The Anglophone Empire Taken To Task

 I have not had time to finish any of the books this past year, they are all older books. Ones put off until my release. The one thing about federal prison is that it does give one time to read, to even find translated books. I think Americans have much to learn from foreign writers about writers - new ideas, new forms, new themes - and about ourselves - they give a different perspective on the world.

For a different view, there is Siddhartha Deb's The Empire Marches On (The Drift) which I ran across tonight. When I should have been doing something more practical and profitable, I think my time was well-spent. Please consider the following:

If that falling-apart world is easily recognizable a century later, so is the Anglophone literary sphere’s capacity to promote, then discard, its exotic others. Since the end of the Cold War, with its competing ideological visions of the world, literary taste in London and New York has moved in easy step with markets and the internal conflicts of a West built on extracted wealth, war-making, consumerism, and endless self-deception.

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The rush to read about foreign societies, no matter how open in spirit, no matter if taken up with a sense of solidarity, is easily subsumed under such forces. This is not the shortcoming of the individual reader, writer, translator, or editor. The empire marches on, making slight adjustments in posture, its acts carried out in plain view. The best we can say of the books that make it across the swathes of wreckage is that they show us that the spirit of resistance and hope is not yet dead. That is not enough, however, for those who live in the maw of Anglophone culture, no matter how reluctantly. We have to call to account the universities, publishers, institutions, and cultural gatekeepers who profit off this violence and inequality, and we have to examine, each of us, our complicity in such violence.

I am an old white man living in Indiana who is not sure how to respond to this. When I say read foreign writers, it is not out of some sort of literary chic. When I say we can learn about ourselves by reading foreign writers, it is to see that our high ideals have ugly consequences elsewhere. The same is true of reading Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz or any American writer from a minority. What we think of as American good deeds register in other countries as American imperialism, just as we can say we are a color-blind society while obscuring the continued hold of racism running under our society's surface.

But is not literature about piercing the illusions we put forward as reality?

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