Literary Criticism in a Time of Genocide

Below is a transcript of the keynote speech I delivered for the 14^th Conference on East-West Cross-Cultural Relations at the American University in Cairo.

How the fuck am I supposed to teach Mark Twain? 

I repeated this question as I sat on the bus traveling to campus.  It was my first time meeting classes since October 7.  I would be walking onto the same campus, but the world in which it is situated had forever changed.  Trying to separate campus from Palestine was no more viable than trying to separate Christ from the crucifix. 

Mark Twain has something to do with Palestine—he wrote about it, after all, in a way that would please Zionists a few generations later.  With a bit of imagination, everything has something to do with Palestine.  This is so because Palestine, while formally absent as a nation-state, exists as both a historical and sociological presence in the minds of people across the world.  Indeed, we affirm the reality of Palestine with every refusal to grant legitimacy to its occupier. 

Still, Twain wouldn’t cut it.  Nor would the more politically-oriented readings assigned to my other two classes.  I wanted to discuss Palestine as Palestine, without analogy, without mediation.  The beginnings of a genocide were already evident.  There’s a simple, inviolable rule about genocide:  normal life must come to a halt until it is defeated. 

What can a literary critic and college instructor do to help defeat genocide?  The obvious answer is “nothing,” but I’m not willing to concede the point so easily.  What we can do depends on how we conceptualize the scope and purpose of literary criticism.  Scholars like to call emphasis on revolutionary outcomes prescriptive, and I suppose they’re right, but certain events in the world demand a kind of vigor socialized out of us by graduate school and the job market.  I’m saying that sometimes it’s okay to be prescriptive.  Who does it help when we spend all our time slogging around in nuance and ambiguity?  What purpose does it serve other than social climbing and self-gratification?  In Palestine right now, not too far from where we’ve gathered, millions of people are being bombarded, starved, displaced, imprisoned.  I condemn it without qualification or concern for the bourgeois etiquette of higher education. 

And I can condemn it in literary criticism without sacrificing the creative touch that often makes the genre so rewarding.  Ghassan Kanafani has already shown how it can be done.  So have Toni Morrison, Robert Warrior, Raymond Williams, Viet Nguyen, Audra Simpson, James Baldwin, and Christina Sharpe.  In his book On Zionist Literature, recently translated into English, Kanafani offers a rigorous analysis of Israeli culture and society, adeptly interrogating Zionism’s discursive norms, philosophical assumptions, and ethical inconsistencies.  He fulfills all the conventional tenets of literary criticism and still manages to affirm national liberation.  There’s no contradiction.  The liberatory aspects of criticism have been suppressed by publishers, by tenure committees, by culture magazines, by scholars affiliated with the CIA—in short, by various organs of the ruling class.  National liberation isn’t considered an unacceptable methodology because of some natural, ahistorical standard of proper literary study.  The standard is political.  It was always political.  And it’s most political precisely when nonpolitics is the demand. 

Let’s look at a more recent example.  The beloved martyr Refaat Alareer from Gaza, murdered by the Zionist entity last December, never wielded a gun but is seen among Palestinians across the world as a revolutionary figure.  Refaat was like everyone in this room:  an English teacher, a writer, a translator, a literary critic.  How, then, did he become a worldwide emblem of resistance?  Because he refused to separate his vocation as a literary critic from his aspirations as a human being.  Those aspirations first and foremost entailed freedom for the Palestinian people. 

Like Kanafani, Refaat’s vocation was relational to, and in a way dependent on, the everyday labor of survival.  Translation, reading, literary criticism, teaching…each was a political project.  It always is, right?  Refaat was aware of it, though.  He embraced it.  Like many before him—and, unfortunately, many still to come—this embrace of the political, in its disreputable incarnations, led to vigorous condemnation by guardians of the status quo in the months before his death.  For if you’re beholden to centers of power, then by definition you’re apolitical and allowed to condemn others for being crass and irresponsible. 

As I made my way to campus on that morning in October, wondering how to teach anymore, Refaat was still alive.  But he seemed to know, just as Kanafani knew, that his physical existence was a tenuous affair and so he proceeded through the world with intense focus on the mind and spirit.  Theirs was a national sensibility.  Palestinians have been made to live as if their legacies are always written in the present. 

