The central fact of American political discourse today is a startling convergence between left and right positions. On the one hand, the favoured and feted of serious non-fiction—those rare liberal academics and authors with policy clout and routine access to the major media—have lately espoused positions that dovetail with the Bush administration’s defence of torture and the suspension of habeas corpus. On the other, the so-called radical wings of the academic humanities as well as dissident subfields such as post-colonial studies, taught by professors who calls themselves Marxists and even in many cases communists, are involved in arguing that empires no longer exist or that everyone, rich and poor alike, can now enjoy the fruits of a freewheeling cosmopolitanism. The world—that is, the United States—is now, without blush, considered genuinely attractive because of its supposed cultural productivity, inventiveness and freedom.
Whether as active defence of imperial...
Timothy Brennan’s most recent book is Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (Columbia, 2006). He has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and The Nation, and teaches at the University of Minnesota.
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