This is an important and strong essay. A lot can be learned from how many central questions it asks, with some compelling answers: where are the leftwing and working class and autodidact and black and male imaginative writers and storytellers today?
In a wealthy and white male owned and largely white female staffed and highly college educated and non-incarcerated and predominantly liberal-not-leftist literary establishment and in a country where the once booming prison literature publishing situation has been actively suppressed since the early 1970s and during a time when as many as 1 in 3 black men in America could expect to be imprisoned in their lifetimes...
Need one go on? I would - simply to expand a bit upon the explorations in this essay. Left scholar H. Bruce Franklin notes in "Inside Stories of the Global American Prison" that:
"A torrent of prison literature was pouring out to the American public [in the 1960s and early 1970s] in mass-market paperbacks, newspapers, magazines, and major motion pictures. This era ended with the downfall of the Nixon regime in 1974, the final defeat of the United States by Vietnam in 1975, and the reactionary epoch that soon followed. In 1976 came the Big Bang, the spectacular explosion of the prison-industrial complex. As a necessary corollary to this prison cosmos, there began a relentless campaign to silence prisoners and ex-prisoners [by passage of new laws and implementation of other measures…. Moreover, today] gone from the so-called "penitentiary" or "correctional facility" is any pretense of reformation or rehabilitation [exceptions to the rule aside]. In the typical American prison, degradation, brutalization, and even overt torture are the norm…."
"After the invasion of Iraq, Lane McCotter, who had been forced to resign as the director of the Utah Department of Corrections because of torture carried out under his administration, was put in charge of reconstructing Saddam Hussein's Abu Ghraib. John Armstrong, former director of the Connecticut Department of Corrections, who had been driven out of his position because of sexual and other tortures revealed by the ACLU and Amnesty International, became deputy director of operation for the entire Iraqi prison system…."
Franklin adds that:
"Despite the assault on the literature of the American prison [which Franklin documents in detail], it has been breaking into literature courses and anthologies. The 2006 edition of the Heath Anthology of American Literature, which is used in classrooms around the world, actually included a whole section labeled "Prison Literature." Although this "cluster" consisted of a mere twenty-seven pages out of the more than three thousand in the multivolume anthology, that was enough to provoke the disapproval of the New York Times Book Review, whose editor Rachel Donadio, complained that it took up more space than that given to "the great poet Elizabeth Bishop." Even more reprehensible, according to Donadio, is the fact that this prison literature section "includes works by Kathy Boudin, a former member of the Weather Underground who served more than 20 years for her role in a 1981 robbery and murder." Implying that the five authors included in this section collectively are not worth as much space as Bishop, Donadio names only Boudin, failing even to give the names of such widely celebrated poets as Etheridge Knight and Jimmy Santiago Baca.[8] Nor does Donadio say even a word about any of their actual work, including Boudin's three beautiful, extremely moving poems. Masquerading as literary criticism based on aesthetic criteria, this editorial commentary in the New York Times Book Review thus offers a minor but revealing example of how dominant cultural institutions collaborate with the political apparatus to suppress prison literature…."
"It is no surprise that modern prisoners [decades ago] helped lead the rediscovery of slave literature, because chattel slavery did not disappear in 1865 – it merely morphed into the modern American prison...merged…with the more modern [forms of slavery] pioneered by the American prison…. When the time came to globalize this institution, the men chosen for the job were some of its most notorious officials."
"The literature of slaves told the inside stories of antebellum slavery and thus helped destroy it. So too, the literature of prisoners tells the inside stories of the American prison and thus threatens its dominion and expansion. The deepest insights into the American global prison, including its culture and political logic, come from this literature it tries to repress."
I'll add that suppressed leftwing midcentury literary critic Maxwell Geismar noted about 6 decades ago an earlier instance of literary repression:
"Recently a group of American historians have been digging into, one might say, "excavating," the true facts of this Cold War Culture – the curious period from the mid-forties to the mid-sixties – and the results are very interesting. We have had almost a quarter of a century of conformity, comfort, complacency and mediocrity in American literature – this epoch of "instant masterpieces" – and only now can we begin to put the pieces together and find a consistent pattern…"
"…it was the Cold War that brought about the downfall, in 1949, of one of the most brilliant journalistic enterprises in our literary history. At the war's end, a new epoch of repression was about to start. Another great achievement of the Depression years was the WPA Federal Theater Project; and Halle Flanagan's history of this, in her book Arena, ends with the congressional investigation and foreclosure of the Federal Theater by political figures who are, by Divine Grace or special dispensation, still active in Washington today…"
The Trumpists and Republicans are flagrant examples of class, culture, race, and education suppression today, but establishment Democrats have long been bad enough. The longstanding and ongoing suppression of socially conscious class literature, classic left literature - in part simultaneous with and as a backlash against the likes of Wright, Mckay, Hughes, Baldwin, and somewhat Ellison, also Du Bois, and plenty of class conscious white writers and others as well, both male and female - has produced much of the void that we feel today in fiction, gutted of key core elements, central to life.
