There will be no shadow history of the 2008 financial crisis or the 2014 New England Patriots’ “Deflategate” scandal, because every possible narrative and motive was discussed in public, in real time, across a mass audience, as the events transpired. Competing modes of discourse no longer “compete.” They coexist. And the same thing is happening in the arts. The diverse literary canon Díaz imagines is not something that will be reengineered retroactively. We won’t have to go back and reinsert marginalized writers who were ignored by the establishment, because the establishment is now a
...more
