Harvard University Press Blog

Cicadas Cicadas Cicadas

It’s just about cicada time here on the East Coast, when millions (billions?) of these strange, noisy creatures will make their way up through the dirt, looking for love. They’ve been waiting down there in wingless nymph form, feeding on the dilute sap of plant roots while they undergo the longest juvenile developmental period of any insect. When the ground reaches 64 degrees and they emerge, outnumbering humans hundreds-to-one and nearly deafening us for our troubles, well, it’s gonna get a bit freaky. Not for nothing did the colonists at Plymouth in 1634 dub them locusts, despite little resemblance to the Biblical grasshoppers.

As entomologist May Berenbaum assures, though, there’s nothing to worry about. “It’s not like these hordes of cicadas suck blood or zombify people,” she says. It’s just such mistaken attribution of outlandish abilities that inspired Berenbaum’s “modern bestiary,” The Earwig’s Tail. She’d come to realize, she writes in the book’s Preface, that “the majority of the most bandied-about insect facts familiar to the general public aren’t facts at all.” In The Earwig’s Tail she takes on twenty-six of “the most firmly entrenched modern mythical insects,” and, in many cases, leaves us with an even more fantastic truth.

When she gets to cicadas, Berenbaum turns to politics and Washington D.C., where the emergence of “Brood X” (the various populations of cicadas run on different schedules and are given roman numeral names) coincides with a presidential election every sixty-eight years, most recently in 2004.

Here’s Berenbaum:

First to take metaphorical advantage of the infestation was the Republican National Committee. On May 14, 2004, at the height of the emergence, 700,000 registered Republicans received an email attachment from the Republican National Committee. A narrator intoned, “Every 17 years, cicadas emerge, morph out of their shell, and change their appearance. The shells they leave behind are the only evidence they were here. Like a cicada, Senator Kerry would like to shed his Senate career and morph into a fiscal conservative, a centrist Democrat opposed to taxes, strong on defense . . . But, he leaves his record behind . . . when the cicadas emerge, they make a lot of noise. But they always revert to form, before disappearing again.” The voiceover accompanies a time-lapse film of a cicada eclosing and expanding its wings and ends with an animated cicada morphing into John Kerry.

The Kerry campaign’s retort? “Maybe, if given another 17 years, President Bush could create a job in Ohio.” Cicada burn.

Cicadas also had a cameo in presidential politics in 1902, Berenbaum reports, when President Theodore Roosevelt “was practically drowned out while trying to give a Memorial Day speech defending national policy to impose ‘orderly freedom’ in the Philippines.” The experience of inundation seems not to have adversely affected his feelings on colonialism.

We’ll wait to see what metaphors are made of this coming return.

Is the Financial Crisis Over?

Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy are the authors of The Crisis of Neoliberalism, which is new in paperback this spring. The book examines the financial crisis in the context of neoliberal globalization, arguing that repairing our economy will require a dramatic reversal of the free market ethos that’s enveloped most of the world over the past few decades. Below, the authors take stock of the movement toward “recovery” since their book’s original 2011 publication.

-----

The last quarter of 2008 was a key period in the progress of the current crisis in the United States and Europe. It marked the culmination of the financial component of the crisis, with the failure of major institutions in the United States, the beginning of the “great contraction,” and the export of the crisis worldwide. The trough was reached in the second quarter of 2009, a 4.6 percent fall of GDP in the United States (from the second quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2009), and 5.1 percent in the euro zone (from the first quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2009). The slow recovery of output that followed is commonly interpreted as the final stage of “the crisis.” This optimistic assessment is, we believe, erroneous.

A first observation is that the recovery was obtained at the cost of dramatic government deficits, 8.6 percent of GDP in the United States (for the third quarter of 2012), much less in the euro zone, but still 4.4 percent. Beginning with the contraction of output, then, the crisis entered a second phase, the “crisis of sovereign debts.” The growth of these debts peaked at 40 percent (annualized rate) in the third quarter of 2008 in the United States, and 18 percent in the third quarter of 2009 in the euro zone. At the end of 2012, in the United States, this growth rate was still larger than 10 percent, much more than the growth rate of GDP.

