How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

The unfortunate influence of this style of reading has dictated that we go to writers of color for the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic: to learn about forgotten history, harrowing tragedy, community-destroying political upheaval, genocide, trauma; that we expect those writers to provide those

intellectual commodities the way their ancestors once provided spices, minerals, precious stones, and unprecious bodies.

For if our stories primarily serve to educate, console, and productively scold a comfortable white readership, then those stories will have failed their readers, and those readers will have failed those stories. All the “representation matters” rhetoric in the world means nothing if we do not address the fundamentally fucked-up relationship between writers of color and white audiences that persists in our contemporary reading culture.

I have no desire to write yet another instruction manual for the sociocultural betterment of white readers. I don’t know any writer who, if asked what they wanted their work to do in the world, would reply: “Make better white people.” Equally, I don’t see a sustainable way to continue in my industry without reckoning with the rot at its core, which is that, by and large, the English-language publishing industry centers the perspective and comfort of its overwhelmingly white employee base and audience, leaving writers of color to be positioned along that firmly established structure: as flavors of the month, as heroic saviors, as direly important educators, as necessary interventions (“classic American story / genre / historical episode, but now populated with brown people!” continues to be one of the most dominant and palatable gateways for white audiences to become accustomed to seeing Black and Brown bodies on their screens and in their pages), as vessels of sensational trauma—but rarely as artists due the same depth and breadth of critical engagement as their white colleagues; rarely as artists whose works are approached not just as sources of history or educational potential but specific and sublime sensual immersion: sites of wonder, laughter, opulence, precision; a place to sink into the particular weather of a particular town; a place to pang at the love of strangers, thwarted or salvaged.

Writers of color often find themselves doing the second, unspoken and unsalaried job of not just being a professional writer but a Professional Person of Color, in the most performative sense—handy to have on hand for panels or journal issues about race or power or revolution, so the festival or literary journal doesn’t appear totally racist; handy to praise publicly and singularly, so as to draw less attention to the white audience, rapt in the seats too expensive for local readers of color.

I’ve very often seen successful people of color framing their experiences of being the only person of color in their classrooms as narratives about struggle, rather than also being narratives about class and power; I emphasize often, because it seems to me that in fact many successful people of color in our mainstream media happen to be precisely the sort of people who grew up the only person of color in white towns. It is precisely because they grew up adjacent to whiteness and its social and economic privilege, precisely because they were well versed at an early age on how to adapt to and accommodate whiteness

that they could thus use those skills as professional adults, living under white supremacy.

Growing up in a town like Milpitas taught me that my ordinariness to myself was a gift, and a root; that this ordinariness, uninterpreted, was enough. It did not have to be distilled or bleached to have value.

The concept of instrumentalizing fiction or art as a kind of ethical protein shake, such that reading more and more diversely will somehow build the muscles in us that will help us see other people as human, makes a kind of superficial sense—and produces a superficial effect. The problem with this type of reading is that in its practical application, usually readers are encouraged—by well-meaning teachers and lazy publishing copy—to read writers of a demographic minority in order to learn things; which is to say, as a supplement for their empathy muscles, a metabolic exchange that turns writers of color into little more than ethnographers—personal trainers, to continue the metaphor. The result is that we largely end up going to writers of color to learn the specific—and go to white writers to feel the universal.

TLDR: A contemporary Austen character would wear that Dior feminist slogan T-shirt.)

acknowledging the truth of colonialism and the slave trade in Austen’s era is no vandalizing act of literary deletion, but an act of literary expansion and restoration, not to mention the barest concession to reality

The people who think that upholding a heavily edited and whitewashed truth about an author’s historical context is the only viable way to truly protect and honor that author’s work, are in fact protecting and honoring something else entirely.

For Loser, erasure is the ideal form of reparations: scratching out one’s history, dumping the incriminating bodies off a cliff, snuffing out that history’s right to exist (rather than doing the more daily and difficult work of contending with its legacies in ordinary, ongoing life). Loser is angered the way people get angry when you point out racism, claiming that pointing out racism is itself racist, when in actuality what angers them is having racism named at all.

It’s a romantic idea: storytellers being thresholds. It might even be true. But the convenience of the threshold philosophy of storytelling is kindred with the nonpolitical philosophy of storytelling: it’s how a story about a violent white middle-class Austrian gets to be reviewed as a largely existential drama, not also a political one—how Loser’s long history of violence is obscured, and his major crime transmuted into an overarching story about the universal condition of mankind; the literary version of a headline that describes a white rapist as an upstanding athlete.

the idea that

some of us can simply opt out of politics—the idea that politics is something one chooses as a vocation, rather than something we have whether we choose it or not; something that encompasses the inevitable material realities that shape every atom of our lives: where we live, how we work, our relationship to justice—is a fantasy of epic proportions.