What can you do with this condition?  It heightens insight even as it restricts possibility.  My mind was completely dead and yet it pulsated with an uncontrollable energy, with a desire for intimacy and affection and exuberance.  Life.  Just life.  As its own beginning, without end.  I couldn’t prattle on about style or aesthetics or rhetorical conventions, not when right next door a death cult disguised as a country was trying to end the very idea of consciousness, of craft, of creativity.  But neither could I withdraw from the world. 

The problem resolved itself.  I taught three sections that day.  In each of them, the students wanted to discuss what was happening in Palestine.  I allowed it, more for my sake than for theirs.  They understood the new mandate.  I didn’t need to explain anything to them.  These discussions about Palestine—what it means, where it’s been, how it moves, why it matters—produced some of the best literary criticism I’ve ever witnessed. 

*****

There’s a beauty in connecting literature to politics (in the material sense of the term), but there comes a point where the political pushes itself into the forefront of everyone’s attention.  This doesn’t mean that literature suddenly becomes pointless or superficial.  If anything, literature assumes a greater importance in the world—not simply for its supposed humanistic qualities (a motif about which critics have been cynical for many decades), but also for its ability to foster connection in economies set up to produce alienation.  I suppose I’m trying to say that literature and politics shouldn’t have a binaristic relationship and don’t have a binaristic relationship even when we pit them against one another.  Literature is a reproduction or perhaps an apologue of material politics.  Criticism should aspire to do the same. 

Whatever the case, we can’t let archaic conventions of literary criticism limit our participation in movements for liberation.  Think about it for a moment:  where does literary criticism normally occur?  College classrooms, scholarly journals, boutique magazines, right?  Very bougie environments, basically.  Even less formal spaces like Goodreads or Facebook, capable of hosting withering critique or vitalizing insight, are largely clearinghouses for white-collar sensibilities.  Can we consider the possibility that crudeness allows for its own kind of sophistication?  We don’t need to tend to issues of class simply as a critical practice, but in terms of where we actually practice the criticism.  It can happen in encampments, tunnels, prison cells, picket lines.  We can call this process critical habituation, an attempt to habituate criticism to the places we gather for insurgency. 

The university isn’t a very good host, after all.  You’re tricked into a false freedom on campus that only becomes apparent when the byzantine system of reward and punishment roots into your consciousness.  Freedom to criticize, in both its rhetorical and aesthetic connotations, is a myth.  It does no good pretending otherwise, unless your fortunes are tethered to the status quo.  You know quite well that there are some things you simply can’t say no matter how persistently they occupy your brain.  You might whisper these thoughts to a trusted colleague or student, with an apology or qualification.  Or maybe you’ll sneak them into a lecture through hint or suggestion.  But the way you discuss an issue such as Palestine among family and community rarely sounds like it does in a professional setting.  This disparity between thought and speech is a damning indictment of intellectual freedom on campus and also a disservice to critical thinking itself.  What does it mean to filter a deeply-felt devotion to the oppressed through a bourgeois etiquette of pragmatism or forbearance?  It tells us that we’re already habituated to ruling class dicta even when we speak of Marxism or queerness or colonization or some other ostensibly radical topic.  We’re always constricted by norms set in advance of our interventions.  We always begin by knowing what not to say.  Is it merely an accident?  A natural occurrence of impartial thinking?  Ask some Ivy League deans.  See what they have to say. 

Conciliation to the norms of responsible criticism won’t do in the face of genocide.  It won’t do at all in a world whose decline is obvious to anyone foolish enough to pay attention. 

Let’s habituate ourselves to urgency as critics and teachers.  We must eventually get to a point where pretense and suggestion are no longer satisfying and simply say what is supposed to be unspeakable in polite society:  yes, I support Palestinian resistance; yes, I dream of the river and the sea and everything in between; yes, I hate Israel; yes, I think militancy is a reasonable antidote to genocide.  Doing so opens space for other important acknowledgments:  the university feels inadequate as against its own self-image; it doesn’t feel up to the task of individual or national liberation; it feels incongruous to any geography beyond its own gates and turnstiles.  This place can’t satisfy my desire to do something meaningful on behalf of the indigent and dispossessed.  Because when things get serious, when we feel most strongly a need to intervene in the world, an inevitable truth emerges like a stone in the larynx:  I’d feel much more useful being anywhere else. 

