Stanford University Press Blog

Letting AI Read for Us Can Undermine Our Thinking

The complexities of outsourcing literacy

NAOMI S. BARON

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

It is said that in the tenth century, the Grand Vizier of Persia traveled with his books –117,000 of them. A caravan of 400 camels bore the load, walking in alphabetical order. Fast forward eight centuries to Napoleon Bonaparte, who, on military campaigns, brought along both a portable library and personal librarian. More recently, at the October 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair (whose origins trace back to the middle ages), 215,000 people came to enjoy the offerings of 4,000 exhibiters.

Reading has long been valued as a source of information and ideas, not to mention as an enjoyable pastime. Media options have evolved, from handwritten manuscripts to print to digital books to audiobooks. But the task for readers remains the same. Besides decoding the words, we strive to make sense of them. Our interpretations often draw upon personal experience and other works we have read. Especially for material that engages or challenges us, the process of reading becomes an act of thinking.

A crucial question in the age of artificial intelligence is whether AI threatens to undermine human reading. As a linguist who has studied the impact of AI on human writing, I am equally concerned about people relying on the technology to do their reading and sense-making for them.

Modern Language Association Conference 2024

 

In addition to our booth in the MLA exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Literary Studies at SUP.

 

Virtual Exhibit

Recent Award Winners

MLA Resources

 

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Virtual Exhibit

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Literary Studies titles with discount code S24XMLA through our virtual exhibit ».

The Legacy of Project Mohole

The Subterranean in practice and popular imagination

PATRICK WHITMARSH

1898 Illustration By A. D. McCormick for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe. Google Books, Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons

 

In May 2023, researchers for the International Ocean Discovery Program, or IODP (a collaborative effort that draws funding from multiple government institutions across four continents), retrieved core samples from the planet’s mantle. The achievement is over sixty years in the making; in 1961, scientists and engineers aboard the barge CUSS I practiced an experimental drilling routine off Guadalupe Island in preparation for reaching the mantle. The official attempt, known as Project Mohole, proved a disappointing failure. The company selected to conduct the drilling—Brown & Root, a construction firm with no offshore experience—delivered minimal results and a blown budget. Although core samples from sediment beneath the ocean floor yielded some valuable information, the drilling failed to reach the earth’s mantle, which would remain out of reach for decades.. The Deep Sea Drilling Project (the predecessor of the IODP) struggled for years to succeed where Mohole had not, until the team aboard the JOIDES Resolution, the IODP’s flagship vessel operated out of Texas A&M University, cracked the case, extracting “a core of rock more than 1 kilometer long.” The discovery is of no small significance, carrying with it the potential for unlocking subterranean secrets long inaccessible. In geochemist Jessica Warren’s words, “We’re finally going to see the Wizard of Oz.”

Modern Language Association Conference 2023

 

In addition to our booth in the MLA exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Literary Studies at SUP.

 

Virtual Exhibit

Recent Award Winners

MLA Resources

 

---

Virtual Exhibit

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Literary Studies titles with discount code S23XMLA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».

Reflections on a Year of Acrimonious Discourse

How the German translation of Multidirectional Memory helped spark a national debate

MICHAEL ROTHBERG

Photo of  the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

A German version of this article was originally published in Berliner Zeitung. Posted with permission.

One year ago my book Multidirectional Memory » was published in German translation, twelve years after it appeared in English. In 2009 the book was received by scholars around the world as part of what Astrid Erll called the “third phase” of memory studies. Scholars in this third phase sought to revise understandings of collective memory inherited from the influential work of the first two phases. Scholars in the third phase saw memory as dynamic: as transnational, transcultural, and pluralistic. Multidirectional Memory, which pursued the interplay of memories of the Holocaust, colonialism, and slavery across a transnational space that linked Black people and Jews, quickly became a standard reference point in scholarship on collective memory.