But the worst of everything is that the distinct paths in the two regions testify to the relationship between the levels of deficits and the levels of growth rates. Only government deficits can support demand levels. In the United States, consumer borrowing (which sustains the consumer spending that drives so much of the economy) is still nearly negligible compared to the average 8.9 percent of GDP it represented between 2003 and 2006, and the rate of default in households’ mortgages did not significantly decline from its peak value. In Europe, government deficits are much lower and a deflationary policy is conducted to further reduce them. Thus, instead of the low growth rates (1.5 percent for 2012) in the United States, the euro zone is entering into recession (-0.9 percent in 2012). Practically the entire zone is affected. Unemployment is soaring and the political situation is deteriorating. Overall, the alternative is between the U.S. model thus far, namely the preservation of (poor) growth rates thanks to record expansion rates of sovereign debts or, the euro model, the contraction of deficits and the new plunge.

Launch of the Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America launches today, having gone from concept to concrete more swiftly than anyone could have hoped. As has been envisioned from the beginning, the DPLA is “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that draws on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in the current and future generations.” The DPLA begins with an already-impressive array of materials, but has even bolder ambitions, along with an encouraging concern with sustainability.

No individual has been as important to the DPLA’s trajectory as Harvard’s University Librarian (and many-time HUP author) Robert Darnton, who has tracked the project’s progress in a series of articles for the New York Review of Books. In his most recent, he recaps the initiative’s brief history and explains its intentions:

How to think of it? Not as a great edifice topped with a dome and standing on a gigantic database. The DPLA will be a distributed system of electronic content that will make the holdings of public and research libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies available, effortlessly and free of charge, to readers located at every connecting point of the Web. To make it work, we must think big and begin small. At first, the DPLA’s offering will be limited to a rich variety of collections—books, manuscripts, and works of art—that have already been digitized in cultural institutions throughout the country. Around this core it will grow, gradually accumulating material of all kinds until it will function as a national digital library.

Darnton goes on to detail a DPLA-affiliated project that is particularly exciting for us here at the Press:

At one time or other, nearly every student comes in contact with a poem by Emily Dickinson, who probably qualifies as America’s favorite poet. But Dickinson’s poems are especially problematic. Only a few of them, horribly mangled, were published in her lifetime.

As Darnton notes, the manuscript copies of Dickinson’s poems “pose important puzzles, because they contain quirky punctuation, capitalization, spacing, and other touches that have profound implications for their meaning.” The originals, which are held in a few invaluable collections—notably at Amherst College Library, the Boston Public Library, and Harvard’s Houghton Library—have now been digitized and combined with printed editions edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955 and by Ralph W. Franklin in 1981, both of which are jewels of HUP’s own catalog. The manuscripts and printed poems will be brought together with a wealth of other supplementary documentation to create an Emily Dickinson Archive. Brigham Young University has also partnered with Amherst College, the BPL, Harvard, HUP, and the DPLA in this project that will greatly expand access to our collective knowledge of one of the country’s great literary icons while also inspiring new scholarship and discourse on her life and work.

The Copley branch of the BPL—the first large free municipal library in the United States—was to host a gala launch for the DPLA today. The Copley library is now at the center of a crime scene, though, directly beside the terrible and tragic Boston Marathon explosions, and so today’s events have been cancelled. In his statement on the cancellation, DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen called the building of a new library “one of the greatest examples of what humans can do together to extend the light against darkness,” and the site’s launch will proceed today as planned. An even larger event to properly celebrate the creation of the DPLA is now in the works for this fall.

