One way to understand the dilemma of contemporary American literature in the age of Donald Trump is to see it as an imperial literature. The United States is a different kind of empire, exerting global hegemonic power through hundreds of military bases and a network of alliances, trade agreements, and financial and legal institutions, which add up to a US-led “international rules based order,” as Joe Biden called it.
For decades, American literature has played its role in this order as an arm of US soft power, showing the domestic life of empire while mostly ignoring the rest of the world. Remember that the aptly named Central Intelligence Agency understood quite well the importance of soft power and the role of art. During the Cold War, the CIA secretly funded or encouraged everything from the promotion of modernism in Europe to the importation of international writers to the United States, where they could be exposed to an American literary aesthetics.
The problem for imperial literature under Trump is that he sees no need for soft power, only hard power. The Trump innovation during Trump II, the Sequel—and Americans love sequels—is to dispense of any sense of imperfection, which is what imperial literature explores, as well as the notion of rules, domestic or international. While Trump did not understand the nature of the rules confronting his first administration, he had always been interested in breaking the rules, like a Hollywood villain straining against the chains placed on him by Captain America. Captain America, in the form of Joe Biden, defeated Trump, but as with every good Hollywood villain, Trump returned stronger than ever. Comic book creators understand very well that every story needs a hero and a villain, and that the distinction between hero and villain is thin. Likewise, the United States has always been hero and villain, both to other nations but also within itself.
This ambiguity of character defines American presidents of all ideologies and also makes for great drama, which is something that American writers from Herman Melville to William Faulkner to Toni Morrison powerfully exploit. Unfortunately, this ambiguity is also tragic, involving the deaths of tens of millions of people, from Indigenous nations reduced by genocide to Africans kidnapped into enslavement. When Trump says “Make America Great Again,” he is speaking about a return to a 19th-century style marked by the unapologetic use of violence or the threat of violence, exercised at the level of an expanding, conquering nation and an individual swaggering masculinity.
An imperial literature prefers the realism of showing the imperfect domesticity within an American empire.The Trump administration, caring little for democracy and focused on hardness, is immune to the idea that literature, a supposedly feminizing kind of art, could ever be useful, unless perhaps it was done by aspiring presidential possibilities like JD Vance, whose best-selling memoir of escaping the constraints of rural life helped propel him into national visibility. Hence the paradoxical situation of literature in the conservative parts of the United States, where it is dismissed as having no utility and yet is also seen as enormously dangerous. Thus, the rise of book banning and other forms of censorship and the efforts of Trump to control narrative, ranging from his takeover of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where American presidents except Trump have given out high honors to American artists, to his latest attempts to dictate to American museums that they must glorify America. American writers are opposed to these efforts, for American writers, especially the most lauded ones, mostly tend to be liberal, and hence as a whole are vigorously anti-Trump.
Artistic politics is something of an oxymoron in the United States, an anticommunist country that tends to see calls for the explicit mixing of art and politics as a communist practice. While writers might march in protests or sign letters, they are not usually expected to think of their writing as political, and the ones who do are more exceptional or respond to specific crises, as some writers did to the Vietnam War, including poet Robert Lowell, essayist Susan Sontag, and novelists Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer. Writers like Melville and Faulkner, who diagnosed deep problems in the American body politic in novels like Moby Dick and Absalom, Absalom!, are seen as canonical writers. They are not usually seen as pure political writers, perhaps because their greatness is seen as residing in their art rather than their politics, as if the two can be separated.
Writing as a continually political practice has usually been delegated by readers and critics to so-called minority writers like Morrison. Minority writers are expected by dominant audiences, and sometimes their own communities, to write about the traumas like enslavement, colonization, racism, migration, or war that have defined their communities, a set of experiences that happened because they have been subjected to abusive power. As as result, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, the space of the minority is always political.