I've been banging the drum for McKay's Banjo for decades. Home to Harlem is good too, should be obvious. If you're a disgruntled white male American writer, and if you're not left-class conscious, and if you're not at least partly self taught, and if you're not seeking insight from left-class black writing in a slavery-scarred, prison-ridden, deeply bigoted and imperialist society - bigotry is official policy, and always has been - then what are you doing? You need to tell, you need to imagine your own story, but you also should see as full as possible that long brutal highway that the utterly dispossessed walk upon (not to mention black women and Native Americans, among others), in this country at least, if not world.
You won't get much help from the literary establishment in doing this. Far from it. There are honorable and important exceptions of all races and genders and class in this, but overall - you're up against what you're up against. The plutocracy doesn't give up its privileged, brainwashed, and brainwashing position without a fight. Why does anyone think it has insisted so desperately on "showing" not "telling" a story - counter to the common intuition of telling a story - from the cold war on? It's easier to squash too many explicit ideas in favor of evoked emotions when one must show rather than point-blank tell - no matter your class, race, or gender. But if you can cut class off at the knees, as well - and previously gender and race - so much the better for the White House fronted Incorporated Estates of America.
There is a lot to rebel about in literature in a plutocratic police state like America. And the battle throughout American history has been extreme because the history has been extreme, and remains so. It's the leftists who document this in detail. But don't tell anyone. It wouldn't do.
Very thought-provoking and interesting. Thank you, and I agree! Perhaps that’s why I love the work that Clifford Thompson, Ben Okri, Barry Jenkins, and to some extent Brandon Taylor are putting out there. Would love to find others.
As America has grown more educated, educated Americans are more likely to see a college degree as a given and not as a privilege. Accordingly they are uninterested in those without college education. This is not specifically a racial issue of course, but it has racial implications because black men are less likely to have college education.
These days, serious literature is generally marketed to bourgeois white women, a notoriously timid demographic. They tend to only tolerate discomfort when they know it's going to end up as part of a pre-packaged, blandly affirming narrative. But good literature lacks a safety net, even more so when it concerns working class black people, because these people often lack real-life safety nets. When these women cling to safety, even in fictional settings, they cut themselves off from the power of literature. They are quick to claim that their sensitivity is a virtue, that they are protecting others, when I think we all know they're just protecting their own feelings. Instead of protecting others, they're smothering those less sensitive than themselves, and preventing contemporary literature from coming alive.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Chester Himes. I've only read one of his books, "The Real Cool Killers" (a great title) but it's set in working class Harlem, and it's very elegantly plotted.
My favorite book of his is Bastards of the Reagan Era, from 2015 IIRC.
I'm of Beatty's generation (born in 1969), so I don't want to say what's up "with kids these days" but back in the '80s when Beatty and I were both part of the US spoken word scene, literature had a much heavier cultural weight. Take everyone who has a Soundcloud or YouTube or TikTok creative career, put them in that time, and they'll be creative, although with different options for outlets. Everyone now would have been in a band, or a poet, or a playwright, or a filmmaker, etc. If you sold a few hundred copies of your poetry book back then, it was a big deal. Now the new options reach much much more.
I would say to look also to the self-publishing world. I used to see guys at the flea market with their self-published books. Now, the new writers are publishing ebooks. A lot of it is garbage, but the good ones are magical.
The premise applies to just about every kind of artist these days, it seems. Where are the working- class poets? The working-class visual artists? The working-class jazz musicians? Making higher education de rigeur may have been the product of good intentions but it’s created an out-of-touch class of people, terribly parochial and hopelessly blind to its own blindness. We need more autodidactism in the mix.
This essay has me thinking about the contemporary black mystery and crime writers like S.A. Crosby, Walter Mosley, and Attica Locke. Are they writing a more representative black literature because their black characters are far diverse in geography, economics, and lifestyle? How about if we include Chester Himes and black crime writers from earlier eras? In the Native lit world, an overwhelming percentage of successfully-publishing Native writers grew up middle-class and outside of tribal communities. Many of them are second-generation college graduates. Almost all of these Native writers are also college professors. But a key difference: these Native writers don't write much about their own middle-class and upper middle-class lives. There is very little Native fiction written about college life by the Native writers who are college professors.
to reassess why so many college-english teachers assign stories that seem to be about the same kinds of voters in the same kinds of places preaching the same set of values. it's like they've never met a gun-owner
This is an important and strong essay. A lot can be learned from how many central questions it asks, with some compelling answers: where are the leftwing and working class and autodidact and black and male imaginative writers and storytellers today?