Broken Window Dressing

Last week, Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy announced his intention to bring “broken windows” policing to the city in the form of an ordinance that, if approved, would allow for criminal (rather than civil) implications for those who disregard tickets issued for routine offenses. “Fixing the little things prevents the big things,” he said, neatly encapsulating the thrust of the broken windows theory. With origins in a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling that itself called on ideas from a 1968 book by Wilson, the theory’s central premise is that public disorder sends a message that encourages crime, and that restoring order reduces offenses. The Chicago plan, subsequently endorsed by mayor Rahm Emanuel, would be just the latest application of what critical theorist and legal scholar Bernard Harcourt describes as a politically popular but analytically weak strategy.

Broken windows policing, also known as the “order-maintenance” approach, is most commonly associated with New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani’s “zero tolerance” crackdown in the early 1990s. The apparent success of the NYC program led hundreds of law enforcement representatives from around the world to visit the NYPD for briefings and instruction in New York-style policing, conventionally assumed to have been proven effective.

Surprisingly, though, the broken windows theory had never been empirically verified, and, as Harcourt argued in 2001’s Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing, the then-existing social scientific data suggested that the theory is probably not right. In a chapter he’s just contributed to Prevention and the Limits of the Criminal Law, a new book from Oxford University Press, Harcourt has surveyed the most recent studies and again concludes that the broken windows approach is really “window dressing,” and that there are actually “more profound processes of real estate development and wealth redistribution”—with complicated race, class, and ethnic dimensions—that are obscured by faith in order maintenance.

With record homicide rates devastating communities and bringing unwanted outside scrutiny, one can understand why the city of Chicago would be looking for a new policing strategy. Whether or not the adoption of broken windows policing can be causally linked to crime reduction—and the data suggest it cannot—the practice rests on a series of assumptions and judgments about the nature of disorder. As Harcourt explained in a 2002 Boston Review article based on Illusion of Order, and as we see confirmed by New York City’s aggressive Stop and Frisk policy, itself a broken windows-style tactic, such theories reflect the modern picture of the disorderly as “an unattached, young, most often racialized other, with a powerful tendency to commit crime and cause disorder.”

The Economics of Voting Rights

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, a case challenging a major provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That provision, Section 5, holds that before making changes to voting procedures, jurisdictions in all or part of 16 states must convince the federal government that the changes won’t amount to “denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.” Despite the law having been repeatedly upheld by Congress—with overwhelming support as recently as 2006—Shelby County, Alabama, argues that the law is outdated, unnecessary, and unfair.

After oral arguments and questioning made the position of the Court’s conservative Justices clear, it’s widely assumed that Section 5 will be struck down, in what Court-watcher Linda Greenhouse characterizes as an all but certain “evisceration” of the Voting Rights Act. For those seeking to understand the case, its place in the Roberts Court’s pattern of rulings on the “sordid business” of race, and how it’s happened that the Court now seems poised to give itself a power that should reside with Congress, Greenhouse’s reporting is a great place to start.

Here though, we’d like to consider a recent study of the Voting Rights Act that shows its effects to have been even broader than is often understood. The Act’s standing as a watershed moment for the extension of civil rights in this country is of course a given, but in a new book, economic historian Gavin Wright shows that the VRA was also extremely significant to the advancement of economic equality in the covered regions. In Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South, Wright outlines the commonly overlooked connections between the civil rights movement and the struggle for economic justice, arguing that breakthroughs like the VRA were an economic boon to African Americans with no commensurate setback for southern whites.

A key contribution of Wright’s book is the simple reminder that, on the ground and in the moment, economic concerns were always part of the push for equal rights:

From the bus boycotts of the 1950s to the sit-ins of the early 1960s, demands for equal access to services were almost always coupled with demands for jobs providing those services. In December 1955 the Montgomery Improvement Association called for “employment of Negro bus operators in predominantly Negro residential sections,” a demand that was actually quite radical for the time because of the quasi-legal powers bus drivers held. Flyers like the one [pictured below] from Warrenton, North Carolina, were circulated during public accommodations disputes throughout the region. The appeal for “equal opportunity for employment” and the complaint that stores “do not hire any Negroes in responsible jobs” are, if anything, more prominent than the demand for fountain service. In Birmingham, pickets wore sandwich boards reading “Don’t buy where you cannot be a salesman” and continued their pressure until each downtown department store hired at least one black clerk.

