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Jennifer Senior

Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture

Late last month, a young man named Kosoko Jackson became the second young adult author

in five weeks to pull a debut work just before it hit the shelves. His book, “A Place for Wolves,”

ran afoul of the sensibilities of the Twitter gatekeeping class, which deemed it insensitive to

Muslims and unduly focused on people of privilege.

5 There was an obvious irony to his story, a karmic boomerang: Jackson, who is black and gay,

often worked as a “sensitivity reader” for major publishing houses, which meant his job was to

flag just the sort of problem content for which he was now being run out of town. He was

Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine. One of the captains of “cancel

culture” – which urges people to shun the insensitive, the oppressive, the morally questionable –

10 got canceled himself.

As often happens with these things, the online pile-on was mainly led by people who hadn’t

read Jackson’s book. It did start with someone who had – a reader who’d written an

intemperate, if highly impassioned, review of an advance copy for the community website

Goodreads. But it most likely would have remained just that, a pan from a citizen critic, had

15 the review not been noticed by that corner of Twitter that’s obsessed with Y.A. fiction. Even

by Twitter standards, it’s a hothouse subculture – self-conscious, emotional, quick to injure.

Not unlike teenagers themselves.

I have read Jackson’s book. Before I get to the actual contents, let’s get this out of the way:

What happened to Jackson is frightening. Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest

20 for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power. In the Twitterverse,

ideologues have far more power than moderates. They have more followers; their tweets

get more traction (studies have shown that emotional tweets pretty much always have more

traction); they set the terms of their neighborhood’s culture and tone.

But this does not mean they have better judgment.

25 This episode is proof of nothing if not of Twitter’s asymmetrical power: A semi-anonymous

mob (the leader of the charge was someone with the handle @flightofstaz) can sufficiently

scare an author into withdrawing his book, even though it received a starred review from

Booklist and was a Kids’ Indie Next pick. (Not a small deal, that.) The die-hards in this army

of crusaders will argue they’re doing it in the name of diversity, but it’s really just the opposite:

30 If Twitter controls publishing, we’ll soon enter a dreary monoculture that admits no book

unless it has been prejudged and meets the standards of the censors.

What Jackson’s case really demonstrates is just how narrow and untenable the rules for

writing Y.A. literature are. In a tweet last May, Jackson himself more or less articulated them:

“Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage

35 should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the

AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

In a live Q. and A. for an online children’s literature conference in January, Jackson explained

that he was at one point tempted to write tangentially about immigration, but his Latino friends

talked him out of it: He’d be encroaching on their turf, poaching their spot on the shelves.

40 So he didn’t. But his first novel, “A Place for Wolves,” is not exclusively populated by gay

African-Americans. His two protagonists are gay teenagers, yes, and one of them is black.

But his secondary characters are … Serbs and Albanians. The book takes place in Kosovo,

during the early days of its civil war in the late ’90s.

Let’s stop to contemplate this for a moment. When Jackson was left to his own devices to

45 create and dream – rather than to simply read books for possible cultural violations – his

natural, irrepressible reflex was to write about something that went beyond his own experience.

Because that’s what novelists do: conjure other worlds, imagine their way into other realities,

guess at the texture of other people’s consciousness. It’s part of the pleasure of inventing

stuff for a living. […]

50 What raised people’s hackles was that an Albanian Muslim is one of the book’s villains, when

it was the Albanian Muslims who suffered disproportionately during the Kosovo war. That,

and the idea that two comparatively privileged American teenagers could be the focus of the

book.

Did Jackson do this out of malice? No. It was his explicit intention, according to an author’s

55 note, to complicate the reader’s picture of a tragic ethnic war. There’s nothing wrong, per se,

with making a victim a villain, or a hero a jerk: Art is filled with antiheroes with redeeming

qualities, whether they’re Humbert Humbert or Tony Soprano. Nor are two American teenagers

in a war-torn country, on the face of it, a bad premise for a Y.A. book.

The book’s real sin is that Jackson didn’t do what he set out to do. Though he can write with

60 charm and the authentic sass of an American adolescent, much of the book is painfully clumsy

and poorly paced – which makes it a fairly typical debut novel, by the way. His job as a

sensitivity reader also shows: “Sounded a little Eurocentric to me,” is a not unrepresentative

observation by the narrator.

If the book-buying public had found “A Place for Wolves” as criminally distasteful and

65 insensitive as Twitter did, it would have sunk the novel in slower, more deliberate ways.

Librarians would have read it and taken a pass. Bookstore owners would have decided it

wasn’t worth the space. Book critics would have savaged it – or worse, ignored it.

It should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the

chance. The mob got to it first.

Annotations

2 · to pull work – here: to withdraw a new book

5 · karmic – resulting from one’s actions; reference to the Buddhist concept of karma

8 · Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine – key figure in the French Revolution responsible for killing many people and finally being killed himself by guillotine

14 · pan – here: very strong criticism

15 · Y.A. fiction – short for Young Adult Fiction

28 · Booklist – book review magazine published by the American Library Association

28 · Kids’ Indie Next pick – books for children and young adults recommended by the American Booksellers Association in corporation with independent bookstores

37 · Q. and A. – here: short for Question-and-Answer session

57 · Humbert Humbert – controversial protagonist of the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

57 · Tony Soprano – main character in the TV drama series The Sopranos about a mafia family

2. Examine the way in which Jennifer Senior expresses her stance on "cancel culture" and the effects it has on authors. Consider both the structure of her argument and her use of language.

(Analysis) [16 Punkte]