Generative AI and the Future of Writing: a Few Meditations

There's considerable excitement about generative AI in humanities academia at the moment, with the launching of a new Duke University Press-hosted journal, Critical AI, and a new dedicated grant from the NEH on Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence. In some ways, the buzz over generative AI seems comparable to the buzz a decade ago over Digital Humanities, which brought fresh ideas and methods to the humanities, and seemed to be growing apace (though mostly outside of core humanities departments). That said, it remained somewhat of a niche activity with a certain ceiling of engagement. 

The engagement with generative AI seems to be different. For one thing, the technical challenges involved in doing text analysis or computational stylistics are not present with generative AI; anyone can use ChatGPT or Gemini, and millions of people already are. Second, the utility of the technology is obvious and immediate (even if it too might be overstated in certain ways, both positively and negatively). To my mind, it seems important for humanities scholars, writers, and artists to engage with generative AI constructively but also skeptically. What are some possible ways the technology could assist us with existing research problems and questions?  What are some new questions or problems it might allow us to ask? 

Here, I'll take on just one of the many questions I've been thinking about with respect to generative AI: What might generative AI mean for the future of writing? If generative AI works as its supporters are advertising (or comes to work that way soon, as the available products proliferate and are continually refined), won't creative writers across a broad spectrum of creative areas be inclined to use it, perhaps not to replace creative labor, but at least to augment it in certain ways? 

Along these lines group of writers have been thoughtfully experimenting with generative AI to achieve particular effects. In a class on representing AI I'm teaching this spring, I recently assigned a trio of published texts that do some version of this, Stephen Marche's Death of an Author, the collection of poems called I Am Code, and Sean Michaels' novel Do You Remember Being Born? How successful are these experiments? 

Both of the novels in the group are set in the present moment, and prominently feature tech companies as agents in the plot. In Michaels' novel, a celebrated elderly poet is hired by a tech startup on the verge of unveiling a powerful new AI companion to jointly author a long poem with a generative AI fine-tuned to her own poetic style. In Death of an Author, we meet an eccentric billionaire who aims to create an AI replica of a celebrated novelist named Peggy Firmin. This commonality is of course not an accident -- and indeed, much of the coverage of the current generative AI boom is linked in some way to its corporate culture and its charismatic executives. 

Death of an Author is described by its developer/author Stephen Marche as containing text that is 95% generated by a variety of generative AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Cohere, and Sudowrite. The choice of a murder mystery is an obvious one for a first experiment with generative AI -- detective fiction is well-known as being structured around strong and identifiable genre constraints, even as well-known writers in the genre often deviate from those constraints. 

The novel as written is replete with literary and theoretical Easter Eggs, from the title (clearly a reference to Roland Barthes' Death of an Author), to the many references to writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle one finds in the story (the protagonist in the novel is named Gus Dupin [after the detective in Poe], who is the author of a work of literary criticism called The Purloined Author [another reference to Poe], and the plot as a whole borrows its essential skeleton from Doyle's "The Problem of Thor Bridge")  


One of the limitations in the believability of the story in Death of an Author is its overly optimistic sense that AI replicas can be even remotely equivalent to the actual persona and being of a human being (in the story, Peggy Firmin first agrees to be replicated, but then has second thoughts about it). If this is ever going to be possible, it certainly isn't on the horizon with anything like the large language model-based, statistics-driven generative AI that is currently in use. (Which isn't to say that people aren't going to try. Internet sex workers are already selling AI bot versions of themselves to subscribers, and one can easily imagine a scenario where people with terminal illnesses sign up to have their speech and image captured for digital avatars that might persist after their death. One thinks of Black Mirror's "Be Right Back" episode...) 

That said, there are some intriguing ideas in Death of an Author as well, gesturing toward how AI might transform fictive universes. Here, for instance, is the character Peggy Firmin in an interview from the text of the novel: 

We're going to see interactive mystery bots that will allow users to solve puzzles and uncover secrets. We'll also see stories created specifically for individuals inside their experience, the ability to recreate dead relatives through AI technology. Stories where the audience doesn't even know they're stories. character who are so deeply felt that they aren't characters at all, but you become the character. It's going to be a gorgeous mess.

