How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

The way a student bringing up rape in a discussion of Rousseau supposedly reduces our analysis of Rousseau’s language; the way bringing up Benedict Anderson’s rebuttal to James Fenton supposedly reduces our discussion of Fenton’s journalism (if indeed that is the word for it). It’s of a piece with the train of thought that thinks engaging with identity politics in art is necessarily a diminishment of its artistic quality, because our working concept of identity politics rarely ever includes those whose identities, politics, and pasts get to remain unmarked, and thus are never seen as potentially contaminating (or, indeed, contaminated). But why can’t “Woven, Sir” vibrate, tautly, in the tension of all those things? It can; it does. We do.