The Critic and Her Publics is a live interview series that asks the best and most prominent critics working today to perform criticism on the spot, on an object they’ve never seen before. It’s a glimpse into brilliant minds at work, performing their thinking, taking risks, and making spontaneous judgments, which are sometimes right and sometimes wrong.
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From the episode:
Here are the lines that I still remember:
“An anti -racist reading list means well, still I’m left to wonder, who is this for? The syllabus as these lists are sometimes called seldom instructs or guides. Genre appears indiscriminately, essays slide against memoir and folklore, poetry squeezed on either side by sociological tomes. This reinforces an already pernicious literary divide that books written by or about minorities are for educational purposes, racism and homophobia and stuff wholly segregated from manners of form and grammar, lyric and scene.”
For a full transcript and details of the piece Lauren responded to, head over to the New York Review of Books.
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Lauren Michele Jackson is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of the essay collection White Negroes and is currently working on a second book, with Amistad Press. She is part of New America’s 2022 class of National Fellows.
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The Critic and Her Publics
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