Reading in an Age of Catastrophe
Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s
by George Hutchinson
Columbia University Press, 439 pp., $35.00
"Contemporary culture, having learned that anyone who stereotypes cultures that are remote in space—on another continent or across the tracks—risks shunning and contempt, has also learned to honor and reward anyone who stereotypes cultures that are remote in time by a half-century or more, as in Mad Men or The Shape of Water, cultures populated by the dead who never feel offended. The motive that drives today’s stereotypes about the past is the same motive that once drove imperialist stereotypes about “lesser breeds without the Law”: the urgent need to convince oneself that one’s own culture has ascended into the light, that its injustices are trivial and ignorable, unlike remote unjust cultures sunk in outer darkness, passively waiting in the distance of time or space for our culture to arrive and correct them."
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