*****

Here’s my silent monologue:  I want to get the hell out of here, find this anywhere else of my fantasy.  Do something.  Open up a roadside stall and pass out sandwiches.  Disappear into a refugee camp.  Join the resistance.  I do.  Is it imprudent to share these desperate thoughts?  Probably.  They’re the sort of comments that get people fired.  But that’s a problem of repression, not of fantasy, because I’m certain that these bouts of reverie, with thematic variations, are perfectly common.  We fantasize for hundreds of reasons.  One of them is dissatisfaction with the current world.  Here also is the hunger to be doing something.  I can’t trust anyone who witnesses a genocide and doesn’t wish they could do more to stop it. 

I’ve been doing, insistently and steadily, in a way that makes sense to my current situation.  Some things.  Somethings.  Many of us have.  But the problem with doing is that it always demands something else be done, some thing often beyond our capacity.  Imagination is the taproot of freedom, though.  In our capacity to envision people and places and purposes beyond the strictures of capitalism, we contribute to a project of liberation.  Why shouldn’t this be a feature of literary criticism? 

You see, literature isn’t an escape from the world; at its best, it forces us to confront precisely what makes escapism so attractive. 

*****

Imagination can’t stop genocide or expel occupying armies.  Palestine’s liberation will come about through a combination of militarism and civil disobedience, and it requires concerned observers outside of Palestine to confront Zionist institutions in their own communities. 

But imagination is a precondition of liberation, nevertheless.  It informs resistance, first of all.  People like to look at militants, especially Palestinian militants, as unthinking, indoctrinated savages hellbent on destroying things for malice or pleasure.  Not so.  A great deal of thinking, both strategic and aspirational, informs resistance.  We cannot dismiss the fighter as an irrational being.  Otherwise we elide the possibilities of a Palestinian future altogether.  The fighter, poet, and intellectual are all essential to national liberation.  For the colonized, the three categories are not contradistinctive. 

Resistance is a form of social critique.  We can say that it is social critique in its purest form, certainly in its most immediate.  The social critic who uses weapons has no need of intermediaries among bureaucrats and tastemakers.  Indeed, this type of social critic is best served ignoring them altogether.  The poet and intellectual must toil among the elite unless they wish to pursue their craft in isolation.  Whether in the field or in the social media feed, there is always confrontation. 

The confrontations are more intense during genocide.  Audiences become less tolerant of skullduggery and dissimulation.  It becomes a different environment for literary criticism. 

I suppose I’m not saying anything new.  All angles of practice and ideology have been covered across decades of literary criticism.  Even the poststructuralists, maligned for being too nihilistic and abstruse, offer space for material analysis—and, if you deconstruct hard enough, maybe even a little material action. 

*****

So, I have an anxiety to confess (I always thought of public speaking as a form of confession):  I have no answers to the questions before us today.  I honestly don’t even know why I’m here.  To inform?  To educate?  To gratify?  To entertain? 

Most immediately, I’m here because Tahia Abdel-Nasser asked me to deliver the keynote.  Tahia is a fantastic colleague and I consider her a friend, so I wasn’t inclined to say no.  And of course I was flattered.  We can admit to being flattered by invitations to speak, I hope. 

Beyond technicalities, though, I’m a bit lost.  I’m not sure what I can do from here.  In this room.  On this campus.  Because our concerns exist beyond this room and beyond this campus and yet we’re supposed to synthesize those concerns into a language compatible with our current location.  Our task, then, is technically impossible.  We have to put our minds in places unavailable to our bodies.  Again, fantasy intrudes upon the cartographies of professional life because this vocation to which we’ve all devoted considerable time and energy is, as we’re meant to understand it, deficient to our spirit of compassion and empathy. 

Yes, you dream of doing something different, something consequential, something you’re only allowed to discuss in whispers.  I know you do.  How do I know?  Because I’m assuming you’re still human. 

This isn’t a problem with the conference or with literary criticism.  It’s a problem of genocide.  It’s not just this speech.  I don’t know what to do in the classroom, either.  I have service obligations to fulfill:  can’t do it.  I have routine emails to answer:  can’t do it.  I have new books to promote:  can’t do it.  When there’s a genocide next door—when your friends are being murdered and babies are being starved of nutrition and mass graves are being excavated outside of hospitals—it’s impossible to care about institutional bureaucracy.  In part this is because on some level we recognize the interrelation between bureaucracy and political violence.  But it’s also the nature of bureaucracy itself:  even in a near-utopia, where everyone has a pony and an electric blanket, I wouldn’t give a damn about assessment.  The modern university is filled with middle managers who justify their existence by dishing out busywork to everyone else. 

