Artists, Experts and Everyone Else with Kelly Campbell

Arundhati Roy’s essays deal with how artistic expression is often viewed as too subjective to deal with “serious” or political issues, and how feelings are culturally positioned as an obstacle in rational understanding. Roy explains how this ideology is weaponized by institutional experts along lines of race, class and gender in order to deny and obscure the lived experiences and dissent of the human subjects of their studies. Experts are invested in obscuring the truth, Roy asserts, while artists have a drive to reveal it. Maintaining a calm distance from feelings and political struggle is only possible when it’s not your own life that is at stake. To whom is the idea of critical distance desirable? Who does it benefit, and who does it suppress?

Reading: Excerpts from “The Ladies Have Feelings, So… Shall We Leave It to the Experts?” (1-33) from Power Politics, 2nd ed, (Cambridge: South End Press, 2002.), and “The Reincarnation of Rumpelstiltskin,” Outlook (India), November 27, 2000 (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2000/11/27/power-politics-reincarnation-rumpelstiltskin), both by Arundhati Roy.