BOOK NOTICE

New book argues that 1999 Seattle WTO protests were a cultural turning point

"What Democracy Looks Like"

Rutgers University Press, 2006

The 1999 protests in Seattle against world trade policies were a dividing line in our culture, and humanities educators need to adjust their approaches or risk irrelevancy, say professors from Vanderbilt and Syracuse universities in a provocative new book.

The book of essays, What Democracy Looks Like: A New Critical Realism for a Post-Seattle World, was edited by Amy Schrager Lang, professor of English and humanities at Syracuse, and Cecelia Tichi, professor of English at Vanderbilt.

"Seattle changed what we read, how we read, and the nature of our teaching and writing," Tichi and Lang write in the book's introduction. "A palpable sense of social urgency drove this challenge and began to disrupt the categories that organize our work."

"For the first time on U.S. soil, there was a major convergence of different groups from all over the world, everyone from Korean farmers to Central American fisherman to U.S. steelworkers," Tichi said. Some of these people had little money yet traveled thousands of miles to deliberately confront the World Trade Organization meeting.

"They said to the world, 'These policies are destructive to us in our countries, and indeed to the whole planet.' It was unprecedented, and it changed everything."

But how should any of this change how a college professor approaches a poem, novel or short story?

"Let me show you with William Faulkner," Tichi offers. In a story titled "Old Man" written in 1939, the Mississippi author tells of a prisoner released during the 1927 flood caused by the Mississippi River. The prisoner rescues others from the flood, gets a job and proves himself rehabilitated. Thought to have drowned by authorities, he is granted a pardon. But when he turns out to be alive, he is returned to prison as an escapee because government officials don't want it disclosed that they've pardoned a live prisoner.

"Faulkner fills that novella with indictments against what he calls 'the criminal injustice system,'" Tichi said. "But what do modern critics say about it? They're interested in the language about the flood."

In What Democracy Looks Like, 27 essayists probe how teaching about writers including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane and Langston Hughes can be revitalized by viewing them in light of the social justice issues raised by the 1999 protests in Seattle.

"I cannot bear to read another novel about a woman, her two lovers and her psychiatrist, Tichi said. "From where I sit in an English department, I see students who are getting worried about the issues brought up in Seattle, realizing that things like global warming and the World Trade Organization might mean their futures are not as assured as previous generations.

"Academia must address these issues to be relevant. We owe it to the kids we're teaching."

from the publisher