Best of Spring
Our favorite essays on art, politics, and education
June 2, 2022
In this week’s issue of Public Seminar, we’re rereading some of our favorite essays from the spring semester.
Onward in the Arts
In a special issue responding to critic Jed Perl’s Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, Katha Pollitt offers an impassioned argument for the “fierce urgency” of contemporary culture and the tumbling of old hierarchies. “The same thing happened in the nineteen-seventies and eighties with art and writing by women thanks to the women’s liberation movement. Sure, there were plenty of terrible poems about menstruation and so-so novels about leaving your dickish husband, and I’m pretty sure there were complaints about the damage those rigid terrifying women were doing to artistic standards and our common humanity and all that. But over time feminism, broadly understood, has transformed every field. For the better! Why not attend with generosity to the new perspectives previously marginalized creators are bringing in today?” (March 2, 2022)
Click here to read the special issue on authority and freedom in the arts, edited by Co-Executive Editor James Miller.
“I, too, have used ‘melodramatic’ as a pejorative term to describe Indian films and vernacular theatre that did not manifest the realist approach to storytelling I associated with ‘good’ British and American art. Much later, I understood that popular Indian films and dramas are not necessarily second-rate reproductions of Hollywood musicals, but represent a melding of myriad global and regional art forms, including Indian classical dances and Parsi theater.” Torsa Ghosal discusses the BIPOC and queer writers using a maximalist approach to confront literary imperialism. (February 1, 2022)
Politics
In her introduction to a special issue dedicated to her new book, Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements, Deva Woodly explains why she hasn’t given up on America. “My attachment to the American idea is much more personal. Like most Black Americans who are descendants of enslaved people, my family can’t trace all the generations that have been born in this land, but as far as we can tell, my roots in this country go back at least seven generations on both sides. Those generations include the often forced but sometimes passionately defiant intermixture of Black, white, and Indigenous bloodlines that make up most of the African diaspora. Those generations toiled to build and serve this nation while being brutalized, stolen from, disrespected, and disavowed. They built triumphantly, tragically effervescent human lives in the face of systematic dehumanization. They are owed—for both their unpaid labor and their faith that this American idea could one day justly serve the entire polity.” (January 17, 2022)
Click here to explore the special issue and read scholar’s responses to Deva Woodly’s Reckoning.
After occupying New Zealand’s parliamentary grounds for 23 days, an “anti-mandate” protest ended in a riot. While some New Zealanders rejected the spectacle as “imported,” Lydia Nobbs argues that the protest’s potent mixture of global white nationalism and homegrown discontent should not be brushed off as a fringe event. “Alongside American Confederate flags, Trump signs, and swastikas, Tino Rangatiratanga (Māori sovereignty) flags waved. ‘Wellness influencers’ and ‘concerned mums’ included the group that took court action to try block the rollout of vaccines to 5- to 11-year-olds.” (April 11)
“To radically remake the world requires openness to radical alterity, the possibility of the radically new. This is why divine creation signifies the essence of freedom, the power to be free from the past, to create entirely new futures, by first taking responsibility for the other.” Lucas Fain returns to the writing of Emmanuel Lévinas as a counter to Putin’s new Iron Curtain. (March 22, 2022)
“From protest to electoral politics, the sequence of events from [George] Floyd’s murder in the spring of 2020 to Biden’s victory in the fall of that year constituted a critical juncture that turned American politics—at least briefly—180 degrees from its orientation under Donald Trump.” In a special issue respondse to his new book Movements and Parties: Critical Connections in American Political Development, Sidney Tarrow suggests we take a long view of how social movements and politics interact. (March 28)
Right-wing organizers have a strategic advantage over the left-wing, Michael Tomasky writes: Republicans tend to unite around what they don’t want. “What is ‘Make America Great Again’ after all, but a huge NO to the last 60 years of American aspiration? No to Black people. No to women (or certain kinds of women). No to immigrants. No to LGBTQ people. No to giving a crap about the environment. No to public health. No to masks. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” (March 30, 2022)
Read more of “Social Movements & Political Parties,” a symposium edited by Co-Executive Editor James Miller.
Race and Academia
“You walk into the classroom, armed with years of rigorous training and expertise, ready to fulfill your vocation, excited to shape and inspire young minds and to deliver your expertise to the next generation. But quickly you realize that you are an oddity, a curio, the novelty of a Negro in the academy: Look! You are a walking embodiment of contradiction between the life of the mind and the historical caricature of your Black body.” In their contribution to the double issue “Teaching While Black,” Bridgette Baldwin and Davarian L. Baldwin examine the classroom as a battleground between white supremacy and abolition. (April 28, 2022)
Curious to read more about the experiences of African American scholars working in higher education? Click here to read the special issue “Teaching While Black,” co-edited by New School President and University Professor Dwight A. McBride, James Baldwin Review Managing Editor Justin A. Joyce, and Public Seminar Co-Executive Editor Claire Potter.