Tuesday News: Speech and its Consequences
Publishing Newscritique / Free Speech / hate speech / parody / racism / Satire2 Comments
Six PEN Members Decline Gala After Award for Charlie Hebdo – The PEN Literary Awards recognize artistic excellence and free expression, and this year’s Freedom of Expression Courage Award is being given to French satirical magazine Charlie Hedbo, a decision that has caused six PEN writers to pull out of the awards ceremony. The writers include Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi, and their objection is that Hedbo went beyond satire to focus specifically on the Muslim minority in France. It’s an interesting issue, in part because French hate speech laws are sometimes perceived to privilege some groups over others (e.g. Jews over Muslims). The complexity of these laws is reflected in the deep conflicts that have erupted in the wake of the violence perpetrated against the Charlie Hedbo staff. Garry Trudeau recently argued that the magazine was “punching down” in its Muslim-themed cartoons, while Salman Rushdie argued that “If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name.” The conflict reflects a difference between U.S. and French perceptions of speech, but is also built on long standing racial, religious, and cultural conflicts in France.
The withdrawals reflect the debate over Charlie Hebdo that erupted immediately after the attack, with some questioning whether casting the victims as free-speech heroes ignored what some saw as the magazine’s particular glee in beating up on France’s vulnerable Muslim minority.
In an essay for The New Yorker’s website after the attack, Mr. Cole noted that the magazine claimed to offend all parties, but in fact in recent years “has gone specifically for racist and Islamophobic provocations.” (Mr. Cole declined to comment for this article.)
This month, the cartoonist Garry Trudeau drew criticism from a number of news-media commentators for saying in a speech that “by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech.” –New York Times
Adam Sandler Has Finally Found the Limits of ‘Satire’ – The recent walkout by Native American actors and consultants on the new Adam Sandler movie, The Ridiculous 6, demonstrates the confusion filmmakers seem to have between satire and parody. This piece from The Atlantic is one of the more comprehensive discussions of the problems with the film I’ve seen, although I disagree with Megan Garber that the problem is that Sandler’s films are too insipid. Rather, I think Sandler isn’t, for the most part, interested in – or at least engaged in — satire.
What Sandler most often does is parody, which is primarily aiming for comic effect, while satire generally has an element of social critique. It seems clear from explanations of the film’s plot and characterizations that satire is an enormous stretch when describing the movie; in fact, I’d suggest that Zohan is the one Sandler film that employs more satire than parody, and I wonder if that’s because Sandler is Jewish and seems to be using the film to advocate for a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Whatever the case, both satire and parody are protected speech in the U.S.; however, that doesn’t mean each is equally defensive on an ethical or moral level, and that may be the wall Sandler is finally hitting in his work. Compare The Ridiculous 6 to Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, for example, to measure the difference between challenging stereotypes through provocative humor and simply making fun of people.
The films of Sandler’s “ridiculous” genre do, indeed, violate Poe’s law. But that’s not because they’re offensive. It’s because they’re insipid. Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore and Grown Ups and Jack and Jill … these films give no indication that they are self-aware or remotely critical of the subjects they take on. They may deal, if tangentially, with serious topics—race (Blended) and gay marriage (I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry) and, um, the Arab-Israeli conflict (You Don’t Mess With the Zohan)—but they lack evidence of the intellectual infrastructure that is a basic requirement of satire. –The Atlantic
WORDS FOR CUTTING: WHY WE NEED TO STOP ABUSING “THE TONE ARGUMENT” – On the other end of the spectrum comes this piece from Feministing’s Katherine Cross that attempts to draw the line between outrage as liberating social critique and hostile, unfettered rage as an oppressive force in and of itself. Cross’s position is basically that anger is an essential tool in challenging and subverting social oppression and marginalization of minority voices, but that at some point it can become a weapon employed not against power (and especially corrupt power), but as an instrument of power, deployed in bad faith to silence dissent. It’s a version of the argument that revolutions can easily reproduce the power structures they intend to subvert.
Outrage has a valuable place; it is the natural reaction to injustice, to a severe moral breach that must offend every nerve ending of one’s sensibilities. To look at our world at present there’s much to be angry about, and there’s some wisdom to the idea that outrage is better than a placid acceptance of our present condition, better than becoming desensitized to the cavalcade of moral crimes that litter the daily newspapers. But like any emotion or tool, there are right and wrong ways to deploy it, and when we uncritically suggest that all rage is valid so long as it is expressed by activists we thereby foreclose all strategic discussion of the utility of rage.
To invoke “the tone argument” against someone criticizing an activist for, say, wishing death on someone is something that fully misunderstands the very nature of what the actual “tone argument” is about, then. It’s meant to refer to the silencing of an idea one does not wish to hear at all, whitewashing it from discourse; “tone” is simply a lazy, bad faith excuse used to plaster over this discomfort and shift the burden of a moral faux pas onto the activist one criticizes. It is not meant to describe any and all situations where “tone” might be discussed, and we should not take it to mean that rage is the kryptonite to all oppression. –Feministing
Reading Racist Literature – Speaking of revolution and subversion, this is a very interesting essay by Elif Batuman, who contemplates the dilemma of enjoying literature that contains racially offensive elements. It reminded me of the problem of anti-Semitism in Georgette Heyer’s books. Batuman looks to playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who transformed Dion Boucicault’s 19th C work The Octoroon by overlaying the story with his own 20th C commentary, creating a dramatic experience that represented both the original work and a powerful challenge to its casual racism:
This is the basic dramatic situation: a black playwright, in 2014, is somehow unable to move beyond a likeable 1859 work, named after a forgotten word once used to describe nonwhite people in the same terms as breeds of livestock. What do you do with your mixed feelings toward a text that treats as stage furniture the most grievous and unhealed insult in American history—especially when you belong to the insulted group? . . .
How do you rehabilitate your love for art works based on expired and inhuman social values—and why bother? It’s easier to just discard the works that look as ungainly to us now as “The Octoroon.” But if you don’t throw out the past, or gloss it over, you can get something like “An Octoroon”: a work of joy and exasperation and anger that transmutes historical insult into artistic strength. –The New Yorker
While I agree about almost every criticism one can make about Charlie Hebdo, and am glad to see PEN member debate and protest the award, their reasons don’t necessarily resonate with me. A a vastly sweeping, hostile statement like “the cultural arrogance of the French nation” doesn’t make me think very highly of Carey, either.
The other problem about the ‘tone argument’ is that sometimes the people shouting about it, are using tone to cover the fact there is no ‘there’ there.
Like RequiresHate with her awful invective and shouty, abusive tone in her reviews concealing the fact that she wasn’t a particularly good or insightful reviewer (and one with an abusive agenda), and her social justice stances are shallow as hell and incredibly hypocritical. But because she and her cronies and apologists would claim anyone complaining about rape threats and death wishes was just upset by her tone – and the tone of a WOC – any reasonable response was silenced, while people of colour and other minorities lost the protection of reasonable voices lifted in their defence.
It’s still going on, of course, and being employed all over the damn place. If someone’s being particularly horrible in their shouting, and using actual threats, we need to push past the social justice rhetorical smokescreen and say, no that is not on, whoever you are.
But standing up to that stream of invective from multiple sources is just really, really scary.