They used Franz Kafka as their primary example, and Kafkaesque is an apt description of the minority experience. It is surreal, after all, to live in a self-proclaimed democracy that sees itself as the Greatest Country on Earth, and yet one that deploys enslavement, genocide, incarceration, disappearance, and deportation as standard tactics against minorities. Thus, the sense among American liberals that they now live in a surreal time under Trump II must be put in the context of how minority existence has always been surreal: hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican American citizens deported to Mexico in the 1930s, 120,000 Japanese Americans sent to concentration camps during World War II, and African Americans routinely disappeared, castrated, raped, lynched, massacred, and even subject to bombings and air attacks by white people and the state, from Tulsa in 1921 to Birmingham in 1963 to Philadelphia in 1985.
While many writers are sympathetic to Palestinians, many of their literary institutions have been flummoxed.Writers of color have always written about this surreal contradiction between lofty ideals and brutal realities, which prevents the possibility of a universal humanism. This contradiction is vividly illustrated by the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza, using bombs and political cover provided by Biden and continued by Trump in a bipartisan display of American imperial power. In the name of protecting the Jewish people, the Palestinians are reduced to what multiple Israeli government officials have called “human animals,” an obscene term that simply repeats how Western colonizers have always seen the non-white, colonized peoples whom they slaughtered in the name of civilizing them. The Palestinians and those who support them are the exception to Western Civilization and American Exceptionalism, but to even point this out is punished with increasing ferocity, from censoring, firing, doxxing, and arresting to expulsion and deportation.
The contemporary American literary world is in disarray as a result. While many writers are sympathetic to Palestinians, many of their literary institutions have been flummoxed, unable to support Palestinians, name genocide, or use the active voice to identify Israeli agency, even as many writers demand that they do. These literary institutions are a part of empire, supported by the state or by powerful donors who benefit from the imperial machinery.
The genocide in Gaza is therefore not an incidental event that can be ignored but a fundamental event like the Vietnam War, where what is being burned with American weapons are not just nonwhite people but American ideals and the possibilities of euphemism. In the light of that fire, American imperialism is revealed, as well as the complicity of Americans who do nothing, including writers who say nothing.
The contemporary writers who have said something through their artistic practice are relatively rare, like Bob Shacochis and his novel The Woman Who Lost Her Soul (2013). While this exploration of America’s permanent state of war as a global military power won awards, it did not propel Shacochis into the realm of literary celebrity. Those books which have been celebrated have been authored by [so-called] minority writers who are in some ways expected to speak, from Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message. These are anti-imperial works because they connect the domestic operations of racism to the US strategy of targeting nonwhite peoples, from drone strikes to invasion, from supporting authoritarian governments to genocide.
American literature as imperial literature does not make that connection, which reveals that the lining of the American Dream is a surreal nightmare for many people inside and outside the empire. An imperial literature prefers the realism of showing the imperfect domesticity within an American empire. This act of showing constitutes a low-level dissent that can be promoted by President Obama in his annual list of recommended books, which flatters writers and provides a literary sheen that obscures Obama’s extensive use of drone assassinations and deportation of undocumented migrants. But even that minimal dissent cannot to be tolerated under Trump II, where ideas like diversity, anti-racism, and other core themes of Obama-sanctioned literature are outlawed.
Defending against certain Trump attacks is important, of course. Social security, national parks, voting rights, immigrant rights and more should be protected. But reflexively defending everything that Trump attacks also reveals that there can be a liberal investment in sustaining American global power. Deploring the end of USAID, for example, with the human damage done to those who lost jobs and those who lost aid is understandable. But USAID is also a form of American soft power that has helped to cloak American hard power. A more substantive dissent would be to call for more soft power and less hard power, a radical downsizing of the military-industrial complex that Democratic presidents, as much as Republican ones, have not been willing to do.
If Obama extended an invitation of inclusion into the American empire to citizens, minorities, and allies, then Trump seeks to turn American empire into an exclusive, members-only club where one can enter only through tribute and submission. Thus the dilemma of contemporary American literature: dissenting against Trump and what he represents but not recognizing that Trump’s imperialism is a more naked version of liberal imperialism is a limited kind of dissent. Instead, such minor dissent will be American literature fulfilling its imperial function, which is to fine-tune imperial power through showing the literary and liberal values of empathy and compassion, and in so doing to be empire’s diplomat.
