Abstract
In the wake of 9/11, the suppression of critical voices from the arts in the USA was near complete. A quarter-century on, the war in Gaza is prompting questions about the USA’s role, but this time, free expression has not been stifled.
AS THE USA approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it finds itself in a peculiar situation. During his recent state visit to the USA, Charles III – titular head of the country against whom pioneering Americans fought a war to secure their freedom – found himself obliged to remind American lawmakers what freedom actually means. Speaking to a joint session of the US Congress, the king delivered a very pointed message, albeit in elegant and understated prose. For their part, the audience of US legislators cheered him enthusiastically, reminding us once again that the USA and the UK are indeed two countries divided by a common language.
Charles’s emphasis on freedoms comes at an important time. The very notion of freedom of expression is under severe strain at the moment in the USA: record number of books being banned from schools and libraries, journalists losing their jobs, comedians finding that their shows have been cancelled (in some instances reinstated after public pressure), and writers being deplatformed with invitations withdrawn.
The polarisation of domestic politics certainly plays a role in this. In addition, one key factor is the war in Gaza. Since 7 October 2023, the war in Gaza (and Lebanon, and later in Iran) has unleashed a ferocious debate about who may say what, to whom, under what auspices, and at what personal cost. This is a debate about free expression but also, more uncomfortably, a debate about power: about who controls the cultural infrastructure that determines the voices to amplify and those to ignore.
That said, the logic informing this turn is, I think, more interesting and more hopeful than it might seem. Because what is new about this moment – and what separates it sharply from the last time America went to war, after the 9/11 attacks, when the cultural establishment closed ranks – is that the suppression is failing. Writers and public intellectuals are louder, more organised, and considerably harder to silence than they were a quarter of a century ago.
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On the evening of 20 October 2023, a fortnight after the Hamas attacks and with Israeli airstrikes already killing hundreds of civilians in Gaza daily, the Vietnamese-American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen was scheduled to speak at New York’s 92NY, one of the most venerable literary institutions in the country. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Nguyen was going to discuss his new memoir, A Man of Two Faces, with the Korean-American novelist Min Jin Lee. But five hours before the event, he was disinvited. No official reason was given, no alternative date offered. He wasn’t even consulted in advance.
92NY, founded in 1874 as the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, regularly attracts large audiences for its literary events. Nguyen’s event was cancelled, it transpired, because he, together with more than 700 artists and writers, had signed an open letter in the London Review of Books calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The letter condemned Hamas’s attacks. It also condemned Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. It is that second condemnation that the organisers found unpalatable.
But then came the twist. Nguyen did not go home. Instead, the event was moved to the McNally Jackson bookstore in lower Manhattan. He was introduced by Bernard Schwartz, director of 92NY’s own Unterberg Poetry Center, who described the institution’s decision as “unacceptable”. In the immediate wake of the furore, two 92NY staffers resigned in protest. A number of writers, including critics Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman, the novelist Dionne Brand, and the poet Paisley Rekdal, withdrew from upcoming 92NY events. As a result, the institution suspended its entire fall literary series. Afterwards, Nguyen said: “I have no regrets about anything I have said or done in regards to Palestine, Israel, or the occupation and war. The only thing I am good at is writing. And writing is the only way I know how to fight.”
He was right on both counts, writing and fighting. And the key thing is: he could still fight. He still had a platform, with another bookstore stepping in, his audience turning up and the literary community rallying behind him. It was different after 9/11, when it was impossible to question US policies. Many writers who tried to write reflectively about the public response were sharply criticised.
To understand why this form of suppression is failing now, it is useful to first consider why it succeeded so completely then. The post-9/11 silencing worked through a combination of forces that were very specific to that time and place. First, there was a patriotic consensus so overwhelming it required almost no enforcement. Next, in a pre-social media landscape, a handful of editors and television executives could effectively set the terms of acceptable speech. Underpinning these was a legal environment freshly menaced by the Patriot Act; George W Bush’s “you’re either with us or with the terrorists” was not thought of as either simplistic or hyperbolic. Writers who dissented were not merely unpopular; they risked being positioned as traitors. Many, understandably, felt that it was not a risk worth taking.
