government to fund a mainstream artistic multiculturalism along with a number of economic development initiatives, university area studies programs, changes to school curricula, and other programs.” In many ways, what writing programs and advocacy organizations now hail as a progressive vision of a professionalized multicultural English literature centered in US universities and nonprofits is a result of the efforts of these containment policies, which are still in effect today. As Juliana Spahr argues in her 2018 book Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment, this included “a well-funded and powerful counterinsurgency as foundations worked with the U.S. military bases, with headlines like ‘Don’t desert, go to Vietnam and kill your commanding officer.’” The government’s anxiety over the wide circulation of separatist and militant writing that spoke directly to the concerns of people resisting neocolonial rule was key to the formation of US social and cultural policy of the 1970s and ’80s. One hundred and forty-four underground papers on U.S. As Ammiel Alcalay points out in his 2012 book A Little History, there was a time when militant leftist writing was closely aligned with the idea of democracy in US culture: “You’re talking about, in 1969, 1970, five hundred and fifty underground newspapers in this country with a circulation of about five million. This is a task that has become increasingly difficult in a country whose ruling class remains committed to policies of containment - involving proxy wars, clandestine torture, censorship, state propaganda, and psychological warfare - policies that prevent domestic and international populations from making sense of the effects of that ruling class’s military ventures and economic policies.Īs Olson understood, the relationship between democracy, literature, and culture became particularly fraught in the late-20th-century United States, when structural transformations in publishing and academia dramatically reduced the circulation of independent magazines, newspapers, and presses publishing politically committed writing. In these lectures, Olson articulated one of the primary concerns of late-20th- and early-21st-century American writers: to speak not about the past as such but about the past’s relationship to the present - about what happens. There is nothing which happens to us which we don’t have the right to know what the - goes on. The rhyme is still “mystery.” We can’t stand it. Reflecting on the Greek verb from which “history” is derived - ἱστορεῖν - Olson offered another definition:īy history I mean to know, to really know.
IN HIS 1956 lectures at Black Mountain College (collected as The Special View of History in 1970), delivered 12 years after he resigned from Roosevelt’s Office of War Information and one year after Eisenhower deployed military advisors to Vietnam, Charles Olson spoke of history not as a record of the past but as a people’s right to knowledge.
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