of literary celebrity was the 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who found his own fame something of a burden.
More recently, authors such as Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Dave Eggers have struggled with the desire for popularity and credibility. In today’s internet culture, reaction to a famous writer’s actions or utterances is quick and merciless. Next week, a new author will be thrust into the media spotlight, with the announcement of <a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/fiction">the Booker Prize winner</a>. </p>
<p>Yet interestingly, discussions about the difficulties of being a famous writer rarely include women. The notion of the solitary genius is usually attached to men. A notable exception is the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante – who is famous, ironically, precisely because of her reluctance to engage with literary celebrity. Ferrante writes under a pseudonym, in her words, to “liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety”. </p>
<p>Ferrante’s recent unmasking by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/03/elena-ferrante-anita-raja-unmasking-publisher-outing-my-brilliant-friend">a literary journalist</a> has unleashed a torrent of condemnation. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"784869671145054208"}"></div></p>
<p>The extent to which her true identity has been picked over shows how our society craves constant closure, often at the expense of creativity and imagination. As Michel Foucault once <a href="http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/Gustafson/FILM%20162.W10/readings/foucault.author.pdf">noted</a>, literary anonymity is “of interest only as a puzzle to be solved”. </p>
<p>Such is the nature of contemporary celebrity culture that many cannot tolerate the idea of writers who prefer anonymity over fame. So those such as Thomas Pynchon, J.D. Salinger and Ferrante, who have evaded the limelight, have been scrutinised as much for their personal lives as their actual works. </p>
<h2>A short history of famous (male) writers</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Russian stamp showing Charles Dickens on his 150th birth anniversary.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Olga Popova / Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The 19th century writers Charles Dickens (hero of the working class) and Mark Twain (America’s most beloved humourist), were plagued with aspects of their fame. While Dickens was often criticised for appealing to the lower classes, Twain <a href="http://www.twainquotes.com/Celebrity.html">likened</a> celebrities to clowns. Celebrity, he said, “is what a boy or a youth longs for more than for any other thing. He would be a clown in a circus […] he would sell himself to Satan, in order to attract attention and be talked about and envied”.</p>
<p>Yet Dickens and Twain also enjoyed their fame. Dickens was renowned for engaging his audiences at public lectures; Twain also went on speaking tours. </p>
<p>If we fast forward half a century or so, we come to Ernest Hemingway – another author who felt imprisoned by his fame. As theorist Leo Braudy <a href="http://leobraudy.com/the-frenzy-of-renown-fame-and-its-history/">puts it</a>, Hemingway was caught between “his genius and its publicity”. In an undated writing fragment, Hemingway <a href="http://www.thefreelibrary.com/%22Glow-in-the-dark+authors%3A%22+Hemingway's+celebrity+and+legacy+in+under...-a0246955529">wrote</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have reached the point where we are ruled by photographers and agents of publishers and writing is no longer of any importance.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He also called fellow writer F. Scott Fitzgerald a “hack” for writing Hollywood screenplays.</p>
<p>Yet Hemingway nevertheless helped promote the “Hemingway myth”, built around ideals of <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7096913-all-man">masculinity</a> and genius. He was frequently photographed outdoors, fishing and hunting, or attending bullfights. </p>
<p>Then there was Norman Mailer, the pugnacious, Jewish author of The Naked and the Dead and Advertisements for Myself. In 1960, Mailer <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/arts/adele-mailer-artist-who-married-norman-mailer-dies-at-90.html?_r=0">stabbed and seriously wounded his then-wife, Adele Morales</a> with a pen-knife at a drunken party. (After pleading guilty to a charge of third-degree assault, he received a suspended sentence.)</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Norman Mailer receives an Austrian decoration for science and art in 2002.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Leonard Foeger/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Mailer cultivated a public persona that certainly boosted his fame, but did little for his literary reputation. Many critics accused him of wasting his talents by shamelessly promoting himself; he did frequent TV interviews, including a particularly notorious <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8m9vDRe8fw">appearance</a> on The Dick Cavett Show, where he and Gore Vidal famously butted heads over Mailer’s public profile and ego. </p>
<p>Indeed, Mailer once <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674005907&content=reviews">called himself</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>a node in a new electronic landscape of celebrity, personality and status.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Theorist John Cawelti suggests that unlike Hemingway, who lived out to the end an ambiguous conflict between celebrity and art, Mailer “tried to make his public performances themselves into a kind of artistic exploration”. Mailer frequently wrote about himself in the third-person, in an effort to “perform” himself as a character. </p>
<p>Interestingly, at the same time as all this was happening, <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/jd-salinger-9470070">J.D. Salinger</a>, author of <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5107.The_Catcher_in_the_Rye">The Catcher in the Rye</a>, famously was living as a recluse. </p>
<h2>Franzen and Oprah</h2>
