Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.Critical: British author Zadie Smith is guilty of ignorance, cynicism and racism in her essay titled Shibboleth, which appeared in The New Yorker this month, the writer says.
This royal “us” betrays Smith’s position as outsider and poseur. In reality, sacrifice is eminently imaginable to the countless people who have chosen to act on their consciences and subsequently languished in prison, lost jobs and careers, suffered exile and ostracism. “What pitiful ethical creatures we are !” she laments. This singular flash of self-awareness, meant to be ironic and thus venial, is the only aspect of the essay worth the reader’s attention.
Smith, like too many of her Western contemporaries, believes herself capable of discussing Palestine without apparently having read a single Palestinian writer. Here’s the point at which a competent editor would have asked Smith if she planned on including any support and praise or if she just wants to keep bombarding college students with passive-aggressive bromides. Smith tut-tuts protestors and their antagonists for simplifying “unbelievably labyrinthine histories”.
“But it is in the nature of the political that we cannot even attend to such ethical imperatives unless we first know the political position of whoever is speaking.” I’m having trouble figuring out what Smith wants to say. She’s probably confused too, but, being a long-standing member of the cultural elite, understands that clarity is less important than satisfying the right audience.
At one point, Smith seems to almost recognise she’s talking a whole lot of bullshit and tries to pre-empt the inevitable backlash.
Source: Education Headlines (educationheadlines.net)
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