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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