Changes for the Church?

In a discussion of the process by which the Catholic Church will select a successor to Pope Benedict, the NPR correspondent Sylvia Poggioli (the real winner in this whole episode) raises the possibility that we may see serious changes to Church structure:

Can this global organization, the Catholic Church with 1.2 billion followers, continue to be governed by an absolute monarch, or is it time for a more collegial management, as it was in the early stages of the church and as was recommended by the Second Vatican Council? Some analysts say Benedict’s resignation has potentially opened the gates for a major overhaul of Church governance.

As Father John O’Malley explains in his definitive recounting of Vatican II, nothing on the council’s agenda was more contentious than the relationship of the bishops to the papacy:

The technical expression for the relationship the council advocated was “collegiality.” What kind of authority did the bishops have over the church at large when they acted collectively, that is, collegially; how was that authority exercised in relationship to the pope; and how was collegiality different from “Conciliarism” (supremacy of council over pope), a position condemned in the fifteenth century and repeatedly condemned thereafter? Closely connected with this issue was the more technical question of how bishops related to the sacrament of orders. Also implied was the question of what voice others in the church, including the laity, rightly have in decision-making.

O’Malley offers the proliferation of papal encyclicals from the mid-19th century on as evidence of the growing centrality of Rome, as more and more of the Catholic world learned to look to the Pope for the answers to all questions. Technology, too, played a role in this centralization, with the invention of the telephone and the telegraph only bolstering the Vatican’s ability to hold sway over its most far-flung constituents.

Interesting, then, to consider the fact that just two short months ago the Pope himself joined Twitter and invited the world to submit questions. Mind-numbing and time-sucking though it is, no one’s suggesting that tweeting’s to blame for Benedict’s abdication, though the timing is certainly curious. Could it be the case that the communication technology that once solidified the Pope’s centrality has now advanced so far as to render it untenable? At least for a man of 85?

Again from O’Malley:

The majority at the council certainly did not press for a statement on collegiality merely to make a theological point. They brought it to the fore, like other ressourcements, because it had practical ramifications. The bishops who promoted the doctrine and fought for it so passionately wanted to redress what they saw as the imbalance between the authority exercised especially by the Roman Congregations and their own authority as heads of “local churches.” Collegiality was the supreme instance in the council of the effort to moderate the centralizing tendencies of the ecclesiastical institution, of the effort to give those from the periphery a more authoritative voice not only back home but also in the center.

In our new world those distinctions collapse; the center now is back home, and vice versa. So, as Poggioli asks, is a single infallible figure still the answer for a world so over-connected? We’ll see.

The Ever-Deeper Ideal of Freedom

Last week we heard from John Burt, author of Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism, on the promise of equality in Barack Obama’s second inaugural address. In the piece below, Burt further explores the historical allusions in Obama’s speech, and considers the contingent and expanding ideal of freedom in American history.

-----

President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address expresses optimism about our country’s seeing its way clear to the next step, rather more optimism than Lincoln felt. To see the difference, consider the way Obama juxtaposed three different allusions to speeches of Lincoln about the lessons of the Civil War:

Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by the sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.

The first sentence quotes a famous sentence from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. In Obama’s version, the blood drawn by the lash of the master and the blood drawn by the sword of the soldier are the (high) price of a lesson by now thoroughly learned. Lincoln’s version is rather darker. What Lincoln said was:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

In saying this, Lincoln imagined that God may have in mind a course of retribution for the United States so severe that the not-yet-ended Civil War will seem only like the first act; furthermore, should this dire fate befall the Union, Lincoln conceded that it will be a fate the Union has richly deserved.

