Tag: identity politics

Cultural Appropriation and the Politics of the Imagination

If art has largely been stripped of its transcendent power—a casualty of commodification and oversupply—and is now measured by utility, it is simultaneously policed for its potential negative effects. In another reversal, much of this comes from elements of the ‘Left’ rather than conservatives.

After Trump?: Cancel culture and the new authoritarianism

After the failed insurrection at the US Capitol building, an event irreconcilably both absurd and frightening, Donald Trump, for so long a master of the attention economy, finally got ‘cancelled’. While many of his Republican colleagues made a last-minute decision (motivated by self-interest) to dump him, the real blow for Trump was the response by corporate America. Facebook and Twitter blocked the president’s social-media accounts, Shopify terminated stores affiliated with him, YouTube removed channels questioning…

Stay in your lane: the oxymoron of ‘authentic fiction’ (Part II)

In all of this worry about authenticity, authority and authorial/appropriated identities, there is one identity that regularly gets forgotten: that of the reader

Stay in your Lane: the oxymoron of ‘authentic fiction’ (Part I)

Are these judges…genuinely concerned about cultural appropriation? Or are they actually concerned about the accusations of cultural appropriation that are likely to result (via social media) if they award and publish a story that turns out to be written by someone who doesn’t identify clearly and directly with their subject matter?

The Anti-Aesthetic of Cancel Culture

The implicit politics of the present—in which the deep left aim of creating a society of universal self-flourishing is rendered as a society of universal ‘safety’, in an expanded sense—trends towards a ban on representation, since any representation of suffering or wrong can be taken as exploitation or aggression.

A Vessel for Our Hopes?, by Alison Caddick

Identity and emotion appear to be playing a role in politics neither tapped in opinion polls nor understood very well by politicos of the Left, and the centre-Left especially.

Alt-Right Dreaming, by Alison Caddick

One of the vastly different aspects of anything that can be considered cultural politics today is its expression as identity politics, and as pointed out by others, the alt-Right itself fits this description.

Facebook and Lionel Shriver, by Simon Cooper

Censorship and freedom in digital capitalism