In a wealthy and white male owned and largely white female staffed and highly college educated and non-incarcerated and predominantly liberal-not-leftist literary establishment and in a country where the once booming prison literature publishing situation has been actively suppressed since the early 1970s and during a time when as many as 1 in 3 black men in America could expect to be imprisoned in their lifetimes...
Need one go on? I would - simply to expand a bit upon the explorations in this essay. Left scholar H. Bruce Franklin notes in "Inside Stories of the Global American Prison" that:
"A torrent of prison literature was pouring out to the American public [in the 1960s and early 1970s] in mass-market paperbacks, newspapers, magazines, and major motion pictures. This era ended with the downfall of the Nixon regime in 1974, the final defeat of the United States by Vietnam in 1975, and the reactionary epoch that soon followed. In 1976 came the Big Bang, the spectacular explosion of the prison-industrial complex. As a necessary corollary to this prison cosmos, there began a relentless campaign to silence prisoners and ex-prisoners [by passage of new laws and implementation of other measures…. Moreover, today] gone from the so-called "penitentiary" or "correctional facility" is any pretense of reformation or rehabilitation [exceptions to the rule aside]. In the typical American prison, degradation, brutalization, and even overt torture are the norm…."
"After the invasion of Iraq, Lane McCotter, who had been forced to resign as the director of the Utah Department of Corrections because of torture carried out under his administration, was put in charge of reconstructing Saddam Hussein's Abu Ghraib. John Armstrong, former director of the Connecticut Department of Corrections, who had been driven out of his position because of sexual and other tortures revealed by the ACLU and Amnesty International, became deputy director of operation for the entire Iraqi prison system…."
Franklin adds that:
"Despite the assault on the literature of the American prison [which Franklin documents in detail], it has been breaking into literature courses and anthologies. The 2006 edition of the Heath Anthology of American Literature, which is used in classrooms around the world, actually included a whole section labeled "Prison Literature." Although this "cluster" consisted of a mere twenty-seven pages out of the more than three thousand in the multivolume anthology, that was enough to provoke the disapproval of the New York Times Book Review, whose editor Rachel Donadio, complained that it took up more space than that given to "the great poet Elizabeth Bishop." Even more reprehensible, according to Donadio, is the fact that this prison literature section "includes works by Kathy Boudin, a former member of the Weather Underground who served more than 20 years for her role in a 1981 robbery and murder." Implying that the five authors included in this section collectively are not worth as much space as Bishop, Donadio names only Boudin, failing even to give the names of such widely celebrated poets as Etheridge Knight and Jimmy Santiago Baca.[8] Nor does Donadio say even a word about any of their actual work, including Boudin's three beautiful, extremely moving poems. Masquerading as literary criticism based on aesthetic criteria, this editorial commentary in the New York Times Book Review thus offers a minor but revealing example of how dominant cultural institutions collaborate with the political apparatus to suppress prison literature…."
"It is no surprise that modern prisoners [decades ago] helped lead the rediscovery of slave literature, because chattel slavery did not disappear in 1865 – it merely morphed into the modern American prison...merged…with the more modern [forms of slavery] pioneered by the American prison…. When the time came to globalize this institution, the men chosen for the job were some of its most notorious officials."
"The literature of slaves told the inside stories of antebellum slavery and thus helped destroy it. So too, the literature of prisoners tells the inside stories of the American prison and thus threatens its dominion and expansion. The deepest insights into the American global prison, including its culture and political logic, come from this literature it tries to repress."
I'll add that suppressed leftwing midcentury literary critic Maxwell Geismar noted about 6 decades ago an earlier instance of literary repression:
"Recently a group of American historians have been digging into, one might say, "excavating," the true facts of this Cold War Culture – the curious period from the mid-forties to the mid-sixties – and the results are very interesting. We have had almost a quarter of a century of conformity, comfort, complacency and mediocrity in American literature – this epoch of "instant masterpieces" – and only now can we begin to put the pieces together and find a consistent pattern…"
"…it was the Cold War that brought about the downfall, in 1949, of one of the most brilliant journalistic enterprises in our literary history. At the war's end, a new epoch of repression was about to start. Another great achievement of the Depression years was the WPA Federal Theater Project; and Halle Flanagan's history of this, in her book Arena, ends with the congressional investigation and foreclosure of the Federal Theater by political figures who are, by Divine Grace or special dispensation, still active in Washington today…"
The Trumpists and Republicans are flagrant examples of class, culture, race, and education suppression today, but establishment Democrats have long been bad enough. The longstanding and ongoing suppression of socially conscious class literature, classic left literature - in part simultaneous with and as a backlash against the likes of Wright, Mckay, Hughes, Baldwin, and somewhat Ellison, also Du Bois, and plenty of class conscious white writers and others as well, both male and female - has produced much of the void that we feel today in fiction, gutted of key core elements, central to life.