The phrase about how no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free alludes, of course, to Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech of 1858, and it does capture one of the main lessons of the Civil War. But when Lincoln referred to the same subject in the opening sentences of the Gettysburg Address, he saw the question not as whether a republic divided into slave states and free states could survive (he already knew that that question had a negative answer) but whether any republic that chose to test the proposition that all men are created equal could endure. That is a related but distinct problem and the question it raised was in Lincoln’s mind still an open one.

Finally, the phrase about making ourselves anew alludes to the key paragraph of Lincoln’s December 1862 Annual Message:

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Lincoln here did not just imagine the Republic learning a hard-earned lesson. He imagined the Republic reinventing itself completely, freeing itself from illusions about itself to which it has been enthralled, enslaved. Now the Republic has indeed moved forward together since the Civil War, and President Obama certainly knows as well as anyone else does how messy and slow and partial that progress was.

The Promise of Equality

Within days of President Obama’s second inauguration the country and the government had returned from the moment’s pageantry to the social and fiscal challenges we face. His inaugural address, though—with its echoes of hallowed American oratory and its own appeals to posterity—deserves far greater consideration than afforded by the swift turn to business. In the piece below, the first of two, John Burt examines the ways in which the speech links Barack Obama’s sense of American identity to that of Lincoln. Burt’s new book, Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism, is a deep engagement with the limits of liberalism and with democracy’s inability to settle moral conflict.

-----

President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address draws together, in an organic whole, themes from the speeches and acts of the Presidents he most admires. Its vision of an economy of mutual care, in which young and old, rich and poor, sick and well, share an ethos of responsibility for each other and express that responsibility in law and policy, derives, with allowances for changed political circumstances and chastening experiences, from the thinking of Franklin Roosevelt, and Roosevelt’s great successor, Lyndon Johnson. Its vision of America’s place in the world looks back, in ways tempered by harsh experiences, through President Truman’s Marshall Plan to President Wilson’s Fourteen Points. But most of all, Obama’s vision of what it is to be an American, his argument that a shared sense of the moral equality of all people is not only an important political value but the ground of American identity itself, the thing that makes Americans a people, ties his sense of what American nationality is to Lincoln’s.

Quotations from Lincoln, whether direct or oblique, recur throughout President Obama’s speech. What most descends from Lincoln is the way Obama reads the promises of the Declaration of Independence:

We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional—what makes us American—is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

What is Lincolnian about this passage is its sense that in America a never completely fulfilled vocation for moral equality stands in the place that shared blood, or shared language, or shared religion stands in other countries. Lincoln argued, in a speech in Chicago in July, 1858, that it is the belief that the promises of the Declaration are “the father of all moral principle in them,” that gives all Americans, wherever their ancestors may be from, a right to claim American nationality “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.” It is a calling for equality, Lincoln maintained, that distinguishes America as America and defines its place in the world. This calling to advance equality is what is exceptional about America, and its success or, all too often, failure, to live up to the demands of that calling, both within its borders and in the world at large, is the measure of its success or failure as a nation. What is more, the course of American history, as Lincoln argued in the Gettysburg Address, is a test, a test in which the rest of the world has a stake, of the viability of equality as a political ideal.

It is by virtue of equality, by virtue of recognizing each other as equal citizens with an equal claim to dignity and public respect, that we share a public world, and it is our participation in that world that shapes our collective identity as a nation and our private identities as citizens. Identity is not atomic; we are what we are because we are already bound up with each other, and equality assures that however else we may be connected with each other, we are also bound up in an ethos of mutual care that shapes our being and gives it a moral vocation. We are what we are as individuals because we share the promise to acknowledge each other as citizens and to take up the obligations toward each other that go with citizenship, with a shared investment in the common life of our republic.

Aaron Swartz and Prosecutorial Discretion

In the sad story of Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old internet pioneer, organizer, and activist who took his own life on January 11th, many have questioned the doggedness with which federal prosecutors were pursuing him. Swartz, who was under indictment for allegedly downloading a large number of papers from the JSTOR database with the intention of making them freely available online, faced 13 felonies for which he was threatened with up to 50 years in prison. Despite JSTOR itself urging that the charges be dropped, prosecutors apparently insisted on prison time and a guilty plea on all counts as conditions of any bargain.