<p>In 2001, Oprah Winfrey put Jonathan Franzen’s sprawling family saga <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3805.The_Corrections?from_search=true">The Corrections</a> on her <a href="https://static.oprah.com/images/o2/201608/201608-obc-complete-list-01a.pdf">book club list</a>, encouraging her audience to read it. Franzen was invited onto Oprah’s show. He declined, <a href="http://www.powells.com/blog/interviews/jonathan-franzen-uncorrected/">saying</a> he didn’t want his novel placed alongside “schmaltzy, one-dimensional [books]”. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=986&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=986&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142297/original/image-20161019-20308-1fntotq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=986&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wolf Gang/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Franzen was widely panned for being a snob. Andre Dubus III, for instance, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/29/books/oprah-gaffe-by-franzen-draws-ire-and-sales.html?pagewanted=all">criticised</a> Franzen’s assumption that “high art is not for the masses, that they won’t understand it and don’t deserve it”. </p>
<p>Media scholar Ian Collinson <a href="https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/everyday-readers-reading-popular-culture-ian-collinson/">sees</a> Franzen’s reaction as a symbolic attempt to separate the television celebrity from the novel, an act of “cultural decontamination”. Franzen, he writes, feared his position within the high-art tradition “would be compromised if his novel were subject to such blatant commercialism”.</p>
<p>Yet nine years later, Franzen <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/sep/16/oprah-winfrey-jonathan-franzen-freedom">apologised</a> to Oprah. He was again invited onto her show, this time to promote his 2010 book <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7905092-freedom">Freedom</a>. He did not refuse a second time. Ironically, many criticised Franzen for succumbing to the allure of popularity. The old assumptions regarding the incompatibility of literature and celebrity resurfaced, with one critic, Macy Halford, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/franzen-meets-oprah">suggesting</a> that “Oprah and Franzen are not terribly compatible personalities”. </p>
<p>This whole saga attests to what Tessa Roynon <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/american-literature/cambridge-introduction-toni-morrison-1">has called</a> the “damned if you don’t, damned if you do” mentality of literary celebrity. Authors are often seen as having to choose between respectability amongst fewer critics, or widespread popularity at the expense of their reputations. (<a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/06/literary-celebrity">One article</a> about a speech Franzen gave to students in 2011 was memorably titled, “Touching the hem of Mr Franzen’s garment.”)
Like Mailer, Franzen’s career has been marred by the troubled union between mass media presence and desire for literary acceptance. </p>
<h2>Celebrity and Sincerity: Wallace and Eggers</h2>
<p>One of Franzen’s peers, the late David Foster Wallace, was an author in the Romantic mould; he is associated with the <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/11/sincerity-not-irony-is-our-ages-ethos/265466/">“New Sincerity”</a> literary movement, and his 1996 novel <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6759.Infinite_Jest?from_search=true">Infinite Jest</a> has been judged by many as a work of genius. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A hand-drawn tribute to David Foster Wallace.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Steve Rhodes/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 2008, Wallace took his own life. Before his death, Wallace was known to have suffered from depression, and he projected an image of the melancholy genius. His opinion of celebrity was less than favourable. His widow Karen Green once <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/10/karen-green-david-foster-wallace-interview">noted</a> in an interview that all of the media attention given to Wallace “turns him into a celebrity writer dude, which I think would have made him wince”.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/16/reviews/wallace-v-profile.html">1996 New York Times piece</a>, Wallace claimed that the “hoopla” of celebrity made him want to become a recluse. The cult of celebrity was something he consistently mocked in his work, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/365145-the-paradoxical-intercourse-of-audience-and-celebrity-the-suppressed-awareness-that">calling</a> celebrities “symbols of themselves” rather than real people. As with Rousseau and Salinger, the logic went that Wallace “deserved his celebrity”, journalist Megan Garber <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/david-foster-wallace-the-end-of-the-tour/400928/">writes</a>, specifically because he had not sought it.</p>
<p>Dave Eggers is also part of the “New Sincerity” movement. A writer of serious, sentimental fiction, his books include his debut memoir <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4953.A_Heartbreaking_Work_of_Staggering_Genius?from_search=true">A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius</a>, and <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4952.What_Is_the_What?from_search=true">What is the What?</a>, the fictionalised story of the life of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng. Eggers also opened the writing centre <a href="http://826valencia.org/about/">Valencia 826</a> in San Francisco, which helps children develop their writing skills (and inspired the <a href="http://www.sydneystoryfactory.org.au/our-inspiration/">Sydney Story Factory</a> and Melbourne’s <a href="http://www.100storybuilding.org.au/">100 Story Building</a>.)</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=707&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=707&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=707&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dave Eggers in 2010.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Elliot Margolies/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Early in his career, Eggers often spoke of wanting to retreat into anonymity. Instead, he <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/one-man-zeitgeist-dave-eggers-publishing-and-publicity-9781441117373/">seized</a> the reins of literary celebrity. Some then accused him of hypocrisy – in criticising fame while also inviting it. He has also been criticised for “excessive sincerity”, while journalist David Kirkpatrick <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/books/ambivalent-writer-turns-his-memoir-upside-down-denouncing-profits-publishers.html">called</a> Eggers “agonizingly ambivalent”. </p>