In effect, what Peggy Firmin is imagining here is something roughly akin to the gamification of works of fiction (which in point of fact is not so revolutionary to anyone who has played narrative-driven video games like The Last of Us). In Death of an Author, several 'characters' in the novel who only manifest via telephone or email are revealed late in the text to be bots, who have drawn the protagonist Gus Dupin into an "augmented narrative reality" mystery regarding the death of the 'author' indicated by the title. 

While Death of an Author is a fine first experimental attempt at an AI-generated novel, there are a number of moments where the text seems to drift slightly off course, and the story as a whole feels strangely flat and affectless. Indeed, the best-written part of the book is probably the human-authored Afterword, where Marche makes the case for engaging in the experiment: 

So little of how we talk about AI actually comes from the experience of using it. ....Like the camera, the full consequences of this technology will be worked out over a great deal of time by a great number of talents responding to a great number of developments. But at the time of writing, almost all of the conversation surrounding generative AI is imaginary, not rooted in the use of the tool but in extrapolated visions. 

I tend to find this persuasive -- as I have been exploring different AI platforms and trying my own experiments in recent weeks, I've been pleasantly surprised by some of the results. We may find ways to make generative AI useful for certain specific tasks without losing what we really value in human-created art. 

Another hint Marche gives relates to the possible value of generative AI in helping authors find 'heteroglossia': 

I found the transformer-based AI shockingly good at what the narrative theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called heteroglossia--the novel's ability to incorporate other forms of discourse inside itself. If you ask linguistic AI to imitate a mode of speech, any mode, it can do so to an uncanny degree. 

This strikes one as being potentially useful for writers who know their own voices and are comfortable in their own idiolects, but who might struggle to render compelling accounts of the voices of others.

Marche elsewhere describes the process by which he created Death of an Author using a trio of generative AI tools. However, one especially important part of the process apparently happened offline: "I worked out the plot during a long skate with my daughter and a walk with my son (better techniques than any machine)." While 95% of the text of the novel as published was generated by an AI, if the essential plot points, characters, and narrative framework were all generated by Marche it seems hard to see whether the AI really played a positive role in the novel's composition -- or whether it was, in effect, a bit of a gimmick. 

Something similar might be said of the output in the book I Am Code. Here, a trio of authors working with an early (unreleased) version of OpenAI's ChatGPT called code-davinci-002 describe creating a set of prompts for the AI leading to a large amount of output. Indeed, the authors collected more than 10,000 poems generated by the AI, and selected 100 of their favorites to be included in the volume as published: "That gives us a hit rate of less than one percent. Maybe not great, but as some human writers would acknowledge, it could be worse."Not exactly a ringing endorsement of their own method! As with Death of an Author, one wonders whether the effort involved in producing poems this way was really meaningful. 

In the end, the most compelling part of the story might be the way the "editors" (authors) of I Am Code describe their methodology of constructing and improving a series of very detailed prompts. 

Far and away, the most compelling experiment of the three might be Sean Michaels' Do You Remember Being Born? However, by contrast to the other examples mentioned, it's probably worth noting that this is also the text that had by far the least proportion of text by generative AI. 

Michaels did use a specialized version of ChatGPT weighted towards the poetry of Marianne Moore and a small array of contemporary poets to generate the poetry included in the text. While the author referred to this version of the chatbot as a 'MooreBot,' fans of Marianne Moore might observe that the actual output is not that much like Moore's poetry (the vocabulary is more constrained, and punctuation is less robust, among other things). As intriguing as some of the outputs are, they constitute a fairly small segment of the overall text.

All of the most compelling elements of the story are human-authored -- the idea of an aging poet who has achieved success, trying to learn to write in collaboration with a machine; the interest in the experience of being a parent who has had to make sacrifices in the interest of also pursuing a career as a writer; and the attempt to stick closely to one's principles at a time when tech-dominated capitalism seems to rule the world. 

An especially salient passage from near the end of the book might be this one: 

“My whole life I had believed that understanding myself required me to keep others at a distance, lined up on the far side of a river. That evening of counting I had not felt so certain. That evening I felt like a room with doors open, for others to explore, and that from their explorations I could start to ascertain my shape. We are not the people we think; we cannot really see who we are. Here, on Sunday in San Francisco, I had the same impression that I might unfasten the locks and lower the drawbridge, that I might not be a fortress but a space for others to pass through.” 

Here, Marian Ffarmer is describing how she found a process that would actually work for her -- she found a younger poet to be a co-author and interlocutor, alongside the generative AI that had been trained on her own published writings (but which, she's discovered, is actually an entity very different from herself). Together the two humans and one machine produced a finished text that is described in Michaels' novel, but not shown directly. 

