NASHVILLE, Tenn. – 1999 protests in Seattle against world trade policies were a dividing line in our culture, and humanities educators need to adjust their approaches or risk irrelevancy, say professors from Vanderbilt and Syracuse universities in a provocative new book.
The book of essays, What Democracy Looks Like: A New Critical Realism for a Post-Seattle World, was edited by Amy Schrager Lang, professor of English and humanities at Syracuse, and Cecelia Tichi, the William R. Kenan Jr. professor of English at Vanderbilt. It was published by Rutgers University Press.
“Seattle changed what we read, how we read, and the nature of our teaching and writing,” Tichi and Lang write in the book’s introduction. “A palpable sense of social urgency drove this challenge and began to disrupt the categories that organize our work.”
Tichi ticked off a litany of social woes during an interview in her Vanderbilt office: vaccine shortages, global warming that could lead to deadly flooding, thousands of minor drug offenders locked up as part of the government’s “War Against Drugs” and economies devastated by free trade policies by the World Bank and World Trade Organization.
To Lang and Tichi, it all came to an historic boil in Seattle.
“For the first time on U.S. soil, there was a major convergence of different groups from all over the world, everyone from Korean farmers to Central American fisherman to U.S. steelworkers,” Tichi said. Some of these people had little money yet traveled thousands of miles to deliberately confront the citizenry at this World Trade Organization meeting.
“They said to the world, ‘These policies are destructive to us in our countries, and indeed to the whole planet.’ It was unprecedented, and it changed everything.”
But how should any of this change how a college professor approaches a poem, novel or short story?
“Let me show you with William Faulkner,” Tichi offers. In a story titled “Old Man” written in 1939, the Mississippi author tells of a prisoner released during the 1927 flood caused by the Mississippi River. The prisoner rescues others from the flood, gets a job and proves himself rehabilitated. Thought to have drowned by authorities, he is granted a pardon. But when he turns out to be alive, he is returned to prison as an escapee because government officials don’t want it disclosed that they’ve pardoned a live prisoner.
“Faulkner fills that novella with indictments against what he calls ‘the criminal injustice system,'” Tichi said. “But what do modern critics say about it? They’re interested in the language about the flood, and they say this guy is perfectly well off in prison because he gets to play baseball on Sunday and have a hot dog now and again.”
Tichi thinks the story speaks to today’s criminal justice system.
“We have more than 2 million people in prison, most for non-violent drug offenses. There is a conflict between our citizenry selves in which we want criminal offenders to be rehabilitated and return productively to society, and our investor selves who want our Wackenhut or Corrections Corporation of America stock to do well.
“We cannot have both. They’re in conflict. We at least have to think through this contradiction in our society. Faulkner’s novella will help us do it.”
In What Democracy Looks Like, 27 essayists probe how teaching about writers including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane and Langston Hughes can be revitalized by viewing them in light of the social justice issues raised by the 1999 protests in Seattle.
“I cannot bear to read another novel about a woman, her two lovers and her psychiatrist, Tichi said. “From where I sit in an English department, I see students who are getting worried about the issues brought up in Seattle, realizing that things like global warming and the World Trade Organization might mean their futures are not as assured as previous generations.
“Academia must address these issues to be relevant. We owe it to the kids we’re teaching.”