In a recent essay for Harper’s, Thomas Chatterton Williams, the now somewhat notorious liberal writer and critic, responded to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s call for a new and explicitly political writing. For Nguyen, the Trump years were a boon for a certain type of writer who was able to finally pull the scales from their eyes that had developed during the “warmth” of the Obama years, and to finally, in these newly troubled times, “awaken [writing] to politics.” Yet, for Nguyen, the problem is just how marginal such politically-active writing is – it mainly being written by those groups who are themselves the most marginalised, those who bear the brunt of a system of unequal social power: the “writers of color, queer and trans writers, feminist writers, anticolonial writers.” What we need then, for Nguyen, is to generalise such writing, to make the political aesthetic.
On Commitment
On Commitment
On Commitment
In a recent essay for Harper’s, Thomas Chatterton Williams, the now somewhat notorious liberal writer and critic, responded to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s call for a new and explicitly political writing. For Nguyen, the Trump years were a boon for a certain type of writer who was able to finally pull the scales from their eyes that had developed during the “warmth” of the Obama years, and to finally, in these newly troubled times, “awaken [writing] to politics.” Yet, for Nguyen, the problem is just how marginal such politically-active writing is – it mainly being written by those groups who are themselves the most marginalised, those who bear the brunt of a system of unequal social power: the “writers of color, queer and trans writers, feminist writers, anticolonial writers.” What we need then, for Nguyen, is to generalise such writing, to make the political aesthetic.