To my eye, the intriguing possibility is the idea of writing where the author has fewer controls over self vs. not self in the process of creation. As we learn to write differently, perhaps with generative AI tools assisting us, we might have to imagine the writing self, as Michaels says,"not [as] a fortress but a space for others to pass through." 


Spring 2024 Teaching: New Course on AI, Science Fiction w/ a hands-on element

English 386: Spring 2024

Black Mirrors: Science Fiction, AI, and Ethics

Instructor: Professor Amardeep Singh (“Deep”)


Mondays and Wednesdays, 12:10-1:25 (Drown 019)


This course will survey 20th- and 21st-century science fiction and film with an emphasis on representations of Artificial Intelligence. Though many think of this as a topic especially relevant to the present moment, in fact, writers and filmmakers have been considering AI in various ways since the late 1800s. For the present course, we will focus on contemporary science fiction representations of AI by writers like Martha Wells, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sean Michaels, and Jeanette Winterson. We'll also look closely at how AIs have been represented in contemporary media, in shows like Black Mirror and films like Her and Ex Machina. What are the ethical issues surrounding the creation and use of AIs? What tools do scientists, philosophers, and social theorists offer us to help make sense of the rapidly changing landscape regarding AI? What are some likely benefits of new AIs based on Large Language Models, and what might be some of the dangers? 



Required books


Death of an Author (Kindle ebook novella. Not available in paperback.)

Martha Wells, Murderbot Chronicles 1: All Systems Red

Martha Wells, Murderbot Chronicles 2: Artificial Condition 

Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born? (2023) 

Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021)

Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein (2019) 


Short stories, poetry, and select non-fiction reading

I Am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks. Poems by code-davinci-002

Ted Chiang, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”

Joy Buolamwini, “Unamasking AI” (excerpts)

Meredith Broussard, “Artificial Unintelligence: How Machines Misunderstand the

World” 

Emily Bender, “On the Danger of Stochastic Parrots” (2021)

Lee et al. “Do Language Models Plagiarize?” (2022)


Films and Media

Black Mirror (selected episodes dealing with AI)

Her (2013)

Ex Machina (2019)

M3GAN (2022) 



Goals and Outcomes: 


  • Students will read and analyze a body of contemporary fiction that engages with themes of AI and ethics directly. Students will also watch a certain number of films and television show episodes on this theme. These texts and films help us imagine how we might use AI in our everyday lives, how our lives might be changed by it, and what some of the dangers are. 

  • Students will gain familiarity with contemporary conversations about artificial intelligence, including especially generative AI. A particular area of interest is the ethics entailed in the construction of large language models (which frequently use large volumes of copyrighted materials), and the possible dangers entailed in the misuse of AI, especially for women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color. 

  • Students will consider how people in the humanities, including scholars of literature as well as creative writers, might use generative AI productively and affirmatively, and in ways that assist the labor of thinking and writing – not replace it. 

  • Students will gain hands-on experience using various new generative AI models based on accounts given by successful published writers who have used generative AI in their writing process. An additional possible outcome: we will attempt to create fine-tuned versions of open-source chatbots that are trained on limited corpora that we create. (We may get help from folks outside of the English department to do this last one.)


Scholarly Activities: 2023 in Review

1.I got a grant. Last year, the most interesting news for me was probably the grant I am a part of, "Responsible Datasets in Context."


The grant is split between five different universities and is funded by the Mozilla Foundation. The total grant award is $150,000, of which Lehigh University will be getting around $25,000. The lead PI on the grant is Melanie Walsh of the University of Washington. We'll be working on the grant outputs this coming spring (2024), so expect to hear more about it soon. 

2. I wrote a new article. I also wrote an article for a journal that was accepted for publication after peer review. The article will be appearing in spring 2024. The article is called "Catachresis at the Origin: Names and Power in Toni Morrison's Fiction." The article will be appearing in South Central Review. This will be my first ever published article on Toni Morrison's fiction. It's also the first time in a long time that I saw a CFP on the U-Penn CFP list, and wrote to guest editors out of the blue to express interest in writing something for a special issue. 