The general consensus has been that the government sought to make an example of Swartz, and that the case drove his turn to suicide at least in part. The Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, a close friend and collaborator of Swartz’s, highlights the seeming injustice of the prosecutorial tenacity:

For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House—and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”

In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million-dollar trial in April—his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.

Writing at The Verge, Tim Carmody offers an answer, detailing the symbolic work the justice department likely expected their prosecution of Swartz to do:

Aaron had become a target for investigation by the federal government. He was on file as a “hacker” who was willing to exploit gaps in the law and in networks in order to make his point… [In the JSTOR case], the Secret Service and US Attorney’s office, led by Assistant US Attorney Stephen Heymann and his boss Carmen Ortiz, had both the discretion and the institutional incentives to run wild on him. And that, with many, many ellipses, is how we got here… The government didn’t need to prosecute a big fish if it could make Aaron look like one. The police don’t need to stop drug kingpins if they can make anyone in a car with drugs look like one. Turning disobedience into felonies becomes the easiest thing in the world. The prosecutors wanted headlines, conviction statistics, promotions, and to make the public feel that computer crime was important and dangerous but something was being done about it. Aaron Swartz, because of his prominence in the tech community and history with PACER and SOPA, was just notorious enough to get the job done. Aaron Swartz was linkbait.

Perry Link on Mo Yan

The Chinese writer Mo Yan accepted the Nobel prize in literature this week in Stockholm, offering remarks that further fanned the flames of controversy surrounding his selection. After being dismissed by Salman Rushdie as a “patsy of the régime” for his failure to support the release of jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, and having his Nobel selection decried by Chinese artist and agitator Ai Weiwei as “an insult to humanity and to literature,” the author defended censorship as necessary, likening it to airport security checks.

Few observers could fail to note the contrasting responses to Mo Yan’s honor this year and to Liu Xiaobo’s in 2010, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Whereas in 2010 the Chinese government denounced and boycotted the award, this time the state has proudly received the honor, even announcing plans to spend $110 million making Mo Yan’s home village a “Culture Experience Zone.”

Some of the Chinese people, on the other hand, evince a response less warm. In a long consideration of Mo Yan’s work and Nobel recognition, Perry Link quotes the satirist Wang Xiaohong imagining Alfred Nobel’s distress:

Two years ago my people gave a prize to a Chinese, and in doing so offended the Chinese government. Today they gave another prize to a Chinese, and in doing so offended the Chinese people. My goodness. The whole of China offended in only two years.

Link, a co-editor of No Enemies, No Hatred, our recent volume of Liu Xiaobo’s writings, and author of a forthcoming inquiry into the workings of the Chinese language, An Anatomy of Chinese, outlines a series of recent statements and actions which have contributed to wide disappointment in Mo Yan’s politics. For his part, Mo Yan asks that his writing be allowed to exist apart from his extratextual political positioning. While acknowledging the complications of any such compartmentalization, Link points to the larger question of “how and to what extent a writer’s immersion in, and adjustment to, an authoritarian political regime affects what he or she writes.”

Link notes Mo Yan’s focus on society’s downtrodden, the “poor farmers who are bullied and bankrupted by local officials,” but contrasts his attention paid with that of dissident writers like Liu Xiaobo and Zheng Yi. “Liu and Zheng,” Link writes, “denounce the entire authoritarian system, including the people at the highest levels. Mo Yan and other inside-the-system writers blame local bullies and leave the top out of the picture.”

Link also highlights Mo Yan’s libidinous “black humor,” the characteristic most often lauded by his supporters, but points to such writing’s usefulness to the regime for its obscuring of the past and its function as a “safety valve.” Link cites Liu Xiaobo’s 2004 article “The Erotic Carnival in Recent Chinese History,” excerpted here from No Enemies, No Hatred: