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Literary Freedom

a Cultural Right to Literature

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

CHAPTER 1

Culture as a Group Right

To begin to make the case that literary freedom of expression is a cultural right, this Chapter will address the concept of what a cultural right entails, bearing in mind the debates on freedom of expression outlined in the Introduction. This Chapter will advance the argument that cultural rights have a necessarily group rights component, whilst recognising the critiques that theorists such as Waldron and Barry have made against group rights. This is tied to the larger project of my argument: to demonstrate that literary freedom of expression is a cultural right requires we understand what a cultural right comprises, and how it must be upheld.

To make this case, this Chapter will explore various debates – the first relates to the concept of "culture" itself, particularly the insights that scholars looking at nationalism from a constructivist viewpoint can bring to this issue; the second relates to the internal divisions and ongoing conversation within multicultural theory amongst thinkers such as Kymlicka, Waldron and I.M.

Young; the third relates to the additional insights that theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Judith Butler, who are looking at the 'transgressive' element in culture, can bring to the discussion of group rights and their tension with individual liberty. The subsequent Chapters will build upon and refer back to the analysis presented here.

1.1 The contested notion of 'culture'

In order to sustain the position that literary freedom entails cultural rights, it is necessary to first demonstrate that there is a legitimate case for cultural rights, which are by necessity in some sense group rights, and thus not part of the classical liberal conception of human rights solely as political and civil rights that individuals exercise independently. It goes without saying, however, that the concept of "culture" is itself highly contested, and countless definitions have been offered from cultural anthropologists, historians, sociologists and so on. Instead of ennumerating the myriad ways in which culture has been conceived and debated by scholars, let us start from a common sense observation of the everyday use of the word "culture": in the English language, at least, the word has two separate predominant connotations, one relating to everyday customs, tradition, and practices ('Innuit culture', 'Montenegrin culture', and subcultures, such as 'punk culture'), and one relating to what could be called capital-C Culture, that is, the arts (for instance the Culture section of a European broadsheet newspaper will encompass reviews of ballet, opera, literary fiction, cinema and so on). Another way of phrasing this has traditionally been a dichotomy between "high culture" and "low culture".

However – and this is one potential inroad into a better understanding of some of the facets of this contested word – the interplay between high and low culture, or culture and Culture, is itself highly dynamic, as scholars such as Hobsbawm, Anderson and Gellner, taking a constructivist approach to nationalism, have highlighted. (Though the construction of nations and nationalism is by no means the only prism through which to unpick the concept of "culture", it is particularly relevant here as it touches upon issues of power, false 'authenticity' and exclusivist constructions of identity, all of which underpin the following debates in this study).

All three scholars highlight, amongst other things, the power dynamics behind claims to "culture", the way in which the concept of "culture" was utilised during the constructions of European nationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to generate exclusivist identities demarcating an "us" and "them" along constructed ethnic, religious, national (that is, "cultural") lines, and that so-called "high art" facilitated this process of construction through its appropriation of and interplay with the supposedly 'authentic' culture of the people or 'Volk'.

In his study Imagined Communities, Anderson charts the trajectory of conceptions of nationalism and the nation-state from the early modern period to the post-colonial era, positing that nationalism should be viewed as a "cultural artefact" of various social trends (rather than, as a primordialist interpretation of nationalism would posit, as something "natural" and immutable). In particular, Anderson pinpoints the emergence of the imagined communities which underpin modern nationalism to the twinned developments of print-capitalism and Protestantism in Europe (with its emphasis on the vernacular language, rather than Church Latin), which laid the foundations for people to conceptualise their relations to one another, and beyond their immediate sphere of daily contact, in entirely new ways, which created new modes of identity. In particular, printcapitalism and the proliferation of printing combined with nascent urbanisation (although it preceded industrialisation) to give provincial and peripheral elites in large multilingual empires such as the Habsburg empire a newfound awareness of their disadvantaged position vis-a-vis the elite of the imperial centre, and this awareness brought forth a desire amongst provincial elites to construct their own identities.

Parallel to this, the codification and standardisation of languages necessitated by the emergence of mass printing fed into the creation of more clearly defined conceptions of the boundaries of comprehensibility of language, rather than a continuum of dialects, and these new, print-made linguistic boundaries helped construct the idea of (among other things, linguistically-based) "nations" as discrete entities.