During a genocide, though?  The busywork starts to feel obscene.  Publishing a book loses much of its pleasure.  Everything is disrupted—“normal life” becomes a kind of cruelty underlain by regret and guilt and anger.  

All I want is for the genocide to end—this includes punishment for its perpetrators and supporters—and the subsequent liberation of its victims.  Everything else is academic. 

This outlook is a kind of disaffection even as it emerges from deeply-felt sentiment.  We spend lots of time as readers and critics exploring affect as a textual phenomenon.  How do authors and audiences interact?  How does rhetoric produce or constrain sensibility?  How can story manipulate human relationships?  These are interesting and important questions, but the current moment seems to demand attention to disaffection.  Helplessness and anger are a type of disaffect congruent to Marxist notions of alienation.  We experience reverberations of the genocide—as witnesses, as kin, as descendants, as social creatures.  Being disaffected is an acknowledgement of the horror beyond our influence but in our line of vision. 

During major tragedies, philosophical questions narrow into their essences.  So it is with Gaza.  Disaffection, in turn, is an intellectual in addition to emotional process.  We cannot avoid the worst of our malignity as human beings.  We seek ways to recover the possibility of love and compassion.  The world is illuminated in bold print.  Racism, economic inequality, and colonial extraction are the texts upon which Zionist genocide is written.  We are thus afflicted and disaffected at the same time. 

Like the basis of all literary criticism, even of the cynical variety, many of us are undertaking a search for meaning.  I don’t know what to do in my job or in the trivia of social life because the everyday doesn’t feel meaningful, not when a genocide is happening across the border, not when the whole of the so-called civilized world conspires to wipe out an entire nation, a nation to which I attach my identity.  The problem isn’t individual; labor under capitalism demands suppression of our most human impulses.  Bosses are necessarily inhumane and workers learn quickly to associate empathy with privation.  The pragmatic decisions we make in order to survive aren’t actually for our own well-being, but to the benefit of the ruling class.  Thus the devotion of nearly all Western (and a great many Eastern) institutions to Zionism.  Thus the constant liberal justification of police brutality at the student encampments on U.S. campuses.  Thus the deference of corporate media to the IOF. 

Disaffection is the basis of revolt against this all-encompassing oppression.  It pulls us away from the logic of good citizenship—that is, the logic of acquiescence—and allows us to recognize the commonplace as an invitation to dispossession.  Good criticism teaches us to think alongside the bereaved, to analyze what isn’t stated, to understand realism as an embrace of the impractical and incredible. 

Everything might seem meaningless during a genocide but only because we’re made to reckon with all that is suddenly possible. 

*****

We wonder how our work can do good in the world, which is an important but difficult question.  It helps to look at the inverse.  How does intellectual work contribute to inequality?  With this question, the answers come more easily.  Some offenders are obvious—the war criminals on faculty at various universities, for instance.  Then you have the standard reactionaries, the wonky centrists, and the pragmatic leftists who, in their addiction to nuance, always manage to theorize themselves onto the same side as the ruling class. 

It is a disciplinary problem, too.  Michael Walzer spent decades formulating a just war theory calibrated to absolve Israel of responsibility for its violence.  An entire field, Israel Studies, exists to mystify Zionist atrocities.  Not to mention the counterrevolutionary ethos of area studies in general.  We know quite well how academic work can be put into service of genocide, so it’s worth asking whether it can also be put into service of justice. 

First of all, dominant notions of “complexity” are often a pretext for obfuscation.  Some issues shouldn’t be complexified, but made simple.  Genocide is among those issues.  I’ll grant that the point is a bit coarse and moralistic, so let’s pause for a moment and see if we can do something useful with it. 

The politicized nature of “complexity” as a professional metric, contra its self-image as anti- or apolitical, suggests that the corresponding category of “simplicity” is far from simple.  The categories themselves don’t tell us anything until we sort through their assumptions.  Something isn’t automatically complex because it avoids partisanship or polemic, nor is it simple because it offers condemnation or material commentary.  In fact, reducing conflict to its moral essences is usually when complexity begins.  

