More pages rustled

Only two books in the post today: 'The Complete Edition' of Alastair Campbell's Diaries: Volume One; Prelude to Power and a free inspection copy of Suman Gupta's Globalization and Literature (or, as the cover has it, suman gupta's globalization and literature).

The complicated title of Campbell's memoir is because he lost power a few years before New Labour did. Needing a large injection of cash, he wrote a censored version so that he could profit without sticking the knife into his party comrades too hard. Like a fool, I bought it. Now that Labour's out of government, Campbell can spin away to his heart's content and not worry about turning the public away from the party. Still, now I have both, there's a comparative critical discourse analysis project waiting to happen. I would like my money back after buying the first version though.

The other book is, under the new regime I live-blogged last night, destined to be contraband because it considers literature within a social, cultural and political context. Going by what I heard yesterday, we're meant to be telling students that they are 'singularities' who shouldn't see themselves as part of ethnic, racial, political, gendered or sexual categories at all. Never mind that many of my students are only just discovering that there are real reasons for their social positions, rather than luck: they're now to be treated as floating points in time - existing in a world of Twitter feeds and status updates, in NOW - rather than as part of humanity.

Basically, a privileged white academic from an imperialist nation is going to tell my students that they need to get over being black/white/Islamic/atheist/Christian/poor/gay/straight because 'identity' turns you into a victim scared to experience new things. Which is utter, utter bollocks, isn't it children? I recommend Dyer's White as corrective reading.

As a colleague points out, Orwell spotted this as elitist manipulation a long time ago: the proles in 1984 are refused a past, a history and therefore an identity. Gupta's book looks like a really good primer in the ways that literary texts have dealt with globalization in its many forms. It also suggests that there are potentially rich rewards to be had from cross-fertilising globalization studies and literary studies. I look forward to getting to grips with it.