Moreover, most crucially to the exploration I am undertaking here, Anderson outlines how this process led the literate provincial elites to reconceptualise their relationship with the illiterate peasants with whom, as they were increasingly aware, they shared a common language, and thus share an identity: across Europe, the provincial elites engaged in acts of reclaiming (through in reality it was construction rather than reclamation) the cultural customs, folklore, arts and traditions of provincial peasants. These adopted and reappropriated aspects of 'Volk' or peasant culture became entrenched, and treated as ahistorical, immutable natural artefacts of the nascent nations or imagined communities, by the elites who elevated them to symbols of their nation's heritage. Among the methods through which this was done was through the simultaneous fetishisation of the "natural" 'folk customs' by the elite and their sanitisation and standardisation through (written) high art, such as the collections of 'folk tales' collected by the Brothers Grimm and Vuk Karadzic, and the standardised folk music of early ethnomusicologists such as Bartók.

To Anderson's analysis, Hobsbawm and Ranger hone in on the construction of European nationalism, and its dynamic relation between folk culture and high art, by following the thread of "invented traditions" particularly in the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment. In Invented Traditions, a predominant theme is the search for, and false construction of, authentic culture, amongst intellectuals and artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, in order to generate a shared history of a nation. For instance, the study details how the modern idea of the Scottish kilt, initially developed in large part out of a parade for the benefit of English Georgian royalty, became reappropriated as a symbol of (ancient) Scottishness, and a symbolic marker against the Anglo-Saxons to the south.

Similarly, theorists who wish to point to the constructed nature of modern nationalism, and its falsely authentic acts of myth-making point to the case of the "Scottish Homer" Ossian, which Hobsbawm and Ranger's volume describes as an elaborate forgery by the eighteenth century writer James Macpherson, who wrote and then claimed to discover an ancient epic poem in Scots Gaelic, which was rapturously received by contemporary intellectuals as proof of Scotland's ancient and noble heritage. As Hobsbawm outlines, such acts of invented tradition often predicated their claims to legitimacy on the value of the authenticity – and ancientness – of cultural practices and artefacts, even as they were necessarily codified and transmitted through modern means and shaped to fit contemporary bourgeois sensibilities.

Although there is not space here to fully outline the many implications of the constructivist reading of nationalism sketched above, it is worth pointing out that one overriding theme in the analysis of Anderson, Hobsbawm, Gellner and others, is the appropriation of "popular" culture by high culture, and the way in which, through this manner, the concepts of "culture" and "Culture" in Western thought developed in tandem to one another, both cultural artefacts of the same social processes. This dynamic should be borne in mind throughout the analysis in the following Chapters, which tends for the purpose of argument to treat "culture" and "Culture" (or "high art") each in turn, but should not be read as an assertion that these two categories are discrete and immutable.

Secondly, as will be demonstrated in Chapter 4's consideration of the poetry of Radovan Karadzic, such constructions of nationalism are necessarily bordered constructions, which through their elevation of a (mythical, pure) 'Volk' culture position the nation in hierarchical dominance against the 'Other', generating an exclusivist identity that hides within it the potential for antagonism, and worse, with those placed outside the boundary of the nation.

1.2 The right to culture and the concept of 'group rights'

And yet – constructed, manipulated, highly contested, and mutable though it may be – we nonetheless have a right to culture, at least inasmuch as this is enshrined in international legal documents such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Moreover, the central claim of my work here is that we have a right to literary culture, which entails positive actions on the part of states. How then do we assert the importance of culture without playing into the hands of those who – as Anderson, Hobsbawm and others have shown – seek to build or reinforce exclusivist identities through a construction of false authenticity, with its concomitant generation of a sharp and hostile definition of "us" and "them"?

Whilst some theorists will argue that this cannot be done, I believe that the case of the importance of culture – and the right to culture as a group right – can be asserted whilst avoiding this pitfall.

Here, I will argue the case for the validity of cultural rights of the kind enshrined in the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the necessity of their group dimension, by first presenting Waldron's classically liberal argument, before refuting this using arguments by Bhabha and Kymlicka. I.M. Young's contribution, which links cultural rights – and the necessity of group-identities – to a defence against oppression, presents a development to both Waldron's and Kymlicka's positions. Finally, recent scholars such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Judith Butler have further modified I. M. Young's position by demonstrating how trangressive/ subversive voices are a crucial part of culture, which is a helpful improvement on the usual impasse – such as the impasse between Brian Barry and Bikhu Parekh – over the idea that group rights will be used to oppress individuals' rights and quell dissenting voices. As I will be constructing the case for group rights in Chapter 1, it is not possible to fully explore all aspects of these theorists' arguments, but only provide a brief overview of the debates.

