The Booker Prize for ignorance

Sadly, no surprise that this literary award has succumbed to our cultural madness

Scarcely a day goes past without some cultural titan or other jumping on the anti-west bandwagon. Apart from the intolerance, prejudice and gross abuse of power usually involved, what never fails to stupify is also the extent of the ignorance that it displays.

Consider. The shortlist for the Booker Prize for fiction has been announced. Today’s Times (£) reports: 

The roots of the Booker prize are problematic because they lie in colonialism and the British empire, its organisers said yesterday as they revealed this year’s shortlist. 

Gaby Wood, its literary director, said there were “political as well as literary problems” with returning to the “colonial framework” of the rules that limited the prize to writers from Britain, the Commonwealth and Ireland. 

Maya Jasanoff, this year’s jury chairwoman, said she found it “pretty remarkable in the 21st century that people were talking about the former British Empire as an appropriate container in which to think about literature”.

So what are they talking about? The Booker Prize was originally awarded to novelists from Britain, the Commonwealth, Ireland and South Africa (and later Zimbabwe). In 2014, the rules were changed to allow for any novel written in English to compete. Since then, 18 of the 48 available shortlist places have been taken by Americans.

The rule change caused consternation among some authors. As the New York Times reported in 2018:  

The Man Booker Prize is Britain’s most prestigious literary award. But for the past two years, American writers have dominated the competition — and authors from Britain and the Commonwealth countries are none too pleased.

…Leading authors and critics from the group, the Rathbones Folio Academy, bashed the Booker’s policy anew this week, arguing that changing the rules had taken away the distinctiveness of the prize, which was previously limited to writers from Britain, Ireland, Zimbabwe and the Commonwealth.

…“The Man Booker used to provide a point of focus each year for British and Commonwealth fiction, a sense that this had some identity-in-difference, and that British and Commonwealth novels were in some sense ‘talking to one another’ — as distinct from any conversation going on in US fiction,” Tessa Hadley, a British author and member of the Folio Academy, said by email.

“Now, it’s as though we’re perceived, and perceive ourselves, as only a subset of U.S. fiction, lost in its margins and eventually, this dilution of the community of writers plays out in the writing,” she added.

This year’s shortlist of six includes three American writers — Patricia Lockwood, Richard Powers and Maggie Shipstead — along with the British-Somalian Nadifa Mohamed, the South African Damon Galgut and the Sri Lankan Anuk Arudpragasam.

This is the context in which the Booker bigwigs made their remarks about “colonialism”. They have thus revealed an attitude as ill-informed as it is offensive. 

For the Booker Prize never had a “colonial” framework. It is, as the NYT correctly observes, a prize originally devised for Britain and the Commonwealth. 

And the Commonwealth is not a colonial enterprise. It is instead a post-colonial enterprise, a family of independent nations with the Queen as its head. 

The Commonwealth is therefore a valued and important part of Britain’s constitution and identity. But in the malign world of identity politics, there is no distinction between the Commonwealth of independent countries and colonisation under the British empire (which ended more than seventy years ago). A family of nations presided over by the British Crown, to the self-perceived benefit of those nations, is thus deemed to have no benefit at all and instead to be a mechanism for their oppression.

In this warped way of thinking, Britain is inescapably “colonial” because it is a western nation which once had an empire. This is deemed to render it inescapably and permanently imperial and colonialist and thus inescapably and permanently wicked, and anyone who dares suggest that the British nation and its family of Commonwealth nations may have legitimate interests of their own (like a literary prize) is denounced as wicked in turn. 

In other words, what Wood and Jasanoff are in essence saying is that Britain and the Commonwealth are not entitled to have their own prize.  The only legitimate forum is a global one. And at the root of that is the belief that the western nation is not entitled to profess a distinctive identity at all.

Since the west’s most educated and intellectual circles have been so throughly penetrated by this cultural madness, it should come as no surprise that Britain’s most prestigious literary prize should also have succumbed. But the extent of the stupidity still causes the jaw to drop. 

Perhaps the real time to worry is when it ceases to do so.

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