The reception of the book in Germany in 2021 was completely different and, indeed, unprecedented. Instead of being part of an international scholarly discussion of the nature of collective remembrance, Multidirectional Memory found itself in the middle of fierce conflicts in the German public sphere about the Holocaust’s uniqueness, the nature of antisemitism, and the critique of Israeli policy. The translation triggered a new round of debate in an ongoing cycle of controversies. The “multidirectional memory” debate built on the previous year’s “Mbembe affair,” in which the prominent Cameroonian intellectual Achille Mbembe was accused—unfairly, in my opinion—of antisemitism and Holocaust relativization based on cherry-picked citations from his writings on apartheid and Israel. The German edition of Multidirectional Memory led, in turn, to increased discussion of the relationship between the Nazi genocide of Jews and European colonialism. Critics of Multidirectional Memory used the opportunity of the translation to revive a debate about historian Jürgen Zimmerer’s work on the relation between Germany’s colonial genocide of the Herrero and Nama and the Holocaust.

As all of these different contested aspects of the German past and present were converging, a sharply critical essay for the Swiss blog Geschichte der Gegenwart by the US-based Australian historian Dirk Moses appeared. Moses identified key tenets of what he saw as a German civil religion that had become illiberal or even authoritarian: the absolute uniqueness of the Holocaust, the absolute distinction of antisemitism from other forms of racism, and the close connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. After Moses’s essay received lively and nuanced discussion in English, the debate was picked up by the German press where the tone changed radically. Now, prominent senior historians and well-placed journalists responded harshly and dismissively to Moses’s critique.

Instead of relitigating the question of the Holocaust’s uniqueness, I want to consider these controversies from a different angle. It is clear that the assertion that Germany’s much vaunted Holocaust memory culture has developed significant, even anti-democratic, flaws has touched a nerve.

Modern Language Association Conference 2021

 

To capture some of the spirit of gathering together in the MLA exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Literary Studies at SUP.

 

New Books and New SUP Authors

2021 Literature Catalog

From the Blog Archives

Recent Award Winners

MLA Resources

 

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New Books and New SUP Authors

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Literary Studies titles with discount code S21XMLA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».

“I Slip Into Your Skin”: Identity and Novelistic Representation

A look at the ethical aesthetic of Girl, Woman, Other

DOROTHY J. HALE

Oct. 10th, 2008— Bernardine Evaristo at a reading in the Long Room, Lancaster Maritime Museum. CC BY 2.0. Photo by Lancaster Litfest via Flickr. 

 

A happy problem for those of us who write on contemporary fiction is the continuous expansion of the field. After I completed the manuscript for The Novel and the New Ethics, I read Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize–winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other, and wished I could have included in my book a chapter on her work.

Girl, Woman, Other: Evaristo’s title trumpets the centrality of identity to its representational project while also making explicit the specific categories of identity which are its guiding concern. But while the title implicitly links the value of literature in the contemporary moment with its capacity to depict—to turn Georg Lukács’s phrase—a new social order and new type of woman, it also raises the question of what literary fiction brings to identity as a personal and societal project.¹ To make social space for new identities, why not pen one’s autobiography or profile the lives of real women?

The Novel and the New Ethics » argues that crucial to the contemporary understanding of fiction’s social value is a belief in fiction’s power to offer a meaningful encounter with otherness. The contemporary writers I discuss—Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Richard Russo, and Marilynne Robinson—all share Evaristo’s belief that “slipping into the skin of characters who are clearly not myself” (as Evaristo puts it) is the defining ethical task of the fiction writer.² Importantly, all these contemporary writers each pursue that ethical task with a full awareness of the political and ideological limitations that make the goal of “becoming other” (to use Morrison’s phrase) an aspirational goal that inspires an ongoing ethical endeavor.³

The Ethics and Politics of Space

Reflecting on boundaries during a pandemic.

DEAN J. FRANCO

Black Lives Matter protest. Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay

 

How do we navigate space ethically in the midst of two national emergencies? The pandemic requires us to be distanced, keeping largely to our private spaces. The other emergency, enduring structural racism, prompts the collective occupation of public space. The distancing necessary for slowing the spread of Covid-19 is fundamentally ethical because we are acting as individuals to safeguard others, and we are rightly upset when social distancing and masking becomes politicized. Public protest, on the other hand, is fundamentally political, and may involve actions that would be considered unethical in other circumstances

