Cancel culture, at its worst, can sound like the adult version of telling tales. Instead of working things out through intellectual debate, people across the arts seem increasingly unwilling to deal with issues without resorting to rhetorical spats online.
Take an ongoing debate in publishing, featuring a series of open letters, statements, public denunciations and apologies. Earlier this summer, reviewers on GoodReads pointed out some unsavoury descriptions in teacher Kate Clanchy’s 2019 book, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. These included a child with a “fine Ashkenazi nose”, an Ethiopian boy with a “narrow skull” and Muslim girls in “flirty hijabs”. Critics in the world of publishing raised the alarm about not only this book, but what it said about the industry generally that such passages might go uncut.
Days of unedifying Twitter exchanges followed, including Philip Pullman saying, in Clanchy’s defence, that people who didn’t read books before they criticised them would “find a comfortable home in Isis or the Taliban”. Next came the open letters and statements. One, from “the writing and publishing community”, defended the writers Monisha Rajesh, Sunny Singh and Chimene Suleyman, who it claimed had been “targeted, harassed and gaslighted online” after criticising Clanchy. In another statement, the Society of Authors distanced themselves from Pullman, who engaged in a tweet-deleting spree. Clanchy soon promised to re-write the offending sections of the book.
Yet last month, Picador publisher Philip Gwyn Jones told the Telegraph that he regretted not having stood up for Clanchy more fervently. This set off another firestorm, with Suleyman, among others, expressing her personal distress on social media. Soon, Gwyn Jones was tweeting a four-part apology. “I now understand,” he said, “[that] I must use my privileged position as a white middle-class gatekeeper with more awareness.” Picador announced this week that it too distanced itself from his comments, adding it was “devastated by the ongoing pain experienced” by Suleyman et al. It added, too, that it was “appalled by the suffering experienced” by Clanchy; the publisher is still set to release an anthology edited by her in March.
It’s unclear whether the aspiration set by Rajesh, Singh and Suleyman – that British “publishing must do better” – has been achieved, or remotely helped, by all this hyperbolic rhetoric. It’s important, because the critics’ cause is a just one. Anyone who knows the industry will tell you that it is elitist and exclusive. A recent survey revealed that 90 per cent of the publishing world was white. On top of that, it’s also a profit-driven market, in which social-media trends are consulted more often than artistic judgements about which stories or writers deserve to enter print.
What publishing needs is more voices, not fewer – but in the form of substantial books, not ephemeral and melodramatic tweets. By telling public tales of how sad or offended or hurt we are about what we read, we only feed the idea that underpins cancel culture: that certain things shouldn’t be allowed to be written. The best response to the problems Suleyman et al identify is sober debate, behind-the-scenes change, and the best writing from the best writers, whatever their identity.
In which vein, while speaking to this paper, Gwyn Jones highlighted how younger readers are taking their cues from Twitter, “where there is no room for nuance” and “misrepresentations” of books are rife. Where is the thoughtful defiance of the Empire Writes Back project of the 1980s, in which authors such as Tsitsi Dangarembga held a mirror up to the racism of Western societies through their writing? Or Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations, which challenged cultural imperialism while poking fun at the English? True diversity, of both identity and thought, will be created by serious literature – not digital screaming fits.