The current Zionist genocide is both simple and complex, but its complexity has nothing to do with figuring out who’s at fault or whose cause is worth supporting.  There is a clear oppressor and victim.  There is likewise an observable pattern of behavior which can be described, depending on the moment, as settler colonization, ethnic cleansing, imperialism, or genocide.  No, the complexity comes into play when we consider how to preserve and revive Palestine in the wake of so much horror and suffering.  The injustice of Zionism is brutally simple.  We can’t get to complexity without this starting point. 

For more clarity, let’s return to the revolutionary thinkers I discussed earlier.  In a recent piece for Ebb Magazine about Refaat’s fundamental incompatibility with Western intellectual paradigms, Ameed Falah notes that “Western academia’s attempts at a positive and objective neutrality that won’t indemnify them lends itself to siding with Zionism.”  In turn, Refaat’s work and legacy present self-styled leftist academics an unavoidable challenge:  “It is a call for class suicide, for humility in the face of Palestinian armed struggle.” 

The same is true of Hanna Mikhail, a young professor in the United States in the 1960s who dropped academe to join the burgeoning Palestinian resistance:  “Mikhail advocated for Palestinian intellectuals to reject material incentives, joining hands with the displaced masses for liberation.”  Throughout the Palestinian intellectual tradition, of which literary criticism has been central, scholars, cultural workers, and revolutionaries have emphasized material struggle as a condition of meaningful theorization.  This tradition hasn’t generally been welcomed in the West, or in academe around the world, because of institutional limitations, not because it lacks intellectual merit. 

Palestinians aren’t alone in this approach.  A large body of Indigenous criticism, particularly that located in North and South America, demands fidelity to projects of national liberation.  Same for what is loosely called the Black radical tradition.  All oppressed groups have at some point determined that esoteric ambivalence agreeable to management isn’t the kind of intellectual work they want to be doing. 

And so now, as always, literary criticism must adapt to the current horror in Palestine or else it must be deferred.  Because if literary criticism has nothing to contribute to Palestine’s liberation, then we have no good reason to spend time on it. 

*****

Here’s an interesting and maybe damning thing about this speech:  it could have happened anytime.  Even without the Zionist genocide in Gaza, the central arguments still stand.  This isn’t because the Zionist genocide is superfluous.  To the contrary.  It’s because the Zionist genocide is one of many throughout the past few centuries.  We’ve always been doing literary criticism in a time of genocide.  Massive state violence has been a feature of modernity.  We’ve never practiced our craft in peaceable conditions. 

My students were aware of this reality.  For them, even the apathetic or indifferent, political violence informs the rhythm of life, on and off campus.  (Apathy and indifference tend to be of a different vintage in the Global North.)  They were very much affected by the Zionist onslaught in Gaza, and disaffected by the sterile environs of the gated community to which that affect was consigned.  AUC is comfortable and secure, a site of leisure surrounded by emblems of upper-class grandeur, but still the students relate to Gaza.  This should be no surprise.  It’s not just that most AUC students are Muslim and speak Arabic and belong to a country with very old ties to Palestine.  It’s that no matter how much the Zionist entity kills and destroys and plunders, Gaza has no boundaries on its imagination.  People everywhere comprehend its aspirations for dignity and freedom.  It is something of a bellwether for the human condition and as such we all owe Gaza the very best of our mind and spirit.  

In the moment of crisis, when survival of an individual or a nation or a species is at stake, people of conscience opt for moral clarity.  That is to say, they side with the party under threat of extermination.  (Or, conversely, they drop all radical affectations and reaffirm loyalty to the oppressor.)  The esoteric stuff from a bygone graduate seminar no longer matters.  “Moral clarity” suggests a million things, so while the decision appears to be simple—natural, even—it is in fact deeply complicated.  It can mean getting fired or arrested.  It can mean losing friends and support from one’s family.  It can mean ostracism.  It can mean loss of income.  It can mean persecution.  Try being a class traitor and see if there’s anything simple about it.  No, it’s the ballyhooed complexifying that leads one into social and political safety and thereby provides the easiest path to simplicity in this life. 