Earlier this season, when I went to my first of several protests to decry and mourn the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and too many others—including John Neville who died in detention at the local Forsyth County jail—I was surprised and relived to find that all of my fellow protestors were wearing masks. Masking to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 is among the most straightforwardly ethical acts I can think of, representative of the ethics of proximity that would have us recognize the other as one who is or could be near us, our “neighbor” to draw out that word’s etymology. In Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, “the face” of the other hails me into ethical being and enjoins me to a responsibility for the other’s life ¹. Though for Levinas, “the face” is less a physical feature of the other and more the manifest vulnerability of being human, wearing a face mask to protect another is almost too on-the-nose, and though we could quickly get tangled up on a discourse of face/face-mask/effacement, it bears emphasizing that wearing a mask to a public protest is an expression of individual care for the collective. Masking at a protest may be the pivot ethics into politics, and certainly of individuality into collective will—from neighbor to neighborhood, as Levinasian theorists might put it—as particular people become part of the assemblage of a mass gathering. Raising our voices and fists, lying down in the streets, holding the tears and prayers of other protestors: even as we are assembled for a political cause, we assemble a community of love. 

For those of us who study literature and language, we are pressed to ask, what is the efficacy of writing and representation for material structural change?

There is a considerable amount of writing on the figure of the neighbor as the junction of ethics and politics, and there is likewise a wealth of scholarship on the complex overlay of history, geography, and the built environment which underwrites actual neighborhoods. However, there has been comparatively little written that engages theories of the neighbor with actual neighborhoods—one of many boundary crossings I undertake in The Border and the Line » on the way to examining how race materializes through spatial practice. The border of my own neighborhood is marked off by University Parkway, the site of a particularly bold protest in July when protestors stepped out into the street and blocked eight lanes of traffic. University is one of those roadways common across the south, which exists as a corridor for commerce and for flows of influence and power which also creates and perpetuates an ongoing, destructive barrier through the neighborhood upon which it was built. Constructed in the 1950’s as a connector of the northern part of the city where my university is situated to downtown, the creators of University Parkway tore through the largely Black, low-income neighborhood, which remains economically depressed. I was often dismayed to see residents dashing across eight lanes of traffic from one side of the street to the other—not just young men, but whole families, even, occasionally, individuals in motorized wheel chairs. There are almost no sidewalks nor crosswalks, even though a large school is on one side of University, with many students living on the other side. I came to understand, this is what racial abjection looks like: vulnerability and exposure, with Black residents spectacularly under-served by public infrastructure. As I argue in The Border and the Line, while race is a construct of law and language, it nonetheless materializes in real, physical ways, bearing its reality with a specific locality. In Winston-Salem, the built environment, including freeways, parkways, derelict manufacturing sites, and even a public land trust starkly divide black and white neighborhoods, and in some cases exist as buffers between the very wealthy neighborhoods founded by company town managers and the very poor neighborhoods founded for the workers of those same companies. For protestors, stepping out onto University Parkway disrupted the flow of commerce and called attention to the road’s deadening impact on local residents’ lives.

Revealing an Asian and Latinx America

The 2020 census will show how the future minority-majority U.S. will depend on Latinxs and Asian Americans.

LONG LE-KHAC

Question from the 2010 census.

Photo by Spot Us. Via Flickr. No changes were made. CC BY-SA 2.0.

 

The 2020 census is upon us. The massive, once-a-decade operation to count the population of the U.S. will engulf American households in the coming weeks. As always the stakes of the census are much greater than numbers, but this year they are amplified by the proximity to the presidential election. The census is our nation’s mechanism for registering the transformations in the social landscape and constituencies of America. Over the next ten years, tough debates on how the nation should respond to its changes will build on the demographic story the census reveals. Distributions of political power and billions of dollars in resources are at stake.

With operations gearing up and no numbers ready to crunch yet, one outcome is already certain: the census will show the increasing centrality of Latinxs and Asian Americans to the U.S. Alongside those who identify as multiracial, they are the fastest growing racial/ethnic groups. The Asian American population increased 72% from 2000-2015 while the Latinx population grew 60% in the same period. Together, they account for over 2/3 of the population growth in the U.S. since 2000. From only 4% of the nation’s population in the 1960s to 24% today, they are projected to top 40% in the coming decades.

Asian Americans and Latinxs are the central players in the turbulent national drama sweeping the U.S. towards the minority-majority threshold, a historic tipping point over which much ink will surely be spilled this census year. But whether Americans welcome this dramatic transformation or view it with apprehension, they, regardless of political affiliation, have not fully understood this forthcoming change.