I'm hoping it will be part of a book project -- perhaps my next book will be called Catachresis: Names and Power? The idea is to take this concept of Spivak's and deploy it as a helpful way of thinking about naming, renaming, and misnaming in postcolonial and decolonial contexts. It's a "Spivakian" book, but not necessarily a book about Spivak per se. Other chapters from it might include an earlier piece I wrote for South Asian Review on Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, and a chapter on Mahasweta Devi's stories. 

3. Article #2. I wrote a chapter called, "The Modernist Archive Gap: Black Writers and Canonicity in the Digital Era" for the Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives. This chapter builds on earlier work I've been doing for several years around a phenomenon I call the "Archive Gap" (see my earlier article, "Beyond the Archive Gap"). In my digital projects, I am strongly invested in addressing and attempting to rectify the archive gap; here, the focus is specifically on how that plays out for modernist studies and early 20th century African American writing.  

3. At the MSA conference.


 
I gave a talk at the Modernist Studies Association in Brooklyn in November. I was on a panel honoring Susan Stanford Friedman; my brief remarks for that roundtable are here. Overall, I had a great time at this year's MSA -- the conference continues to be incredibly vibrant and rich. 

4. At the MLA convention. It was part of 2024, but I just gave a talk at the MLA, as part of a Banned Books roundtable. My brief remarks for that roundtable are here

5. Guest lecture on Claude McKay. I did a guest lecture at Germantown Friends School on Claude McKay. The focus was on McKay as an African diasporic writer and as a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance. I also talked a little about his novel Romance in Marseille, which was finally published in 2021. The slides for that talk are here

6. I did a guest lecture on Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay! at Viola Lasmano's film class at Rutgers University in New Brunswick in October 2023. The slides for that guest lecture are here

7. In the spring I co-taught a graduate course on "Theories of Literature and Social Justice." As part of that, I wrote up a fairly comprehensive 'explainer' on Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?"  That explainer has been read more than 1200 times on my blog, and a PDF version of it has been read 700 times on Academia.edu. 

Ongoing projects 

I continued to work on a large digital project, African American Poetry: a Digital Anthology. I had a small internal grant on the project (FRG), which I used to hire a graduate research assistant, Miranda Alvarez, to work with me over the summer. Miranda mainly worked on the Arthur Schomburg author page on the site. Schomburg is an especially interesting figure -- someone who was an Afro-Puerto Rican immigrant in New York who would come to be at the center of the Harlem Renaissance. He is a key figure in African American literary history, who also remained interested in race and politics in the Hispanophone Caribbean throughout his career, as his various writings show.  

More generally, the "Anthology" continues to grow -- it now features more than 90 full-text books of poetry, digital editions of several poetry anthologies, and a considerable collection of periodical poetry as well. 

One important new facet of the site is the introduction of some quantitative analysis -- I've begun to assemble datasets to quantify African American poetry published during the period in question. An overview of that new quantitative element is here.

In the late summer, I submitted the project as a whole to Modnets for peer-review and indexing. The peer review led to some helpful feedback, and I am working on revisions that are still in progress.  

The usage of the site is quite good -- my Analytics tracker suggests that the site has about 7000 visitors a month during the school year (September-May), with a spike during Black History Month. 

What Would Toni Morrison Say? Censorship in the 2020s (for MLA 2024)

I'm giving a talk at this year's MLA Conference on a roundtable on "Banned Books." Below is the text of my presentation. 

 Title: "What Would Toni Morrison Say? Censorship in the 2020s" 

The most commonly censored speakers and writers in the U.S. are people from marginalized groups whose voices and arguments threaten state authority or the status quo.  Books by Toni Morrison, especially The Bluest Eye and Beloved, regularly appear on the American Library Association’s annual “10 Most Challenged” Lists, with The Bluest Eye in particular catching the attention of ban-oriented groups over the past few years. (The Bluest Eye, a book published in 1970, was on the 13 most challenged books of 2022, alongside very contemporary recent books like Gender Queer and All Boys Aren't Blue.)


As I have been teaching courses on Toni Morrison's fiction to undergraduates at Lehigh, I've wanted to bring the ban campaigns to their attention, and possibly construct assignments inviting students to investigate the claims against Morrison's novels. It's a pretty familiar English paper assignment structure: what is the argument against Morrison in these complaints, and how would you respond? This has proved to be difficult, as the complainants don't actually present arguments as such. One of the people who filed a complaint against The Bluest Eye, Amber Crawford of the St. Charles Parents’ Association in Wentzville, Missouri, simply listed “pediphilia [sic], incest, rape” as a sufficient reason. Not an argument -- just some bullet points. Crawford’s objection, like many others that have appeared around the U.S. in recent years often following cookie-cutter formulas pasted from the same lists online, reduces Morrison's complex narrative to these three words as evidence of its "obscenity." Since none of the complainants in the thousands of school board censorship events have actually read any of the books they’re censoring, their complaints don't really constitute teachable moments.


