Some news from the Which House

Two projects

I started this newsletter to write about topics having to do with my book Cancel Culture Transfer, and with the way we sensationalize campus stories in particular. Specifically, I wanted to use it to think through issues and stories in ways too granular and too wonky to cover in a newspaper piece.

In the last few weeks, I’ve done a few of the latter, all of them in German — a review of Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto at Zeit Online (TL;DR: I recommend it, but so does everyone you know anyway), an essay about the big red Critical Race Theory-anthology from the 1990s for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (TL;DR: CRT is interesting and people should probably read that book before popping off about it), and an essay on the War on Drag in the Austrian daily Die Presse (TL;DR: shit is fucked up). An essay of mine about the life-writing of US neoconservatives (basically about how they narrated their own conversion from left/liberal positions to conservatism) appeared in Mittelweg 36 back in February.

I also had another Cancel Culture-text come out in a German-language anthology called Canceln: Ein notwendiger Streit (Canceling: A necessary debate). Those of you who know my book know that I would quibble with that subtitle, but I had fun thinking through the case of J.K. Rowling for the collection. Whatever you call it, the process by which a certain portion of the public cooled on Rowling and her work, and by which another portion of the public really got invested in Rowling as a stand-in for something larger seems really interesting. My essay was about what practices of reading and interpretation were at work in each of these two groups.

There are two projects coming up for me now that don’t fit into these kinds of formats, and I wanted to give you a preview of what to expect in future installments of Dreams in the Which House.

Project 1:

Tomorrow there’s a piece coming out (in Geschichte der Gegenwart) about something quite near to my heart. It’s a short essay (newspaper length), and it’s about a puzzlement that has bedeviled me whenever I’ve written about European takes on US-style “identity politics”. Specifically: I don’t understand what they mean when they use that word and I suspect it doesn’t mean what they think it means. Or rather: I know what they want to mean, but I always feel their descriptions, their diagnoses, and their critiques are always just slightly off vis-à-vis anything I would apply the label identity politics to. Certain types of feminism seemed to count, others not; anti-identity discourses like Queer Theory appeared to be identity politics after all? 1970s style separatism wasn’t identity politics, but Judith Butler was? MLK wasn’t identity politics, but Amanda Gorman was? “Gender critical feminists” weren’t identity politics, but trans people who complained about “Gender critical feminists” were?

Of course, something like that exists in the US as well, but the German discourse appeared to me a distortion overlaid on another distortion. As in my book, I am not interested in correcting this distortion, but in analyzing it. How come people were so certain “identity politics” was on the rise when what seemed to be comprised under the term turned out to be so slippery? I couldn’t really articulate what that distortion consisted of, nor — given the sheer profusion of articles written about the subject in popular media (there were about 1500 German-language articles that included the word “identity politics” in 2022, 1700 in the US and almost 2500 in the UK) — could I really swear I was even accurate in describing what others were describing as “identity politics.”

So while my short piece in Geschichte der Gegenwart traces some of the history of the term, especially insofar as it is used to call out certain forms of activism and organizing, I also wanted to do something bigger. I wanted to use those 1500 German-language articles that included the word “identity politics” in 2022, the 1700 in the US and the almost 2500 in the UK, and find out: what do they mean when they say “identity politics”. That’s far too granular and too wonky for a newspaper essay; and so I thought: hey, Substack? In the next few weeks I’ll lay out my analysis and try to make some points about what I think happens in the use of that word. I hope this strikes you as interesting — because there are going to be at least 4 parts to this project. I hope that doesn’t sound too tedious to you, but I think it’s fascinating stuff actually.

Project 2:

In a few weeks I’m flying out to Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France for a bunch of events and interviews. I’m already pretty excited. But the prospect also brought home something that I’ve felt with greater and greater acuteness over the last few years. I’ll be in Europe to give talks around a book – Cancel Culture Transfer – and a few additional lectures around an earlier book – What Tech Calls Thinking. Two books in two years that, at least in the German reception, became very much about the relationships Germany, France, Europe in general have with the US and its cultural influence. So I’ll be heading to Frankfurt as a critic of a particularly lopsided fixation with all things American: the fixation that makes newspapers send journalists on their umpteenth safari in Silicon Valley, to get an interview with some dude at Y Combinator and take some pictures of the Google Campus; the fixation that ensures that every little campus kerfuffle in the US eventually makes its way into a newspaper in Stuttgart or Düsseldorf.

But of course I come only because I am myself implicated in that fixation. During those 6 weeks, at 25 events, I’ll likely be introduced (or advertised) as a “Stanford professor”; I will be held out as an expert for  … well, for places that I just kind of ended up in. Northern California, for one; the university, for another. There’s a mode of expertise, or at least cultural currency one gains (at least in the eyes of European audiences) after living for some time in the US as a European. This specific identity — in Germany this is called an Amerikaexperte, and is a very specific species of person — seems fascinating to me, and I want to offer reflections on it as I … well, as I get yelled at by retired dentists for claiming their favorite cancel culture story from the US is likely bunk.

I think that my little pseudo book tour will offer a pretty interesting vantage point: rather than reflecting on that relationship in the sense of taking a step outside of it, coolly assessing it, I’d like to describe it as I inhabit it. And describe how I specifically inhabit it. This may not sound fun to you, and that’s alright. What it will be is quite personal. I came to the US 27 years ago. So reflecting dispassionately on a relationship between two countries that I have lived, that is to some extent the structuring relationship of my life, is not something I think I can do. To have given 27 years of your life to a place, to a pursuit, to a choice (or set of choices) locks certain things in place, or nearly so. It makes certain questions either unanswerable, or deeply unpleasant to confront. When an immigrant extols the virtues of their new country, it’s of course also always a way to retroactively justify and validate the fact of their immigration. A way to make worthwhile sacrifices and frustrations, the births, birthdays and funerals missed “back home”. I don’t intend to try to think around that mote in my eye, but to use it as a magnifying glass.

I am a little nervous about both of these topics. I realize I don’t know much about my subscribers yet, and there’s a chance I’m just completely talking past y’all. But I think the only way for me to use this platform productively is to fill it with the stuff I can’t say or write anywhere else, but that still to me seems worth saying, and more importantly thinking. I’d love to have you along for the ride.