Distance and Depth

Understanding the intersect of literary text and computers.

MARTIN PAUL EVE

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

One of the ways in which literary studies recurrently defends itself is through the idea of critical attention. English literature, as a field, is sold as allowing students to move from eddies of formalist close textual attention to the tidal fluxes of large-scale literary history, all while developing their thinking within politico-theoretical streams that extend the possibility of progressive real-world change. These oscillations between theory, archive, and formalism sometimes form the bases for scholarly contention: ‘what is the proper object of literary studies?’ For students of the discipline, though, such variety often coheres into a dynamic and stimulating field that does, indeed, teach critical thinking skills and can foster a life-long love of reading.

‘To err is human’, the oft-misattributed quotation runs, ‘but to really foul things up you need a computer’. And ‘computational literary studies’ or ‘digital literary studies’ has attracted some flack for fouling things up, to put it mildly. Conventionally, approaches in this space towards literary texts have been critiqued as ‘bad’ stylistics/formalism; as a-theoretical/anti-progressive; or as historical mis-readings. The apparently scientistic incursion of computational approaches evokes a fear for the historical, textual, and political sensitivities on which literary studies has staked its claims of critical thought. The fact that digital humanities seems, to many, to attract funding only serves to confirm its misplacement in literary studies departments.

Many arguments for digital approaches to the study of literature, though, rest on the problems of canon and selection (which, of course, are overtly political). More works of fiction are published every year than it is possible to read in a lifetime. Our judgements on the worth of fiction, both new and old, are conditioned by a set of market practices that limit our understanding of true mutations in writing over time. In this light, recent books by Ted Underwood, Andrew Piper, and others have built on the traditions of so-called distant reading but also predictive modelling in order better to understand the larger scale sweeps of literary history, without resorting to periodizing description. Charting continuous change rather than distinct epistemic and aesthetic breaks, such methods examine computationally the effect that linguistic mutations have upon our understandings of literary history.

Using software as a tool to explore texts can lead us to new literary insight, if we retain a vibrant critical, theoretical, historical, and interpretative imagination.

There is a second strand of digital work in literary studies, though, that underpins such an approach to ‘distance’: text analysis. Often operating at smaller scales, for distance should not be opposed depth, such work seeks to extract linguistic features from individual texts or authors and then to visualize or otherwise present the results. This can be of use as the repetitious nature of examining, say, foregroundedness (in which a textual feature stands out with prominence) as opposed to its actual quantitative presence (how often it really occurs) is beyond the patience of most readers. Yet distant approaches at scale rely on this microscopic approach working, the idea being that if we can accurately measure and computationally discern features at the atomic level we can then scale this up to work on unknown texts and corpora.

The Romantics and the Information Age

The fortunes of literature and how the culture of data is older than we think.

YOHEI IGARASHI

Inkwells and other writing implements from the 18th and 19th century. Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

Stanford University Press is proud to present a Q&A with The Connected Condition» author Yohei Igarashi

 

What’s this book about?  

My hope in writing The Connected Condition was to have readers think about British Romantic poetry a little bit differently and in a way that’s suggestive about contemporary concerns. Romantic literature’s distinguishing literary features and motifs, and its very emergence as an artistic movement, have been accounted for in a variety of ways for a very long time: for example, as  responses to eighteenth-century poetic style, the French Revolution, or industrialization. I wanted to suggest that the period could be understood in an additional way, as registering the beginnings of the information age, our information age. The Romantics found themselves living with, quite ambivalently, an early version of today’s world of communication, media, and information technologies. My chapter on John Keats, for example, considers how his poetry harbors a tension between broader cultural desires about speedy communication sparked by early telegraphy and the slow reading traditionally associated with ornate, figurative poetic language of the sort that defined Keats’s own literary style.

The opening pages of The Connected Condition reflect on how I’m a slow reader and writer, and the book as a whole considers the ways that the Romantics capitulated to the norms of informational efficiency and speed as much as they criticized them through their writings

Narratives of Narcissistic Democracy and Rational Tyranny

How Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism remains painfully relevant.

AMIR ESHEL

New York City– 370 Riverside Drive, which Hannah Arendt lived in from 1959 until her death in 1975. Photo by Amir Eshel.

