Amanda Nelson

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

To call someone “basic” is to look into the abyss of continually flattening capitalist dystopia and, instead of articulating and interrogating the fear, transform it into casual misogyny. And that’s a behavior far more troubling — and regressive — than taking pleasure in all things pumpkin spice.

Online violence has "subverted the original positive promise of the internet’s freedoms," UN Women’s Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said in a press release. "And in too many circumstances has made it a chilling space that permits anonymous cruelty and facilitates harmful acts towards women and girls." With this report, the UN strives to reclaim the opportunities that a free and safe internet can offer. "That means recognizing the scale and depth of the damage being done – and taking strong, concerted steps to call it – and stop it."

If you’re into wearing corsets and writing with a fountain pen, God bless. If you’re romanticizing an era in which more than half the children born in American cities would die before their fifth birthdays, people on the Internet are probably going to go ahead and make jokes about whether you “love polio.” And if Chrisman wants to wave her freak flag, I’ll support her right to do it — but I sure hope she got her husband’s permission first.

But the professed longing of white writers to reproduce the "authentic" racialized body, the "correct" narrative of otherness, is a convenient disguise for the underlying gestures of colonization and erasure that enable those reproductions to be canonized and rewarded to an extent that narratives produced by othered writers themselves are not. The performance of that longing for "authenticity" serves only to further insist on the centering of whiteness at the expense of writers of color, whose sole role in any conversation about "authenticity" can only be as experts whose testimony serves to reassure the all-pervasive anxieties of whiteness. It goes without saying that that labor of authentication is unpaid.