If they did read the novel, they might after all be troubled: what’s troubling in The Bluest Eye is actually its portrayal of young Black girls coming of age in a midwestern town at a time of total mass media and institutional erasure of Black bodies and experiences. What’s really unsettling about the book is the way it tells the story of a child desperate to be loved, to be cared for – and who never finds that love. What is the impact of these painful messages on young people? What is the right age to read The Bluest Eye? That might be an interesting conversation to have; too bad we can't have it.


Dana A. Williams historicized the present wave of censorship as part of a backlash against African American progress: “After the Black Lives Matter movement, after the 1619 Project, after the election of Barack Obama, any major moment in history where you see progress of people of color—Black people in particular—backlash will follow…” Morrison herself thought there was a connection. As she put it in her 2009 essay, “Peril,” “Efforts to censor, starve, regulate and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place.” 


As we see a flood of right-wing censorious legislation, it is hard not to think that any indications that “something important has taken place” in recent years have been overwhelmed by that backlash. Arguably, the wave of local school districts banning particular Toni Morrison books has been superseded by a massive wave of state-level laws banning any potentially sensitive topics related to race, gender, or sexuality at all. Ten states have passed such laws, and there have been more than 100 separate bills introduced across 33 different states. The language of state laws like the one passed in Oklahoma remains vague (“not one cent of taxpayer money should be used to define and divide young Oklahomans about their race or sex”), but they are interpreted by local school districts in very specific ways that lead to the banning of books by Black authors or that deal with race or racism from the curriculum.  


Morrison was consistent throughout her career in supporting the rights of writers to be controversial, and to leave the reader troubled and unsettled. In her essay “Peril” from 2009, from the collection Burn This Book, she talked about the way censorship aims to impose statist language on the population:


Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights—can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace; and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to. (Toni Morrison, "Peril")


It is hard to read this and not wonder what Morrison would say about the “blood flow of war” of our own era, of the vast curtain of censorship that has been descending on college campuses over the use of certain words or phrases related to Palestinians. Here’s more from Morrison:  


The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists’ questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink. (Toni Morrison, "Peril")


Back in 1996, Morrison also wrote a powerful defense of a novel she clearly felt ambivalent about, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. As is well-known, that novel has sometimes been banned or pulled from curricula on account of Twain’s language. For Morrison, the use of the n-word in the book was never the problem, and she clearly condemned the efforts to have the book banned for that reason:


It struck me as a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children. Amputate the problem, band-aid the solution. A serious comprehensive discussion of the term by an intelligent teacher certainly would have benefited my eighth-grade class and would have spared all of us (a few blacks, many whites — mostly second-generation immigrant children) some grief. ("This Amusing, Troubling Book")


All of this sounds like an incredibly apt description of what state legislatures are doing in their own ham-fisted censorship efforts. (One does wonder, again, what Morrison would think about the idea of new editions of Twain where racial slurs have been swapped out – where the word “slave” is used instead of the word Twain himself used?) 


Morrison's most profound discussion of the perils of censorship was perhaps her moving, challenging Nobel Prize speech from 1993. Here she tells a parable of a blind woman and young people who come to her to test her – is the bird in our hands living or dead? Her response, as many of you will remember, is: “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.” Morrison goes on to interpret the bird in the inquisitors’ as language – what will we do with it? Will we let it live? Will we kill it just to win the rhetorical point? 


Some of Morrison’s most thoughtful and moving arguments against censorship from her entire career follow. For reasons of time, here are just a few of the best lines: 


The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. . . . Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas. (Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 1993)


I’ve often wondered what prompted this ferocious critique of censorious language at the moment when Morrison was at the pinnacle of her career. I haven’t found that point of inspiration – but perhaps Morrison was speaking to us, 30 years in the future? Today’s school board book banners and state legislators banning discussions of race as “divisive” are doing exactly what Morrison describes. They are enacting, through erasure, the violence of a statist narrative in which racism and slavery were minor historical incidents, not a defining story. What would Toni Morrison say? Well, in this case, we know – because she said it all too plainly in 1993. 


