Jean-Thomas Tremblay on New Narrative's Togetherness at Chicago Review

Jean-Thomas Tremblay's new essay for Chicago Review, "Together, in the First Person," considers New Narrative from its incarnation—rooted in work by Dodie Bellamy and Robert Glück—to its "new recruits." An excerpt:

Kevin [Killian] said that New Narrative had always been welcoming to all writers. As he and Bellamy write in their notes to the anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997, “New Narrative was always looking for new recruits—we took anybody who took even a passing interest in transgression or Bataille or Chester Himes or pop music.”[20] Writers Who Love Too Much and the “Communal Presence” conference [in fall 2017] honored the writers of color who had shaped and been shaped by New Narrative, including R. Zamora Linmark, Gabrielle Daniels, Roberto Bedoya, Renee Gladman, and Trisha Low. To reject New Narrative wholesale, as Kevin noted, would be to dismiss the contributions of those writers. I agreed with Kevin that an account of New Narrative as exclusively white would reproduce the racist exclusion it sought to denounce. And I believed him when he assured me that New Narrative had been welcoming. Yet it now strikes me that the movement’s openness—the readiness with which it had assimilated voices into its canon—was precisely what caused my conference interlocutors and me some discomfort.

Appropriation is likelier to fulfill a communal function if it is lateral or from below—if the appropriated are as privileged as, or more privileged than, the appropriators. Privilege can be hard to measure…

Read the full piece at Chicago Review.