The retrenchment of loyalty in a moment of crisis—that is to say, the moment when people are compelled to drop their pretenses—ought to guide our notions of meaningful criticism.  Violence has a way of distinguishing serious people from bullshitters.  I want us to prioritize a criticism that moves beyond performances of style and erudition. 

Let me put it more bluntly:  we have to take a side.  Certainly in moments like this one when a technocratic colonial entity backed by the world’s superpowers unleashes hell on a civilian population.  Yes, this applies to even the most genteel and urbane among us, those for whom literature is entirely a social affair.  But that’s not enough.  We have to take a side in advance of the spectacle.  We have to understand that the violence is no less vicious in its latent stages.  And we have to figure out how that violence forever seeps into notions of institutional common sense.  Only then will we be prepared to truly read a text. 

We carry out this mandate every time we go off script in the classroom to discuss world affairs or whenever we broaden the traditional conception of “scholarship” to include testimony, exposition, reportage, and commentary.  Doing so is a way to honor the basic human need for a material understanding of our environment and to cultivate a dynamic sense of worldliness.  This viewpoint might be old-fashioned, but I’m okay with that.  It’s about time we try something new for a change.  

*****

Like others who refuse to abandon Palestine to the gods of neutrality, I’ve had a rocky time in academe and, despite being an English professor, don’t have any particular love of literary theory or criticism.  Maybe I’m just lukewarm about theory and criticism as they’re conventionally practiced among the tenured professoriate.  Because I certainly love to read and to write about reading and to read in order to learn about writing.  Mostly my mind is on reading as it helps demystify a very confusing and seemingly intractable world.  And mostly I write to read the revolutionary sentiment in places of suffering and oppression, Palestine especially.  No amount of college could purge these practices from my brain.  It’s possible that I simply wasn’t built to be a scholar.  I accept the possibility.  Yet here I am.  So I reckon that I’m obliged to keep at it. 

I remember early in my career sitting quietly on a thesis defense while my colleagues held court in a dense and alien vocabulary, thinking, “What does any of this mean, literally?  What are we even doing here?” 

These were the same questions I repeated in my mind as I arrived on campus after October 7 and they haven’t gone away in the eight months since. I still have no answers—if I did, I would eagerly share them. 

But the months of horror have brought a few things into focus.  It all comes down to what we’re encouraged to value (through fiat or coercion) and what we choose to value (through defiance or compassion).  Survival of the institution or survival of the nation?  Comfort of the elite or relief for the downtrodden?  Careerism or solidarity?  Again, I’ll put it more plainly:  when the violence reaches the point of spectacle, we all decide between death and life, compliance and dignity, oppression and freedom, even those who think they’re exempt.  (The ruling class already decided on behalf of those who fancy themselves exempt.)  We cannot suppress feelings of existential urgency in order to uphold some vague standard of professionalism or sophistication.  We cannot continue to uncritically reproduce the traditions passed along to us, for those traditions clearly aren’t up to the moment and perhaps facilitated the very crises we oppose.  Make your labor count for those less powerful than you instead of satisfying the archaic bromides of a dying industry.  There’s no roadmap.  It can happen in dozens of ways.  You’re capable if only because you care.  The motive and sentiment are more important than the approach. 

Student encampments in support of Palestine have sprung up on campuses throughout North America (and beyond).  University administrators respond with a heavy hand.  They understand that in moments of crisis there is no longer room for pretense.  See, we need to take our lead from the managerial classes even as we repudiate them.  They know full well that when it comes time to exercise power, the intellectual niceties they promoted and on which their enemies were weaned are a bunch of hokum and fluff.  When it matters, they know what to do.  Let’s learn how to make this knowledge matter to us before it matters to them. 

I’ve been fired, I’ve been in legal trouble, I’ve been ridiculed and belittled, and in turn I’ve wanted to give up a thousand times, if only so I don’t have to ask that same goddamn question:  what’s the point?  But no matter how detached and reclusive I become, something inside me just can’t let go of the moldering idea of freedom.  I used to think that the failure to let go was an emotional condition, some type of compulsion or maybe a form of nostalgia, but I’ve come to understand that it’s a starkly intellectual choice, one I make every day in conjunction with millions of sisters and brothers around the world, starting in the classroom here at AUC and reverberating to places far beyond the limits of my experience, and it always ends on the same frequency:  sometimes refusing to defer the possibility of freedom is the most critical theory of all.