[Marxism] Charlie Hebdo Award at PEN Gala Sparks More Debate
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * NY Times, May 5 2015 Charlie Hebdo Award at PEN Gala Sparks More Debate By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER Guests at your typical $1,250-a-plate Manhattan fund-raiser usually face no quandary more urgent than “red or white?” But when representatives of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo step onstage Tuesday to receive an award for “freedom of expression courage” at PEN American Center’s literary gala, the roughly 800 guests will face a more complicated choice: standing ovation, walkout or something in between? During the past week, the news that six prominent writers, including Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje and Francine Prose, had pulled out as gala table hosts to protest what they saw as the magazine’s cultural intolerance and Islamophobia has set off an unusually intense war of words in the heart of the American literary establishment. The controversy has ricocheted across social media and op-ed pages worldwide, as partisans have traded impassioned arguments and sometimes ad hominem insults. By the weekend, more than 200 of PEN’s roughly 4,000 members — including Junot Díaz, Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore and Michael Cunningham — had signed a letter saying that the award crossed a line between “staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.” The debate is emotional and complex. But the battle lines are generally drawn between those who believe that PEN’s core mission includes celebrating Charlie Hebdo’s courageous perseverance after the Jan. 7 attack on its office by Muslim extremists that left 12 people dead and those who believe that the magazine’s cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad promote bigotry and reinforce the second-class status of a Muslim underclass in France. There has also been debate about the debate, with some seeing an example of fractious freedom of expression in action while others see a spectacle that has generated more heat than light. “With this boycott the Charlie Hebdo debate has come to embody all the limitations, and now the futility, of the freedom of expression argument vis-à-vis Muslims in particular and minorities in general,” Nesrine Malik, a Sudanese-born, London-based commentator, wrote in The Guardian. “We are trapped between people who see a knowing establishment prejudice against Muslims (and other ethnic or racial minorities) everywhere, and those who refuse to believe it exists,” she wrote. The controversy revives a debate that flared up in January over whether some of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons were racist. It is drawing in new partisans, and may take on greater urgency after the shootings on Sunday in Texas, where two gunmen, one of whom the F.B.I. had previously investigated for links to Islamic terrorism, attacked a conference organized by an anti-Islam group that included a Muhammad cartoon contest. To some, the bigoted nature of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons is clear. “It’s a racist publication,” Ms. Prose, a former president of PEN, told The Nation last week. “Let’s not beat about the bush.” The writer Luc Sante, who also signed the letter of protest, said that while the work of Georges Wolinski, one of the cartoonists killed in the attack, “was humane and large-spirited,” some of Charlie Hedbo’s contributors trafficked in “sophomoric troll humor.” “The fact alone that black and Arab people are offended by the way they were depicted — leaving religion to the side — should have made PEN think before celebrating Charlie Hebdo,” Mr. Sante said in an email. Defenders of the award counter that such arguments overlook the full scope and context of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons. They point to websites like Understanding Charlie Hebdo Cartoons, which offers detailed analysis of some of the magazine’s ruder images, or to a study published in Le Monde in February stating that, contrary to the notion that the publication focused obsessively on Islam, fewer than 2 percent of the magazine’s covers between 2005 and 2015 primarily mocked Islam. Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker (and a gala table host) who wrote an essay in defense of the award, said in an interview that the critics had elided the crucial distinction between blasphemy, which attacks a belief system, and racism, which attacks people. “In France, it’s well understood that Charlie Hebdo was and is aggressively blasphemous and anti-religious,” he said. But “if you make a minimal effort to understand Charlie Hebdo in its proper context, you cannot conclude they are racist in any meaning of the term.” The conversation about Charlie Hebdo in France has indeed been
Re: [Marxism] Charlie Hebdo Award at PEN Gala Sparks More Debate
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * thanks louis. very glad to see some of the names on that list. - Original Message - From: Louis Proyect via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu To: Charles Faulkner lacena...@comcast.net Sent: Tuesday, May 5, 2015 7:59:56 AM Subject: [Marxism] Charlie Hebdo Award at PEN Gala Sparks More Debate POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * NY Times, May 5 2015 Charlie Hebdo Award at PEN Gala Sparks More Debate By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER Guests at your typical $1,250-a-plate Manhattan fund-raiser usually face no quandary more urgent than “red or white?” But when representatives of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo step onstage Tuesday to receive an award for “freedom of expression courage” at PEN American Center’s literary gala, the roughly 800 guests will face a more complicated choice: standing ovation, walkout or something in between? During the past week, the news that six prominent writers, including Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje and Francine Prose, had pulled out as gala table hosts to protest what they saw as the magazine’s cultural intolerance and Islamophobia has set off an unusually intense war of words in the heart of the American literary establishment. The controversy has ricocheted across social media and op-ed pages worldwide, as partisans have traded impassioned arguments and sometimes ad hominem insults. By the weekend, more than 200 of PEN’s roughly 4,000 members — including Junot Díaz, Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore and Michael Cunningham — had signed a letter saying that the award crossed a line between “staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.” The debate is emotional and complex. But the battle lines are generally drawn between those who believe that PEN’s core mission includes celebrating Charlie Hebdo’s courageous perseverance after the Jan. 7 attack on its office by Muslim extremists that left 12 people dead and those who believe that the magazine’s cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad promote bigotry and reinforce the second-class status of a Muslim underclass in France. There has also been debate about the debate, with some seeing an example of fractious freedom of expression in action while others see a spectacle that has generated more heat than light. “With this boycott the Charlie Hebdo debate has come to embody all the limitations, and now the futility, of the freedom of expression argument vis-à-vis Muslims in particular and minorities in general,” Nesrine Malik, a Sudanese-born, London-based commentator, wrote in The Guardian. “We are trapped between people who see a knowing establishment prejudice against Muslims (and other ethnic or racial minorities) everywhere, and those who refuse to believe it exists,” she wrote. The controversy revives a debate that flared up in January over whether some of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons were racist. It is drawing in new partisans, and may take on greater urgency after the shootings on Sunday in Texas, where two gunmen, one of whom the F.B.I. had previously investigated for links to Islamic terrorism, attacked a conference organized by an anti-Islam group that included a Muhammad cartoon contest. To some, the bigoted nature of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons is clear. “It’s a racist publication,” Ms. Prose, a former president of PEN, told The Nation last week. “Let’s not beat about the bush.” The writer Luc Sante, who also signed the letter of protest, said that while the work of Georges Wolinski, one of the cartoonists killed in the attack, “was humane and large-spirited,” some of Charlie Hedbo’s contributors trafficked in “sophomoric troll humor.” “The fact alone that black and Arab people are offended by the way they were depicted — leaving religion to the side — should have made PEN think before celebrating Charlie Hebdo,” Mr. Sante said in an email. Defenders of the award counter that such arguments overlook the full scope and context of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons. They point to websites like Understanding Charlie Hebdo Cartoons, which offers detailed analysis of some of the magazine’s ruder images, or to a study published in Le Monde in February stating that, contrary to the notion that the publication focused obsessively on Islam, fewer than 2 percent of the magazine’s covers between 2005 and 2015