Recently, following a discussion of totalitarianism, a student shared a conversation she’d had in her dormitory with a brilliant peer from China. My student was asked, “What is so great about democracy?” To explain why she was asking such a provocative question, the Chinese student showed her a headline from CNN that quoted a recent tweet by President Trump: “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.” A bright, ironic smile spread on the Chinese student’s face, as if to say, “If this chaotic adolescent narcissism is an expression of democracy, I prefer rational tyranny.” “There was little I could say,” said my student with noticeable sadness. “At the moment, I myself am not sure how I should answer.”

The challenge posed by authoritarian regimes such as China’s to political liberalism and democracy is everywhere today. The daily headlines from Hong Kong and elsewhere remind us that around the world tyranny of multiple sorts is on the rise. Values, such as free speech and an independent press, that we used to take for granted are in doubt, as we question their ability to endure, while some are dismissed altogether. Indeed, seventy years after the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the enduring threat to freedom seems as pertinent as ever. From Manila and Mumbai to Brasilia and Moscow, from Budapest and Warsaw to Istanbul, Damascus, and beyond, freedom of thought, expression, and political action are in ever greater danger. As I show in my book, Poetic Thinking Today, what makes Arendt’s insights into despotic politics in the modern era so pressing and relevant is not only the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ explosion of the will to power or the seemingly interminable machinations of capitalism. It is also what Arendt brilliantly describes as the enduring affinity between certain philosophical assumptions and tyranny. Ever since Plato, Arendt noted in a diary entry from 1950, Western logic has been “by definition” tyrannical — fixed on principles, which are considered the outcome of “pure thought and reason.” It is not only tyrants, in their desire to repress all forms of opposition, but also the despotic idea that understanding and sound judgment depend solely on logic, method, rigor, and systemization that pose a constant threat to human freedom. If, under a tyrannical regime, the sovereign alone decides between right and wrong in all realms of life, the Western notion of “thinking” itself is constantly threatened by a despot of its own: the consecrated Western concept of “logic.” Arendt thus asks, “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?”[i]

Art alone is hardly sufficient to combat tyranny; a piece of art, in and of itself, cannot change the world. Yet art itself and the way we engage with it can indeed effect change—both within ourselves and eventually within the public worlds we inhabit.

My answer to this question is a clear yes. In Poetic Thinking Today, I point to the post-Romantic philosophical tradition in its open-ended notion of thinking as a clear alternative to the authoritarianism of logic-bound thought. Yet, I also view the arts and our engagement with them in schools and universities as crucial for enhancing and cultivating freedom. Drawing on a variety of thinkers who all explored art’s capacity to present and to engender insight or to offer orientation—including Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Michael Oakeshott, and Richard Rorty—I suggest how we can protect and promote intellectual and political freedom when those values are under duress. With tyrannical tendencies increasing around the world, we must adopt poetic thinking in our educational systems, in our scholarship, and in the public sphere as a vital measure to protect our freedoms.

The Prehistory of Queer Celebrity

How Sontag, Baldwin, and Vidal contributed to gay liberation.

GUY DAVIDSON

James Baldwin and Marlon Brando at the August 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C.            Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 

 

Toward the end of 2018, Newnownext, like many other LGBT-focused websites, featured a listicle tallying celebrities who had come out that year. The celebrities listed had variously come out as gay, bisexual, pansexual, non-binary, and queer and included Janelle Monáe (pansexual), Broad City star and creator Abbi Jacobson (queer), pro soccer player Collin Martin (gay), and star of Scream and Arrow Bex Taylor-Klaus (non-binary).

The article is headlined #20GayTeen: 26 Celebs Who Came Out in 2018—an allusion to a hashtag tweeted out by American out lesbian pop star Hayley Kiyoko on the 1^st of January of the year. Kiyoko tweeted: “It’s our year, it’s our time. To thrive and let our souls feel alive. #20GAYTEEN #expectations2018.” The #20GAYTEEN hashtag quickly went viral, tweeted out by fans and other LGBTQ celebrities as a proclamation of queer pride.

