Subcommandante Marcos, meet Natty Bumpo

Though it’s been decisively knocked off the national radar in the aftermath of 9/11, the massive protest that disrupted the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle was widely regarded at the time as a political watershed. It was the first time the U.S. had seen such a broad range of activists—including labor groups, environmentalists and advocates for indigenous people—gathered from all over the world, taking to American streets to protest the injustices of multinational capitalism and privatization. Their chant, “This is what democracy looks like,” became a rallying cry for similar demonstrations around the globe. For Americans on the left/progressive end of the political spectrum, the event in Seattle was a brief, shining moment of revolutionary activism—not to mention the best rumble with the cops since the 1968 Democratic Convention. The protest remains an inspiration for many. For their book What Democracy Looks Like: A New Critical Realism for a Post-Seattle World, Vanderbilt English professor Cecelia Tichi and her co-editor, Amy Schrager Lang of Syracuse University, solicited essays and interviews from 25 writers and academics, asking them to consider how “Seattle” has influenced their work. Tenured professors may not seem much like a revolutionary force, but for Tichi and Lang, the primary aim of literature is to portray the truth of human experience as it is actually lived, and a critical approach that ignores the larger social reality shaping both writer and reader reduces any work, however masterful, to stylistic abstraction. The Seattle protest, they say, caused a fundamental altering of the socio-political landscape, a monumental change which obligates the serious scholar to engage its effect on culture: “Our role as scholars and teachers is…to recognize Seattle not as a rupture but as a bridge connecting texts across and within periods, genres, authors and traditions.” Tichi and Lang assume a sympathetic and fairly well-informed reader, although they do include a history of activism that begins, somewhat arbitrarily, with the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Mexico and ends with protests at the 2005 G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. The fact that the Seattle protests are embedded unobtrusively in this timeline seems to undercut the editors’ claim for their unique political significance; but insofar as Tichi and Lang’s thesis is primarily concerned with consciousness and culture, the Seattle action makes sense as a historical springboard for American scholars. The vision of homegrown anarchists smashing up a Starbucks (one of the notable moments of the Seattle protest) clearly had a greater cultural resonance here than, say, the French workers’ invasion of the Paris stock exchange, or the 1996 national strike in Argentina. What Democracy Looks Like casts a fairly wide net for a book on critical theory. As you would expect, the contributor list is top-heavy with academics. But Tichi and Lang also sought contributions from writers as disparate as Paula Gunn-Allen and George Saunders, along with playwright Tony Kushner and journalist Laurie Garrett. Essays from a high school English teacher and a New York theater artist are thrown in for good measure. Overall, the academic essays are remarkably readable and free of jargon. They range from Fredric Jameson’s rambling riff on global consumer culture as portrayed in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, to Cindy Weinstein’s post-Iraq analysis of the presentation of battlefield dead in The Red Badge of Courage. Dana Nelson’s essay, “Cooper and the Tragedy of the Commons,” is perhaps the book’s purest exercise in literary criticism, and yet it’s also the entry with the clearest connection to the issues of Seattle. In considering James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (one of the lesser-known volumes of The Leatherstocking Tales), Nelson puts aside critical clichés about the struggle to subdue the wilderness, focusing instead on the dominance of private ownership over the ancient principle of communal land rights. In this analysis, hunter Natty Bumpo’s dispute with a wealthy judge over a deer carcass exactly mirrors present-day conflicts such as the debate over the logging of public lands in the U.S. The less scholarly contributions are a distinctly mixed bag. Teacher Judith Scot-Smith Girgus, English Department chair at the Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, offers an engaging account of her attempts to reform school curricula in ”On Behalf of Tomato Pickers Everywhere,” but the usually brilliant Tony Kushner is represented with his tub-thumping, pompous 2002 commencement address at Vassar College, titled (really, this is not a joke), “The Antitribalist Identity-based Movement for Pluralist Democracy.” Daniel Lang/Levitsky’s “Ivory Towers, Velvet Gloves” is a fact-packed account of encroachments on academic freedom, but unfortunately it is written in the dry, hectoring tone that so often afflicts left-wing journalism. The most thought-provoking segment of What Democracy Looks Like is offered up in an interview with writer George Saunders, who, though he’s a darling of left-leaning critics, dismisses efforts to politicize literature. (His immediate response to the question of whether his own work is politically engaged is, “I hope not.”) Saunders is sympathetic to the goal of social justice, but art itself, he says, is “supposed to rip the existing categories up and reveal them for what they are: fearful quaking placeholders. Art, in my view, is supposed to remind us that all dualities are false, and potentially dangerous. An ‘oppressive capitalist’ also has an inner ‘sensitive artist.’ And vice versa.” His words don’t make for a very good protest slogan, but they do describe the fundamentally revolutionary nature of great art, literary or otherwise. Saunders manages to get to the heart of the transformative power that Tichi and Lang’s “new critical realism” timidly addresses. For him, any art worthy of the name is always political, always radical, to the extent that it tells the truth of human lives: “It holds up a mirror. We see how we are. A feeling of discontent wells up, we change.”