4/21/2010

totally deadening in terms of imaginative literature

In the academy, identity politics has replaced any kind of politics known to the rest of the world. So they’ve invented this idea of authenticity: that one can only talk about where one is personally coming from, and only the people coming from a culture are able to talk with any authority about that culture at all. This strikes me as totally deadening in terms of imaginative literature, and also utterly unrealistic: Would you rely on any random American for a trenchant analysis of the USA?

- Eliot Weinberger, in interview with New Directions. You can watch a video of the interview here and read the transcript here. Thanks to Don Share for pointing this out.

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