Mary Beard, a classicist and hardly a radical, observed in an LRB special issue published in October 2001 that America needed to “bring itself to understand” why it was so hated. The deaths, she wrote, were in some sense “the consequences of American foreign policy”. This was not by any measure a controversial proposition, even though some may have felt it poorly timed. Nevertheless, it provoked a deluge of virulent abuse.
Beard was in Britain though, writing from the relative safety of Cambridge. Some 18 days after the attacks, Arundhati Roy published her famous essay The Algebra of Infinite Justice in The Guardian. In the piece, she argued that Americans were using the moment to “usurp the whole world’s sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own”. With remarkable accuracy, she predicted that those asking the hard questions would “for our pains, for our bad timing, be disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced”. Roy is Indian and was writing from New Delhi. The insulation mattered.
American writers had less room. The great American novelists who might have written critically of the US response – Philip Roth, John Updike, Don De Lillo – either processed American grief elegiacally or said very little. The notable fiction came late and carefully: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (moving and scrupulously apolitical) in 2005, John Updike’s Terrorist in 2006, and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man in 2007. Updike’s book was widely ridiculed for its clumsy attempt to inhabit a young Muslim man’s worldview, and as such was more embarrassing than brave. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, published in 2007, was the most pointed early reckoning with how the attacks looked from outside America. Hamid, a Pakistani-British author, knew the USA intimately; he had been taught by Toni Morrison at Princeton and had worked as a management consultant in New York. It works because he saw the world from a multi-perspective. The most conspicuous feature of the post-9/11 literary landscape, from an Arab or Muslim American perspective, was the silence where their voices should have been heard. That absence was its own form of suppression, and it went largely unnoticed.
Edward Said was not a novelist, but he was the most prominent Arab-American intellectual of his generation. He received death threats after he spoke critically of the US and recounted his experiences later. He died in 2003. Rashid Khalidi, who succeeded him at Columbia, also faced intense pressure and harassment throughout the 2000s,
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Today’s silencing is less effective. Institutionally fragmented, it is more visibly contested and, crucially, harder to sustain. When Indiana University cancelled an exhibition by the Palestinian-American abstract painter Samia Halaby in February 2024 citing “safety concerns”, more than 10,000 people signed a petition demanding reinstatement.
The uptick in art-world censorship in the US was so dramatic that in March 2024, the New York-based National Coalition Against Censorship launched the Art Censorship Index, an online tool to track restrictions on free expression across the US art world. Suppression is real enough to require monitoring; but it is also visible enough to be monitored.
Palestinian writer Mohammed el-Kurd (left) has been a vocal critic of the war in Gaza
CREDIT: Admedia Wire LLC/Alamy
The silencing has not been onedirectional. In September 2024, the National Writers Union published Red Lines: Retaliation in the Media Industry During the War in Gaza, a report tracking 44 cases of retaliation against more than 100 US media workers who had legitimately challenged the consensus in a number of ways. The cases included firings, social-media suppressions and the rescinding of awards. Samira Nasr, editor of Harper’s Bazaar was forced to apologise for publicly criticising Israel’s blockade of electricity and water in Gaza. The editor-in-chief of Artforum was dismissed after the magazine published an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. On the other side, Israeli and Jewish writers have been deplatformed too: disinvited from literary events, harassed online, labelled “Zionists” as a term of abuse. The Jewish Book Council has tracked cases of pro-Jewish voices being silenced. PEN America, the organisation that exists precisely to defend writers, was forced to cancel its 2024 World Voices Festival and annual awards ceremony after nearly half the nominated authors withdrew their books in protest at what they called PEN’s inadequate response to the killing of writers in Gaza. This year, PEN awarded its nonfiction prize to Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, by Peter Beinart. In the book Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and an observant Jew, argues that the American Jewish community has privileged – with catastrophic consequences – Zionist ethnonationalism over the traditions of Jewish ethics. Beinart asks what it means to be Jewish when a Jewish state, armed with American weapons, destroys hospitals, schools, and agriculture. The book opens with the line: “When I enter a synagogue, I am no longer sure who will extend their hand and who will look away.” That a Jewish writer could publish that book with a major house, and receive PEN’s endorsement, suggests that the suppression is not closing down the debate.