This kind of nonpolitical storytelling—and the stunted readership it demands—asks us to uphold the lie that certain bodies, certain characters, certain stories, remain depoliticized, neutral, and universal. It asks us to keep those bodies, characters, stories, forever safe from...

I do often think it would serve us to read fewer books, and more slowly, to dispense with a practice of reading that serves as yet another anxious rite to keep cultural FOMO at bay),

When white readers claim to be made uncomfortable—as many I heard from claimed—by the presence of something like untranslated words in fiction, what they’re really saying is: I have always been the expected reader. A reader like this is used to the practice of reading being one that may performatively challenge them, much the way a safari guides a tourist through the “wilderness”—but ultimately always prioritizes their comfort and understanding. This tourism dynamic means that even when writers of color tell their own stories, those stories must cater to the needs and wishes of that expected, and expectant, reader: translations, glossaries, indexes, maps, rest stops along the way. When intellectuals bristle at their white liberal politics being parsed and critiqued by BIPOC readers, when they get tetchy at their white feminism (that overused stage name, meant to obscure its legal name: Ye Olde Garden-Variety White Supremacy—Now Available in Girlboss) being exposed for its transphobia, what they’re really saying is: I’m the only reader I have ever been expecting.

we are conditioned to accept that some of our work is in fact routinely expected to comfort; that the work of writers of color must often in some way console, educate, provide new definitions, great epiphanies, and, most of all—that buzzword of both the commercial marketplace and political theater—be relevant. Whereas the work of white writers must be free to: offend, transgress, be exempt, be beyond politics, beyond identity—to delight, in other words, in the myriad fruits of its political immunity. And their readers must, in turn, always extend empathy toward that lucrative and culturally rewarded immunity—which is, after all, great art.

An expected reader always expects to be led by the hand; the unexpected reader knows we get lost in each other.

What if art was the space not for us to enjoy our freedom, but for us to encounter our bondages—and our bondedness? That in our art making and our art consumption, we paid attention not just to the things that made us feel free, expansive, containing multitudes, but to the things that remind us we are not just free but delimited—the things that make us feel our smallness, our ordinariness, our contingency, our vulnerability and reliance? The things that make us feel not neutral but named—actually known by the world, so that we might be truly in it, and of it?

Willful misreading is a violence. To warp the history of a place to serve one vision of the past—and therefore, preserve a specific vision of the present and future—is an obscenity, and yet we live in obscenities like this every day.

Monumentalizing is already an act of editing (and censoring) the past; it already allows us to pretend to have a different history. Those statues don’t just teach us about our past—they teach us how to read our past, and thereby how to live in our present.

That people in the past had different perspectives, different understandings of right and wrong doesn’t alter the fact that they were wrong—it cannot be controversial to ask us to agree that transatlantic slavery was a world-rending evil whose enrichment of the West has corruptively made the world we know today—and to memorialize those actors is to memorialize that wrong. In 2003, to choose to center the statue of a man like Robert Milligan is to make a deliberate choice—a choice about how to remember the docklands, how to remember that sugar warehouse and its uses, how to remember London and the history that made it. It’s an act of reading, and it teaches all who view it a very specific way to read that history, too.

What I would point out, however, is that this very dynamic—taking stories of oppression and marginalization, stripping them of most of their racial and historical specificity (leaving just enough to add a frisson of exotic/erotic flavor), and recasting them with white bodies—is at the heart of most white fantasy, and thus is also the source of the incongruence that minority readers later struggle with, when those authors turn out to care little at all about the oppression they once so beautifully illustrated.

I can no longer muster up disappointment when white authors whose works supposedly deal in equality and justice show themselves (and the reactionary readers who love them) to not be remotely interested in either equality or justice—not when both the inception and the material effect of that work necessitate lifting from the historical struggle of racial, sexual, and economic minorities, and replacing those bodies with white, cis, straight characters. Were these works ever truly concerned by justice to begin with? Or were they simply enamored with and appropriative of its language—its culture, its aesthetic, its narrative style? Oppression chic, equalitycore.