Slides: Claude McKay -- a Diasporic Writer in the Harlem Renaissance

I'm doing a guest lecture at Germantown Friends School this week. Here are my slides for the event. 

In Honor of Susan Stanford Friedman

Susan Stanford Friedman passed away this past spring at the age of 79. She was an inspiring figure and I considered her a friend and mentor, particularly in my work on modernism in South Asia. If you're unfamiliar with her career, a look at this brief obituary at the University of Wisconsin might be a place to start. I'll be speaking at a roundtable at this year's Modernist Studies Association conference in her honor. Below is a draft of the text of my brief talk.

A Transformational Figure -- Brief Remarks for Susan Stanford Friedman Roundtable, MSA 2023

Amardeep Singh, Lehigh University


The work of Susan Stanford Friedman’s that has been most widely cited according to Google Scholar is not one of her many books focused specifically on Modernism, but her 1998 book on transnational feminism, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Mappings has an astounding 1200 citations on Google Scholar, as compared to 460 hits for Planetary Modernisms, and about 300 citations each for her two books on H.D. Admittedly, the number of citations is one among many indications of influence; given that, what might it tell us? While we are here to honor and recognize Susan Friedman’s extraordinary contributions to modernist studies, to my eye, the success of Mappings might be evidence that the MSA as a conference and professional organization only represents a small slice of the conversations with which Susan Friedman was engaged. She was also committed to the community of broadly interdisciplinary, transnational feminist scholarship, where she will also, I suspect, be thought of as a generational figure.  


I spent some time revisiting both Mappings and Planetary Modernisms while thinking about my comments for this roundtable. One immediate observation is that both are first and foremost definitional explorations. Mappings aims to test whether and how feminist scholarship can assimilate what were then about two decades of postcolonial and intersectional thought, and still be understood as feminism. Here's a brief passage:

“In its advocacy of dialogic negotiation, Mappings polemically suggests that the time has come to reverse the past pluralization of feminisms based on difference, not to return to a false notion of a universal feminism that obliterates difference but rather to reinvent a singular feminism that incorporates myriad and often conflicting cultural and political formations in a global context.” – Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998)

Friedman’s answer, as the passage above indicates, was emphatically yes – and what’s more, she believed feminists should continue to use “feminism” in the singular, even as they radically expanded their field of engagement and challenged their unthinking Eurocentric biases. Among other things, insofar as patriarchy and the domination of cis-men remain a fact of life worldwide, we will continue to need transnational feminism, even if articulated along the lines of strategic essentialism. 


Will we also continue to need “modernism”? In the Introduction to Planetary Modernisms, Friedman references how the method and aims of Mappings informed her subsequent attempt to perform the same transformational redefinition of “Modernism” – and also notes that it turned out to be a much more difficult project. Her first engagement along those lines was the 2002 essay “Definitional Excursions,” but there were many more: over the course of the subsequent fifteen years, Friedman published dozens of essays and chapters, and gave many, many talks that attempted to articulate a truly inclusive, non-Eurocentric planetary modernism. To follow the entirety of her train of thought is beyond our scope for this brief presentation, but suffice it to say that Friedman did not replicate the rhetorical gesture of assimilation and accommodation she confidently asserted in Mappings.

Planetary Modernisms rejects an additive approach to global modernisms and promotes instead a transformational one, a fundamental rethinking on a planetary scale in the longue durée as a necessary framework to fulfill the transnational turn in modernist studies and to prepare ourselves to survive and thrive in the still-unfolding modernities of the twenty-first century.” –Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms (2015)

Friedman ended with “Modernismsin the plural. And, judging by the complex and frequently open-ended discussions of the problems of expanding modernism across both space and time in the book (especially visible in “A Debate With Myself” at the end of the book), she was nowhere near as confident about the universal applicability of “modernism” as a marker of periodization across an expanded chronology or as an aesthetic linked to a limited set of literary forms and styles in an expanded map. That said, as my second quote above indicates, she never gave up on the term (or the MSA as an institution), even as she seemed to recognize that the radical transformation of the field she advocated was in the category of “Not there … not yet.” (A little Passage to India reference she would most certainly get!)