In an article from December of the same year entitled How 2018 Became the Year ‘20GAYTEEN’, Vice writer Daisy Jones enthused that Kiyoko had been right in her optimistic prediction, given the number of overtly queer pop hits that the year had seen, as well as the number of out queer characters in films and other media. She concluded,

“it's really cool that teenagers today who might not identify as totally straight (which is a lot of them, apparently) have a pop culture landscape that increasingly speaks to the specifics of their own life. Because that's exactly what pop culture should be. It should be a vehicle for you to make sense of the world around you, of the relationships you'll get lost in, the structures you'll have to navigate, the loves you'll gain and lose and gain again, the years that will fly behind you. And if pop culture is a mirror, it makes sense that it would (and it should) hold more than one type of person's reflection.”

Remembering (and forgetting) Old Poetry

Why Thomas Wyatt’s They Flee From Me still means Something, and How.

PETER MURPHY

Portrait of Sir Thomas Wyatt by Hans Holbein the Younger c. 1535-37. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Picture a bright modern classroom, somewhere, in which students sit, perhaps in a semicircle facing the Professor. A screen glows at the front, and on it is displayed a poem, first written down on paper in the 1530s, a poem that has only three stanzas and so fits tidily in the inevitable PowerPoint slide (or Blog Post).  It begins, “They flee from me, that sometime did me seek”:

The Professor asks a question about it, and someone answers. If we forget for a moment just how common this scenario is, and try to explain why it is happening, or could happen in the first place, a whole crowd of questions immediately appear. My book, The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem, is an effort to answer all of them: one at a time, and repeatedly, for some, since the answers change over the slow centuries. For instance:

How do we know about this poem, which Tudor-era diplomat and courtier Thomas Wyatt’s secretary wrote down for him and which Wyatt initialed in the margin on this beautiful page?

How do we know the words which have traveled from that page to this screen are the right words, since we have inherited three different versions from the sixteenth century? Here is the version that occurs in the Devonshire manuscript:

 

The Devonshire Manuscript facsimile 69v. CC BY-SA 3.0, by DMSEG

The Devonshire Manuscript facsimile 70r. CC BY-SA 3.0, by DMSEG 

How did the Choice between these versions get made, and what thinking guided the Choosers? How do we know anything at all about old poetry and its authors—where does the knowledge come from, and how did it get to us? How is it even possible that a book Thomas Wyatt carried around with him in the course of his exceptionally dangerous life in the murderous court of Henry VIII survived to now rest quietly in the British Library?

Implicated Subjects, Reparations, and the Afterlives of Slavery

To confront the legacies of slavery we need a new theory of historical responsibility

MICHAEL ROTHBERG

"Reparations" by Daquella manera is licensed under CC CC0 1.0  Public Domain Dedication

 

When I wrote about the question of reparations for slavery in my new book, The Implicated Subject, I did not expect to see the US House of Representatives holding hearings about that issue before my book even appeared. But on June 19, 2019, the House took up the perennially vexed and still controversial question of whether and how the descendants of America’s enslaved people should be compensated for slavery’s crimes against humanity.

On the eve of the hearing, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell voiced a familiar objection to the idea of redress: “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom [sic] none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea.” McConnell’s comments provided an opening for the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, speaking to a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee the next day, to make a powerful case for reparations. Calling McConnell’s objection “a strange theory of governance,” Coates described the problem of reparations as “a dilemma of inheritance”: “It’s impossible,” he asserted, “to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.” The rest of his testimony traced how the afterlives of slavery have manifested themselves in all realms of American life: in state and federal laws, banking practices, and forms of physical violence that have ensured the ongoing subordination of people of African descent well into Mitch McConnell’s lifetime and indeed up until the present.

Reparations have been a recurrent demand of enslaved and freed people since the eighteenth century—and of their descendants in the decades since Emancipation—as scholars such as Ana Lucia Araujo have documented. Yet, national debate on the issue has seemed to reemerge with an astonishing suddenness. Long a marginalized concern, reparations have become almost mainstream—although we’re still a long way from their actualization in any meaningful form. In addition to the recent House hearings, no fewer than eleven Democratic presidential candidates have expressed support either for reparations or for studying their feasibility. The current discussions have not come out of nowhere, of course. Recent years have seen greater visibility for the issue, not least because of Coates’s widely read 2014 Atlantic essay, “The Case for Reparations.” Nor is the discussion limited to the US; it is a distinctly transnational conversation emerging from various points across the Black Atlantic.