In Didion’s case, books like Slouching Towards Bethlehem have of course become talismanic Californian commodities—but none greater than the image of Didion herself, appearing on literary tote bags and in Céline ads alike, as shorthand for a certain strain of bourgeois intellectual white feminism so beloved by luxury capitalism for the veneer of authenticity and depth it provides: the cool white girl as elder stateswoman, remote in her thousand-dollar sunglasses.

Democracy sometimes reads like a funhouse mirror Eat Pray Love—they are cut from the same still-somewhat-lucrative cloth, wherein white people, very preoccupied with their own melancholy, are adrift in Asia or Africa or Latin America, the exotic background providing just enough texture and detail to make the old operatic agonies novel again. The inevitable redemption arcs are always scaffolded by the one or two noble-hearted natives in the piece, who usually end up dying in the finale, stage left.

nearly every article about Didion I’ve ever read appears contractually obligated to make the same breathlessly, quasi-fetishistic observation: that she is a “fifth-generation Californian.” Fifth-generation Californian is a way of reminding first-generation Californians like myself that our stories mean less, matter less, weigh less: four generations less, to be exact. Fifth-generation Californian, rather than read as a distinctly banal American settler colonial horror story, is recited like a land deed, ready to evict those of us with frailer claims to California; frailer claims to the right of telling its story.

This passive, barren portrait of white women’s interiority in the West is not just textbook Didion but textbook Americana: it’s a deliberate characterization of white colonial femininity as grimly but unoperatically tragic; helpless and blameless.

(Sometimes, the defense of Didion’s writing from critique takes a page from this proto-girlboss handbook, i.e., that to criticize her is misogynist; defending white heroines is, after all, a totemic American pastime.) The women are fragile but hard; too scattered and distracted to ever be anything as overt as a heroine or a villain; always imperiled but somehow never quite vanquished—most of all, they are ethically neutral objects through which history happens, not decisive actors of history themselves. Their presence in the West is not an active project of occupation, but an inevitability; nobody’s fault.

Its vise grip on the comic reminds us that people familiar with genocide are usually pretty funny—there has to be at least a little laughter on the other end of survival, to make it worth anything. But Pico’s narrator is equally aware that the humor of people who’ve known intergenerational trauma is also nearly always a defense mechanism, a way to deflect, a practiced jujitsu that survivors use to make their way through the world, always blocking and redirecting the unexpected blows:

the idea that it must be necessarily positive for minoritized writers to “reclaim” spaces in which they have been erased, that the Western genre can be redeemed if we just populate it with the Native, Black, Latinx, and Asian people who actually made Western history possible in the first place

It was the school of literary interpretation that, by its deliberate omissions, teaches us how not to read, what not to read—what we ought to let perish in silence.

It falls on us to live in that culture and (though for some select few, the more precise and indeed preferred word may still be or; those who are safe enough to have a choice in the matter) to dismantle it: to take it apart, piece by piece, and expose its carefully curated silences, concealments, and confidentiality clauses to light. To revoke that culture’s too-long-enjoyed permission not to know. Most of all, to give up our permission not to know—not to know that reality, which is the enemy of the powerful, and which is all there is for us to love: there where loving is a kind of knowing, and knowing, a kind of loving.

It’s about how long it takes to deprogram yourself from an abuser—whether a grooming elder, a religion, a patriarchy. It’s about learning the painful fact that it isn’t just trauma that takes a toll on us; repair takes a toll. It’s about learning that justice is labor, and if we try to do it alone, that monumental burden—its loneliness, its weight, its corrosive rage and pain—will be crushing. It’s about sobering to the adult realization that there are some things we cannot do alone—and there are also sometimes places in ourselves we cannot reach with community.

Because when art gets made to check a box for positive representation, you feel it—you feel its intellectual limits, its political lassitude, its flat affect where a complex emotional life is supposed to be. “Representation matters”–type art is interested in people the same way Didion is interested in people, which is to say, not at all. People—the spiky, uneven feeling, striated with joy and boredom and grief and wonder, of being a living person in the world—don’t matter to positive-representation art. Only representations matter, and representations in art perform a function not unlike monarchs in constitutional monarchies, or presidents in parliamentary republics: a figurehead function, meant as a living symbol, with no real power—except, of course, for the enormous and indelible “soft” power they wield as symbolic incarnations of everything their country supposedly means, values, and venerates. Representation Matters Art wants delegates, not people; a Crazy Rich Asian, an Asian Cowboy, an Asian Brad Pitt, an Asian Superhero, an Asian Joan of Arc, One Asian to Rule Them All. Representation Matters Art thinks we can save the settler colonial Western fantasy if we just make John Wayne Filipino this time.

these kinds of strong, virile, enthusiastically cis-hetero-heroic representations have nothing to do with dismantling the white supremacist heteropatriarchy that actually oppresses Asian people of all genders, because empowerment is not the same thing as emancipation. All those kinds of representations care for is a bigger piece of the poisoned pie. And none of it addresses the fact that the precise way white supremacist heteropatriarchy works is to pass oppression down, the way grief gets passed down, in Larkin’s famous poem: from man to man, deepening like a coastal shelf—until its last station, women. But Larkin forgot to mention that part.

Representation Matters Art is late capitalism’s wet dream, because it sublimates the immense hunger and desire for wide-ranging racial, sexual, gender, and economic justice into the Pepsi commercial of that justice. Only the art that truly sees us will truly free us, representational politics says, mistaking visibility for liberation. And too many of us buy into the capitalist remix of liberation politics, enough that I’ve been frustrated, time and time again, with how much Asian American (predominantly middle- and upper-middle-class East Asian American and South Asian American) antiracist politics and art rely on the tired narrative of supposed Asian cultural invisibility vs. supposed Black and Latinx hypervisibility—a stymied logic that would purport that the existence of Marvel’s Black Panther somehow softens the edges of the anti-Black carceral state, or that the relative lack of mainstream Asian TV and film narratives as compared to their Black and Latinx counterparts in some way cancels out the fact that despite being the most economically divided racial or ethnic group in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center, Asians rank overall as the highest-earning racial and ethnic group in the country (not minority group—racial and ethnic group; this reality accompanied by the fact that income inequality in the US is greatest among Asians). But Representation Matters Art—and the extractive vision of the world it serves—absolutely relies on us mistaking visibi...

When we talk about positive representation, we have to ask: positive representation for whom? Is Representation Matters Art made for us, the minority community being represented positively? Do we really want to see only the corporate hotel art version of ourselves? Or is that art only for the omnipresent gaze Morrison was pointing toward in her critique of Ellison’s supposedly “invisible” man (invisible to whom?); the idea that says us seeing each other means nothing if white people don’t see us, too; the idea that when our stories enter the mainstream, we must send the brightest of us, be on our best behavior, the way our parents turned on their “white people voice” when speaking to teachers and taxmen alike? Representation Matters Art is still, ultimately, just another armed wing of the attritive arts of white supremacy: it’s the kind of art you make when someone has told you to prove you’re a human—and you agree. It’s art that makes us stupider, the way white supremacy makes us stupider: it was bad enough to rob us of life, land, and language, but style, too, babe? It’s the kind of art you make when every impulse you have is a conditioned fear response to some imaginary white specter in the audience, in the mirror. Whoever the audience, Representation Matters Art accomplishes the singular feat of being both tailor-made for it and utterly unworthy of it. The point of positive representation is to give us visions of the world like an immigrant’s sofa in the eighties: vacu...

the impulse to political unity “for the greater good” often ends up enforcing a politicized type of silence: to not speak about sexual assault in already beleaguered communities of color or activist circles, to not prioritize trans women in feminist liberation; to not speak about the racism, classicism, and sexual fetishization perpetrated upon certain Asian groups by other Asian groups (one only need to cast a scant eye on the online hate comments about Thai Swiss popstar Lisa Manobal, the K-pop group Blackpink’s only non-Korean member, to know that intra-Asian racism is alive and well). Sometimes the silencing takes a soothing, paternalistic tone: minority groups within minority groups are told to “wait their turn,” to save their niche concerns for later, and that their immediate political duty is to support, applaud, and identify with, effectively, their conquerors, employers, and bullies.

Because despite our natural human frangibility, there does come a time when we have to be solid for other people. When we have to not evade, obfuscate, be liminal, be of two minds or a thousand. When we have to try to be whole for other people—and face their messy, sewn-together wholeness—which is another way of holding other people, being held by other people; held together, usually. Solidarity is not nothing. It is a labor—like building a person, a love, a body of knowledge. And that labor, its peopled dailiness, has a tangible, vibrating effect in the world, radiating liveliness like a furnace throws off heat in the cold. And the art that I truly love, the art that has saved me, never made me just feel represented. It did not speak to my vanity, my desperation to be seen positively at any cost. It made me feel—solid. It told me I was minor, and showed me my debts. It held me together.