<p>Journalist James Sullivan <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Eggers-Surprised-By-Success-Author-to-read-from-2935959.php">notes</a> that Eggers</p>
<blockquote>
<p>treats his celebrity like a gold lamé suit: It’s amusing, absurd and, in his mind, not quite appropriate.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Meanwhile, in her reading of Eggers’ 2003 book <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4954.You_Shall_Know_Our_Velocity_?from_search=true">You Shall Know Our Velocity</a>, Caroline Hamilton <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/one-man-zeitgeist-dave-eggers-publishing-and-publicity-9781441117373/">suggests</a> that the central characters “resemble the credibility-obsessed younger Eggers torn between longing for celebrity and legitimacy”. </p>
<p>In a <a href="http://www.armchairnews.com/freelance/eggers.html">2000 email interview</a>, Eggers referred to himself as a sellout for having sold many books and appeared in various magazines. As Hamilton <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/one-man-zeitgeist-dave-eggers-publishing-and-publicity-9781441117373/">writes</a>, the term sellout has less to do with wealth, and more to do with “the popularity that comes with it”.
Celebrity, then, remains a problem for those authors wishing to appear genuine and serious. </p>
<h2>Where are all the women?</h2>
<p>It is striking that female authors are, for the most part, excluded from all these agonised discussions about inner turmoil and perceived loss of prestige. This suggests that women are not often thought of as having substantial reputations in the first place. </p>
<p>Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, for instance, has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jw0Fu8nhOc">frequently appeared</a> on Oprah’s program to discuss her complex, poetically written, novels. In contrast to Franzen, however, Morrison’s credibility was never seen to be compromised in doing so. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Toni Morrison after being awarded the French Legion of Honour in 2010.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Philippe Wojazer/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Despite the number of talented women writing today for large audiences – Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Joan Didion, and Toni Morrison just to name a few – critics do not often think of female authors as having the kinds of monumental reputations that their male peers possess. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byronic_hero">The Byronic hero</a>, <a href="https://www.academia.edu/5771776/Remembering_Hemingway_The_Endurance_of_the_Hemingway_Myth">the Hemingway legend</a>, and the <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/09/13/behind_the_david_foster_wallace_myth/">Foster Wallace genius</a> are larger-than-life men. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Margaret Atwood.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Blinch/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Women are seldom discussed in such a way – with the possible exception of Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. Yet this may actually be a blessing for them. Avoiding the expectations that go along with literary celebrity can be an advantage. Female authors may be better able to breach certain boundaries – of genre, style, content – in ways that certain male authors cannot. </p>
<p>Ferrante, for instance, said she explicitly needed anonymity to write honestly. While some may see it as a bizarre sort of compliment to her that she is so intriguing that an Italian journalist spent weeks combing financial and property records to unmask her, she surely deserved the right to her privacy to focus on her own work. </p>
<p>Some of the most interesting genre-defying authors writing today are women such as Morrison, Atwood, and Emily St. John Mandel. Perhaps, then, female authors can more seamlessly defy stringent boundaries that continue to define the literary world when they are not hailed as heroic geniuses.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64156/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Siobhan Lyons does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Bob Dylan is now a literary celebrity. And next week, the Booker Prize judges will anoint another. The tag is still chiefly attached to men but women authors shouldn’t despair: fame and good writing can be uneasy bedfellows.Siobhan Lyons, Tutor in Media and Cultural Studies, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/492242015-10-15T19:17:58Z2015-10-15T19:17:58ZToni Morrison’s Desdemona invites us to listen not just hear<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98491/original/image-20151015-27968-rjbg8a.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Desdemona is one of several productions at this year's Melbourne Festival that invites its audiences to listen to tragedy and its reverberations.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Allan/Melbourne Festival</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/desdemona/#.Vh8iXhArJBw">Desdemona</a>, Toni Morrison’s response to Shakespeare’s Othello, which opens today at the Melbourne Festival, we are invited to do something – something it seems we are being invited to do as audiences of tragedy ever more: to listen.</p>
<p>Last year in London, I was bowled over by Euripides’ Medea, adapted for the <a href="http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/medea">National Theatre</a> by Ben Powers.
It opens with the Nurse, caregiver to Medea’s two sons, anticipating their murder by their mother. </p>
<p>At the close of the play, after the deed is done, the Nurse turns back to the audience, to say:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I ask you again <br>
You who watch. <br>
How can there ever be any ending than this? <br>
First silence. <br>
Then darkness. <br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>That warm July week, the brutal inevitability of the infanticide was all the more troubling for “we who watch”. Child death was in the headlines. After three Israeli teenagers had been <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/21/hamas-kidnapping-three-israeli-teenagers-saleh-al-arouri-qassam-brigades">kidnapped and killed</a> by members of Hamas, the Israeli Defence Force launched an operation whose high child casualty rate <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/world/no-safe-place-for-civilians-in-gaza-says-un-as-child-death-toll-reaches-149-20140723-zvvz3.html">drew outrage</a>. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, reports on the <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28357880">shooting down of flight MH17 over Ukraine</a> focused in particular on the fact that almost a third of the 283 passengers were under 18. Were we, I wondered as I laboured under the weight of the Nurse’s hex, becoming a species that had turned on its own children? </p>
<p>Some 15 months later, those events were superseded by others. Most recently, the so-called “<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/aug/10/10-truths-about-europes-refugee-crisis">refugee crisis</a>” has thrown up countless images of displaced individuals of all ages. Then pictures of a three-year old face-down in the surf on a Turkish beach prompted a concerted political response, and made of little <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/03/refugee-crisis-friends-and-family-fill-in-gaps-behind-harrowing-images">Alan Kurdi</a> a perverse sort of sacrificial necessity. </p>
<p>The Nurse’s rebuke to “you who watch” in Medea is a standing one. In art, tragedy reflects an enduring, inescapable fascination with our own mortality. In the media, it tags event after event in a seemingly endless parade of wretched suffering. Tragedy can be overwhelmingly powerful, or it can turn us into helpless onlookers. Neither reaction is sufficient – but what comes next?</p>
<p>In Desdemona, another nurse character offers to split the difference between the double-whammy of silence and darkness to which Medea’s nurse condemns her audience. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98492/original/image-20151015-27968-1lk5bq7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Desdemona.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Allan/Melbourne Festival</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Played by <a href="http://www.rokiatraore.net/bio-english/">Malian singer Rokia Traoré</a> (pictured above), Barbara, the lovelorn maid to Desdemona’s mother who is referred to in Othello, is here reconceived as Barbary, erstwhile nursemaid to Desdemona. In the afterlife, their ghosts tell and sing Morrison’s revisionist stories of the past. </p>
<p>Many of those stories are traumatic, including those of Othello’s experiences as a child soldier, and of the rapes he subsequently committed. But, the performance suggests, while we may find ourselves staring time after time into the abyss, we need not do so in silence. </p>
<p>Desdemona shifts the emphasis of Othello from hubris to history and from looking to listening. A personal stake in history arises, it suggests, from the intimacies of tragic knowledge, which enter the body as stealthily as sound. </p>
<p>Listening? It seems an ineffably fragile thing – precious, even – in the face of the urgent, attention-grabbing challenges of our age. But to cultivate a capacity for listening may, at the very least, complement impulsive sympathy and the well-meaning but often short-lived desire for remedial action. </p>
<p>It is perhaps no coincidence in contemporary culture that “I hear you” is shorthand for “I know what you are saying, but I am not going to alter my position”. </p>
<p>What does it mean to listen, rather than hear? </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/gadamer/">philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer</a> described interpretation as a process of “uninterrupted listening”, requiring attention precisely to what we do not anticipate. He wrote in <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213142.Truth_and_Method">Truth and Method</a> (1960):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A person who is trying to understand a text has to keep something at a distance – namely everything that suggests itself, on the basis of his own prejudices, as the meaning expected – as soon as it is rejected by the sense of the text itself. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>As Gadamer’s emphasis on sustained attention highlights, listening takes time in a way that the visual apprehension of a scene or situation appears not to. Listening as uninterruptedly as possible in our noisy world may better attune us to the ground bass of those tragic events that unfold without fanfare, but instead slowly, persistently, and to devastating effect. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98493/original/image-20151015-27941-1yy0trg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Desdemona.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Allan/Melbourne Festival.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is unsurprising that therapists concerned with the ways transgenerational trauma causes past catastrophes to reverberate through the behaviours of young people advocate “<a href="http://aboriginal.telethonkids.org.au/media/54889/chapter10.pdf">deep listening</a>”: a mode of respectful, non-judgemental attention that can serve to manage group discussions about sensitive topics. </p>
