A Small Place
My brother recently sent me an article that Noam Chomsky contributed to regarding ChatGPT. Chomsky is technically a professor of linguistics, but really, he’s a “public intellectual” or “social critic.” It landed in my inbox around the same time I was organizing my old grad school materials. I re-discovered the book Is There a Text in this Class? by Stanley Fish, who was influential in the rise of reader-response criticism. (Something interesting that I’ll explore another day!) Anyway, all this sudden immersion in the idea of “criticism” is very appropriate given that I’d been reading A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid for #ReadingJamaicaKincaid w @ifthisisparadise
We need social critics. I don’t mean “critics” like those who employ simplistic, meme-y taglines masquerading as explanations. And I don’t mean “critic” as in “negative” (necessarily). I mean people who can really, really parse “how” a thing — an idea, an industry, a nation (!) — comes to be. A Small Place is Kincaid’s “take” on Antigua, her homeland and where she lived until she moved to the US in 1966. Specifically, she explores tourism, British colonialism, the sorry decline of the public library in Antigua, and Antigua’s “corrupt” (to use a not-very-critical simplistic term) government and why people from Syria and Lebanon own substantial amounts of commercial real estate. They’re all intertwined, of course.
Bringing awareness to people about “why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live and in the place they live, why the things that happened to them happened…[this knowledge] lead[s] these people to a different relationship to the world…” This is social criticism. A Small Place is artful — a word Kincaid uses elsewhere. The non-critic would just say “this is bad” or “this is good”; the critic paints a picture far beyond — and more complex — than that.
We need social critics. {Btw, Kincaid was criticized for A Small Place because of its negativity toward Antigua. The New Yorker — she was a frequent contributor — refused to publish it. Yet the work is also a forceful takedown of colonialism. A good social critic can’t be boxed in.}
originally published on instagram