Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Steve Stoft's avatar

Smart and highly relevant. This makes perfect sense historically -- comparative literature departments were the gateway through which postmodernism entered the universities starting in the late 1960s. Edward Said, noted for post-colonialism, taught at Columbia from 1963. Gayatri Spivak: Joined the English and Comparative Literature department there in the late 1970s. She was Jacque Derrida's translator and a major force in PoMo herself. In Yascha Mounk's latest book, The Identity Trap, he credits Spivak with saying:

“My search is not a search for coherence,” Spivak replied. In theoretical terms, she admitted, “it’s absolutely on target to take a stand against the discourses of essentialism. . . . But strategically we cannot.”

That rationalization of essentialism, he believes, was necessary to rationalize Kimberle Crenshaw's introduction of "intersectionality" in 1989, which is the basis of today's Identity Politics.

My point is that what we see today flows from the '60s. It's actually a merger of Black Power, Critical Theory and Postmodernism. It's been gaining strength the whole time. Its ideology is now systemic wokeism, and it's not going away without a hell of a fight. Now is the time for the Persuasion Community learn to fight back.

Expand full comment
Andrew Wurzer's avatar

I have to wonder the extent to which this is driven by being in a hyper-competitive ivy like Columbia. I graduated with a degree in English Lit 25 years ago, but from a middle-brow liberal arts school that churned out pre-meds and theatre folk for its competitive side. English Lit was mostly the purview of future gradeschool teachers with a smattering of editor's assistants and PhDs, and while the profs were certainly aware of Marxist readings, they mostly focused on much more what I would consider literary concerns: can you make an effective argument for the interpretation you have based in the text itself?

We did our senior seminar on Ulysses, and our prof had a distinct point of view on the novel as world literature, but several of us who'd been steeped in several Irish lit electives couldn't read Ulysses without seeing a deeply Irish novel. That wasn't the interpretation he was interested in, but still graded us all fairly and never held it against us. What this essay describes is a bizarre semi-totalitarian order.

Expand full comment
31 more comments...

No posts