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What has broken through most powerfully in this moment is diaspora writing. This is where the contrast with the post-9/11 period is sharpest and most meaningful. Palestinian-American poet and novelist Hala Alyan’s memoir I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is a lyrical, fragmented account of successive family displacements: Gaza, Kuwait, and Lebanon. The story of these forced movements is interwoven with her account of her journey to motherhood. The narrative draws from the figure of Scheherazade: the woman who tells stories in order to survive another night. Storytelling here is not decoration but a strategic response, expressing the will to live. Mohammed El-Kurd, Palestine Correspondent for The Nation and a co-founder of the #SaveSheikhJarrah movement, has a forthcoming essay collection, Perfect Victims and The Politics of Appeal; its title alone is a piece of political argument. The poet Summer Farah published I Could Die Today and Live Again in 2024. These writers are making an explicit argument about whose stories count, who gets to tell them, and what the cost of telling them is.
“Art can help us see beyond the hatred of war,” says author Viet Thanh Nguyen
What has enabled these voices now, in part, is the reach of social media. It has amplified the writer’s ability to build an audience outside and around institutional gatekeepers. Another reason is the emergence of a genuine organisational infrastructure. Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), formed in October 2023 and selfconsciously modelled on Vietnam-era cultural mobilisation, produced a free broadsheet called The New York War Crimes and distributed it in bookstores, subway stations and bodegas, publishing the names of Palestinians killed in Gaza. Their actions – which have included sit-ins at the New York Times, vigils on the steps of the New York Public Library, readings of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer’s poem If I Must Die (Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023) – point to a generation of writers for whom political commitment and literary form are not separate activities. PEN America has documented the deaths of at least 125 cultural figures in Gaza. PEN International has mourned the killing of Palestinian writers. That remembrance and recalling is a key part of today’s cultural conversation – unlike the erasure of Arab and Muslim names of the dead and disappeared after 9/11.
Why is the suppression failing this time?
There are three possible explanations. The first is technological: social media has disaggregated the power to publish and distribute. In 2002, if the New York Times and the three television broadcast networks decided not to amplify dissent, these viewpoints was effectively inaudible beyond an immediate circle of influence. That is no longer possible. Nguyen’s Instagram post about the 92NY cancellation reached more people than the cancelled reading itself, had it gone ahead.
The second is generational. Of the writers who have come of age after 9/11, many were from communities that felt the patriotic consensus as exclusion rather than solidarity. They did not internalise the same prohibition on dissent, nor did they believe in naive arguments like “my country, right or wrong”. They watched their communities bear the cost of wars that they did not choose, and they wrote about these injustices. The Palestinian, Iranian, and Arab diaspora literary voices currently prominent were, in many cases, shaped precisely by the experience of post-9/11 marginalisation.
The third, and perhaps most important reason, is the nature of the conflict itself. Gaza is a long war, with a high and rising civilian death toll, happening in real time, visible to the world. The scale of the destruction has made it harder (not impossible, but harder) to sustain the argument that critics of Israeli military conduct are simply antisemites. Critics of the war include a growing number of Jewish writers and intellectuals (Beinart is far from alone); the International Court of Justice is involved; Palestinians including poets and professors, are being killed at a rate unprecedented in the troubled history of Israel and Palestine. The moral landscape has not been simplified. But it has, for many people, been clarified.
None of this makes the free expression question simple. The silencing of pro-Palestinian voices is real and documented, as is the silencing (sometimes by the same cultural left) of Jewish and Israeli voices that do not fit the preferred narrative. A cultural ecosystem in which the litmus test for access to a platform is political alignment, as opposed to artistic or intellectual quality, is impoverished regardless of the side applying the test. The more important principle, the one that Viet Thanh Nguyen articulated in a bookshop in lower Manhattan on the evening of 20 October 2023, is the one that has always been the writer’s actual job: to resist the demand that the world be divided into the human and the inhuman. “Art”, he said that night, “can help us see beyond the hatred of war.” It is a modest claim. But it is, at the moment, a brave one. And necessary.