I've been banging the drum for McKay's Banjo for decades. Home to Harlem is good too, should be obvious. If you're a disgruntled white male American writer, and if you're not left-class conscious, and if you're not at least partly self taught, and if you're not seeking insight from left-class black writing in a slavery-scarred, prison-ridden, deeply bigoted and imperialist society - bigotry is official policy, and always has been - then what are you doing? You need to tell, you need to imagine your own story, but you also should see as full as possible that long brutal highway that the utterly dispossessed walk upon (not to mention black women and Native Americans, among others), in this country at least, if not world.
You won't get much help from the literary establishment in doing this. Far from it. There are honorable and important exceptions of all races and genders and class in this, but overall - you're up against what you're up against. The plutocracy doesn't give up its privileged, brainwashed, and brainwashing position without a fight. Why does anyone think it has insisted so desperately on "showing" not "telling" a story - counter to the common intuition of telling a story - from the cold war on? It's easier to squash too many explicit ideas in favor of evoked emotions when one must show rather than point-blank tell - no matter your class, race, or gender. But if you can cut class off at the knees, as well - and previously gender and race - so much the better for the White House fronted Incorporated Estates of America.
There is a lot to rebel about in literature in a plutocratic police state like America. And the battle throughout American history has been extreme because the history has been extreme, and remains so. It's the leftists who document this in detail. But don't tell anyone. It wouldn't do.
Try this. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/the-man-rewriting-prison-from-inside
Very thought-provoking and interesting. Thank you, and I agree! Perhaps that’s why I love the work that Clifford Thompson, Ben Okri, Barry Jenkins, and to some extent Brandon Taylor are putting out there. Would love to find others.
As America has grown more educated, educated Americans are more likely to see a college degree as a given and not as a privilege. Accordingly they are uninterested in those without college education. This is not specifically a racial issue of course, but it has racial implications because black men are less likely to have college education.
These days, serious literature is generally marketed to bourgeois white women, a notoriously timid demographic. They tend to only tolerate discomfort when they know it's going to end up as part of a pre-packaged, blandly affirming narrative. But good literature lacks a safety net, even more so when it concerns working class black people, because these people often lack real-life safety nets. When these women cling to safety, even in fictional settings, they cut themselves off from the power of literature. They are quick to claim that their sensitivity is a virtue, that they are protecting others, when I think we all know they're just protecting their own feelings. Instead of protecting others, they're smothering those less sensitive than themselves, and preventing contemporary literature from coming alive.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Chester Himes. I've only read one of his books, "The Real Cool Killers" (a great title) but it's set in working class Harlem, and it's very elegantly plotted.
Start here: https://www.dwaynebetts.com/
My favorite book of his is Bastards of the Reagan Era, from 2015 IIRC.
I'm of Beatty's generation (born in 1969), so I don't want to say what's up "with kids these days" but back in the '80s when Beatty and I were both part of the US spoken word scene, literature had a much heavier cultural weight. Take everyone who has a Soundcloud or YouTube or TikTok creative career, put them in that time, and they'll be creative, although with different options for outlets. Everyone now would have been in a band, or a poet, or a playwright, or a filmmaker, etc. If you sold a few hundred copies of your poetry book back then, it was a big deal. Now the new options reach much much more.
I would say to look also to the self-publishing world. I used to see guys at the flea market with their self-published books. Now, the new writers are publishing ebooks. A lot of it is garbage, but the good ones are magical.
The premise applies to just about every kind of artist these days, it seems. Where are the working- class poets? The working-class visual artists? The working-class jazz musicians? Making higher education de rigeur may have been the product of good intentions but it’s created an out-of-touch class of people, terribly parochial and hopelessly blind to its own blindness. We need more autodidactism in the mix.
This essay has me thinking about the contemporary black mystery and crime writers like S.A. Crosby, Walter Mosley, and Attica Locke. Are they writing a more representative black literature because their black characters are far diverse in geography, economics, and lifestyle? How about if we include Chester Himes and black crime writers from earlier eras? In the Native lit world, an overwhelming percentage of successfully-publishing Native writers grew up middle-class and outside of tribal communities. Many of them are second-generation college graduates. Almost all of these Native writers are also college professors. But a key difference: these Native writers don't write much about their own middle-class and upper middle-class lives. There is very little Native fiction written about college life by the Native writers who are college professors.
Stateway's Garden by Jasmon Drain
to reassess why so many college-english teachers assign stories that seem to be about the same kinds of voters in the same kinds of places preaching the same set of values. it's like they've never met a gun-owner