Ever wonder what literary orgs have to do with the state? Nonprofits with the CIA? Your own poems with military operations on the other side of the planet? Of course you do. Luckily, so does Buffalo’s own poet laureate of waste collection and public transit Joe Hall, whose recent essay “PEN America: Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde” is a veritable syllabus on the ways arts and culture institutions serve the aims of American empire. In the essay, Joe offers an exhaustive analysis of PEN America’s response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, documents recent protest efforts such as boycotts of the PEN America Literary Awards and PEN/Heim Translation Grants, and conducts some nonprofit forensics and close-reading of PEN America’s messaging and leadership to connect their work to a broader project of American cultural imperialism. In our discussion, we reflect on the flattening effects of institutional language and the de-politicization of the arts, money and other forms of soft power, applications of the term “avant-garde,” how imperialism is a liberal concept too, and some of the ways writers can work to resist these historic political-aesthetic dynamics and collaborate with other workers to build a more liberated future.
Joe’s essay covers it all (ya gotta read those footnotes) but here are some more readings for your further reading, which specifically come up in this conversation: Ohio’s investments in Israel bonds; the killings of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer and journalist Ismail al-Ghoul; Palestinian-American writer Randa Jarrar’s expulsion from a PEN America event in early in 2024; Juliana Spahr’s DuBois’s Telegram; PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel’s 2004 essay “Smart Power” in Foreign Affairs; Fargo Tbakhi’s “Notes On Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide” at Protean Magazine.