<p>By contrast, one of the most perplexing things about climate change is how much of modern life continues to function at odds with what we are constantly being told about the environmental transformations already underway. </p>
<p>At this point, the transition from such weighty topics to considerations of art easily founders over questions of efficacy – or lack thereof. That said, it is striking to note that Desdemona is far from alone among this year’s Melbourne Festival offerings in inviting audiences to listen to tragedy and its reverberations. </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/a-genre-hopping-triumph-the-rabbits-47554">The Rabbits</a>, based on Shaun Tan’s children’s book about the colonisation of Australia, <a href="https://theconversation.com/fly-away-peter-on-the-opera-stage-is-a-masterful-adaptation-38160">Fly Away Peter</a>, a staging of David Malouf’s First World War novel, and <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/the-experiment/#.Vh8moBArJBw">The Experiment</a>, a multi-media interpretation of a monodrama by Mark Ravenhill about the ethics of experiments on children, are all works that have met the challenges of adaptation by turning to musical performance of one form or another. </p>
<p>Given their diversity, one would be hard-pressed to identify a single reason or effect. But the contribution that music can make to the staged recovery of what has been silenced or rendered inarticulate must play a role here. </p>
<p>Taken together, along with Desdemona, we can at least say that Melbourne audiences are this year being invited to participate in a certain kind of attention training. The act of spectating – often characterised as a passive activity – is here reformulated as an opportunity to fall quiet, the better, as the sociologist Les Back wrote in <a href="http://samples.sainsburysebooks.co.uk/9781444118964_sample_579486.pdf">Deep Listening: Researching Music and the Cartographies of Sound</a> (2014), to “think with our ears”.</p>
<p>To what end, though? That the act of listening may itself be a reparative activity: a re-balancing of the sensorium away from visual immediacy, and a qualified challenge to the desire for over-hasty interruption or intervention. The larger trajectory must also encompass what Gerard Goggin, <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10304310903012636">writing with reference to disability</a>, calls “varieties of listening”, including embodied modes of reception that do not privilege sound.</p>
<p>I have always admired “good listeners”. Lacking the patience or humility, I am all too ready to interject. But <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/after-tragedy-listening/#.Vh8nsxArJBw">on Sunday</a>, I will be keen to hear what panellists Genevieve Grieves, Peter Sellars, Marcia Langton and Mary Luckhurst have to say about questions such as: What comes after tragedy? What social actions and creative responses do such events demand of us? How do we live with death, and not just live but flourish and thrive? </p>
<p>Addressing such questions reminds us that listening can be a valuable precursor to being listened to. </p>
<p>At the beginning of Powers’ Medea, the Nurse says: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Listen. <br>
There’s a story that has to be told. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>And so unfolds the tragedy. Is it possible to change the script? Only if first we listen and then, having done so, newly appreciating the responsibilities of speech and the affective capacities of sound, we take the Nurse’s position, now unburdened by fatalism. </p>
<p>Listen. There’s a story that has to be told. </p>
<p><br>
<em>Desdemona is at Melbourne Festival from October 16-19, details <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/desdemona/#.Vh8pABArJBw">here</a>. Paul Rae will chair After Tragedy, Listening: A roundtable response to Toni Morrison’s Desdemona on October 18, details <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/after-tragedy-listening/#.Vh8oVxArJBx">here</a>. The production plays in Sydney as part of Sydney Festival from October 23-25, details <a href="http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/info/desdemona">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49224/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Rae does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Tony Morrison’s Desdemona, which opens today in Melbourne, asks many questions of its audience. Perhaps most pressingly: what does it really mean to listen, rather than hear?Paul Rae, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.