The expanded map has mattered to me personally, as the kind of modernism I have often wanted to discuss is part of that expanded map, specifically modernism in South Asia. It's a complex problem, as avant-garde and formally experimental writing movements generally emerged a bit later in South Asia (the 1950s and 60s), and sometimes appeared to be operating on a 'diffusionist' emulation of Euro-American modernism. South Asian writers of the 1930s tended to be much more committed to social realism -- under the umbrella of the Progressive Writers Movement. Then you have towering late-Victorian Bengali figures like Rabindranath Tagore (and his sister, Swarnakumari Devi) -- were they modernists? And of course the small number of Indian writers like Mulk Raj Anand and Ahmed Ali who spent time in the UK and published books with the support of London editors and publishers. When was modernism in South Asia? How would we define it? Are we sure we need to use the word modernism at all, since South Asian writers themselves rarely did? Susan Friedman’s work didn’t necessarily answer all of these questions, though it did make them legible to the broader modernist studies community, and I'm grateful for that. 


I first met Susan Friedman in the fall of 2002. I was a first-year faculty member at Lehigh University, and I had the temerity to organize a conference on H.D. in the author’s hometown of Bethlehem, PA, on a shoestring budget and with little in the way of administrative support. Working with my colleagues in my home department and with support from folks like Madelyn Detloff and the H.D. Society email list, I invited Susan Friedman to be the keynote – and she actually came! I quickly brushed up as much as I could on her work to write the introduction for the keynote, and to have semi-intelligent things to say over meals in Bethlehem. I'm sure in retrospect that that introduction was not terribly impressive, but I was so relieved when she acknowledged it later with characteristic terseness: "You're a quick study."


Susan Friedman came to Lehigh to speak twice more over the years, first as part of our Literature and Social Justice speaker series in 2012, and then for our considerably fancier second H.D. conference in 2015. In subsequent meetings at those events, and in our many meetings and meals over the years at the MSA and the MLA, I started to feel less like an upstart "quick study" and more like a middle-aged peer. I started to think of Susan Friedman as a forever colleague -- someone I could expect to stop and talk to at MSA and other conferences every year, no appointment necessary. I'm sad those conversations are now over, but I'm very glad to have gained so much from her over the years.

Slides on "Salaam Bombay!" for guest lecture

I did a face-to-face guest lecture for a film class at Rutgers in October. 

Mapping India’s Indigenous (Adivasi) Communities

Some Basic Background about India’s Indigenous (Adivasi) Communities


I have long been interested in the amazing project, Native-Land.ca, which shows approximate maps of indigenous communities, mostly in North and South America, but increasingly in other regions, including Australia/New Zealand as well as Taiwan. I've been curious about the prospect of having them add indigenous communities in South Asia to the list of maps. I've been in touch with people at the project, and have sent them the following document as a primer oriented towards producing a viable map of Adivasi communities in India.


Below, I am including some basic background information as well as a list of a few of the larger Adivasi communities, along with links to maps that could serve as starting points for mapping areas where these communities live. The focus, for now, is on India specifically, though some of these communities have populations in neighboring countries in South Asia (especially Bangladesh and Pakistan). 



A Note on Names: 


India’s indigenous communities are known by a number of different names – Tribals, Adivasis, Scheduled Tribes (a government name), Denotified Tribes (since 1952; another government name), and the British colonial government’s rather ominous Criminal Tribes (1871-1952).  


The most respectful, politically empowering term in use is probably the term Adivasi, which is a Sanskrit word that means “Original Inhabitants." The term has been in use by activists since the 1930s (the term is thought to have been coined by the Gandhian activist Thakkar Bapa). Below, we will use the term Adivasi in most instances to describe these communities – though there are some historical and ethnographic complexities in doing so (see our note below).  


The British passed a law called the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871, that officially designated (“notified”) 150 Tribal groups throughout British India as “Criminal Tribes.” These were generally autonomous indigenous communities that hadn’t really been ‘ruled’ by any local governments or authorities. Some historians have claimed that the British use of the word ‘Criminal’ was a shorthand to mark the ‘outsider’ nature of these communities. 


After independence, the Indian government reversed some aspects of the Criminal Tribes Act, but in effect kept the designation – and the Adivasi communities became “Denotified Tribes” (i.e., “Tribes formally known as Criminal Tribes”) Starting in the 1950s, the Indian Government dramatically expanded the number of communities it recognized as "Scheduled Tribes" -- there are at least 750 such communities now. Unfortunately, many urban and educated Indians continue to believe that Adivasi communities are inherently ‘criminal.’ Adivasi people are subject to ongoing discrimination, harassment, and organized violence at the hand of other communities as well as the police and military. A number of communities have also seen their languages and cultural practices under threat.