For the purposes of the argument here, it could be said that "culture" here is a shorthand for culture in the sense of everyday practices, customs, and so on (whilst not disregarding the insight of Hobsbawm, Anderson and Ranger outlined above). It should be noted that, whilst mutlicultural theorists such as Waldron, Young and Kymlicka are predominantly addressing questions relating to 'minority culture' in the modern nation state, my concern is not with minority culture per se, and instead with the right to culture in general, in order to use this as a basis for a 'right to literary culture'.

However, it could be said that it is through the analysis of minority culture, and minorities' claims to cultural rights upon the nation state, that the conceptional paradigms related to the idea of a 'right to culture' – minority or predominant – have developed, as it is the presence of minorities in the modern nation state, and the minority-state relationship, that gave birth to the concept of "culture" as we understand it.

To begin with one proposal for addressing minorities and their right to culture, Jeremy Waldron presents a liberal case for assimilationist cosmopolitanism, in which individual rights are fully protected within a "kaleidoscope of cultures" that exist together against the neutral backdrop of liberal democracy. For Waldron, group rights protecting an individual's culture of origin are unnecessary and may detract from the individual's right to fully exert their own civil/political rights. Waldron challenges the idea that cultures are homogenous entities – entailing, in turn, that they ought not to be protected. Through a description of a cosmopolitan metropolis in which many foods, musics, and other cultural aspects from across the world can comfortably mix, Waldron challenges the idea of "authenticity", which he claims the defence of groups rights is predicated upon. Any attempt to preserve culture as an entity in and of itself entails a false assumption of "authenticity", and does not recognise that all cultural "traditions" are contested and constantly changing: to preserve "culture" would therefore lead to stagnation, and oppress the individual (from within the 'traditional' culture) and their right to freely choose how to identify. Cosmopolitanism in liberal democracy, on the other hand, allows cultures, in their multiplicity, to thrive in a kind of marketplace of ideas, in which individuals from many different 'cultures of origin' assert their agency in choosing which aspects of their culture(s) to practice or keep.

Waldron's optimism, however, leaves him open to various criticisms. There is a false neutrality in Waldron's essay that fails to acknowledge global power dynamics, and which could in turn be seen as an assertion of privilege, or what Homi Bhabha has described as 'elite cosmopolitanism.' Whilst Waldron's position rightly argues against the fetishisation of "authenticity", which is based on the false assumption that cultures are monolithic, fully-boundaried entities, Waldron's portrayal of cosmopolitanism is guilty of the same Orientalist/ essentialist fallacy, inasmuch as it presents the cosmopolitan alternative (in reality, found in the 'metropole', or, in different terms, the traditional 'colonial centre' of the West) as the sole crucible or melting-pot in which cultures meet.

The "cultural heterogeneity" Waldron espouses implies that the rest of the world consists of monolithic, ahistorical 'cultures' that require the Western model of cosmopolitanism for them to come into contact with one another. This implication that nonWestern/ non-"cosmopolitan" cultures are homogenous and static also has a temporal dimension, as the emergence of the "global community" came, in Waldron's description, at the West's instigation, and occurs on their territory, time, and terms.

Building on Edward Said's analysis, Homi Bhabha argues against this 'elite cosmopolitanism' with the idea of the "third space" in which the global subaltern (or, at least, the non-elite) navigate modernity without reference to this colonial/Western metropolitan "centre" and it is instead through this process that cultures continue to adapt, intersect, and exchange ideas and values. Bhabha's criticism is a helpful lens for highlighting the significant failures of Waldron's argument, but it does not in itself provide a comprehensive counter-argument to Waldron's thesis: working within post-colonial critical theory, Bhabha does not intend to present a political philosophy on the question of group rights and culture. For an alternative approach, it is helpful to turn to Kymlicka's argument, which survives Waldron's critique of it because, as demonstrated above, Waldron's own argument has several significant flaws.

Kymlicka asserts the necessity of the group component for individual identity, and thus individual freedom. Kymlicka notes that cultural contexts determine individuals' choices, and thus liberals such as Waldron "should be concerned with the fate of cultural structures, not because they have some moral status of their own, but because it's only through having a rich and secure cultural structure that people can become aware, in a vivid way, of the options available to them, and intelligently examine their value."
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Literary Freedom by Heather Katharine McRobie. Copyright © 2013 Heather Katharine McRobie. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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