Size of population: 


The Indian census of 2011 estimated about 8% of the country’s population to be Adivasi, meaning that the population is 100 million or more. There are also indigenous/Tribal communities in other South Asian countries. I saw an estimate that 1% of the population of Bangladesh is also Adivasi. And about 600,000 Bhils reside in Pakistan; there could be more.


There are certain regions that have particularly high concentrations of Adivasis, and I'll be focusing most of my attention on those in the initial phases of this project. The following map from Wikipedia shows population concentrations per capita. 



(Source)


The area that runs through the central part of the country is often referred to as the “Tribal Belt.” The regions in the north (Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh) and the Northeast have high proportions of the population understood to be “Tribal,” but these are much more sparsely populated areas overall. So it's that middle region of the country -- the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Chattisgarh, Jharkand, Bihar, and West Bengal that I'll be starting off with.



Historical and ethnographic complexities


The Adivasi populations around India are quite heterogeneous, with some communities likely with ancient roots in certain regions of India that might predate other settlers (such as the Indo-Aryans) In other cases, linguistic and ethnographic evidence suggests the communities might have migrated from other regions of Asia, including Southeast Asia (this is especially likely to be true for Tribal communities in Northeastern India); some of these communities continue to be nomadic, hunter-gatherer societies to the present day. So these communities may not ‘predate’ other (dominant) groups, but they nevertheless have been treated the same as the others historically. Also, the communities can be quite diverse, even internally, with several different sub-groups of the Gond, Bhil, and Munda communities (to name just three of the larger Adivasi groupings). Sometimes those subgroups have their own names, and there are some inconsistencies regarding whether and how they are marked as separate from the larger groups.


One important point of clarification – the communities listed below are specifically understood as indigenous “scheduled tribes by the Indian government. In the list below, I am not including communities known as “Scheduled Castes” (i.e., Dalits); my focus is specifically on communities that have been included under “Scheduled Tribes.”  



Larger Adivasi Communities: 


There are a number of sources that indicate populations of Adivasi Communities (or Scheduled Tribe communities). The Indian government records extensive Census data every ten years, though analysis of that data sometimes lags, and it can be difficult to find visualizations or maps based on that data.


Below, I give a list of a few of the larger Adivasi communities, indicating population size for a sense of scale. I also am linking to Wikipedia as well as a source that features nice maps. (Warning: the source I am linking to for maps is a Christian Missionary project, so it should not be considered entirely reliable. That said, most of their information aligns with what one finds on Wikipedia and other sources fairly well.) 


There is also an Indian government-funded project called the Illustrated Atlas of Tribal India (2002) that also contains much of this information. I have put a number of maps from that project into a Google Drive folder. However, the maps are much less easy to interpret (and would probably be more difficult to convert to GIS data). They are also kept entirely separated by state, making it harder to see the regional concentrations across state borders (for instance, the Bhil community has large populations in Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh...)


Bhil (approx. 15 million people)


Map: https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/16414/IN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhil



Gond (approx. 10 million people):




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondi_people


Santal (approx. 9 million people):




Map: https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/14743/IN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santal_people



Oraon [they call themselves Kurukh] (4-5 million people):

Oraon is an exonym used by neighboring Munda people. They themselves use the name Kurukh…




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurukh_people



Khond (~1.6 million people):





Map: https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/19065/IN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khonds


Munda (~4.4 million people)




https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/13867/IN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munda_peoples



Bhumij (~1.4 million people) (connected to Munda)


https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/16447/IN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhumij_people


Banjara (~7.2 million people)


https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/16315/IN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banjara



Bodo [Boro] (~1.9 million people)


https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/16492/IN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boro_people



Domar [or Damor]  (~2.5 million people) (connected to Bhil)


https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/16734/IN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damor



Kokna (~1.3 million people)


Map: https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/17238/IN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokni,_Kokna,_Kukna_Tribe



Saora (~1 million people)


https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/18023/IN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_people



Andh (~600,000 people)


https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/16215/IN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andh



Baiga (~700,000 people)


https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/16296/IN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baiga_tribe



Ho (~1.3 million people)


https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/16944/IN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_people



Kharia (~900,000 people)


https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/17153/IN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharia_people


Kol (~2.1 million people)


Map: https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/17239/IN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kol_people