On speaking truth to power publicly

PROFESSOR Jonathan Dollimore was in Kerala in October 2018 as an Erudite Scholar in Residence hosted by the Kerala State Higher Education Council. Instrumental in popularising a critical practice known as cultural materialism, he also pioneered queer studies in academia. Dollimore de-sanitised our very idea of literature by politically examining literary texts as sites of cultural production where hegemonic meanings are stabilised in history. In a disarmingly simple style, he talks about the continued need to be historical, political and philosophical in speaking truth to power. Excerpts from an interview:

In 1985, your commendable work “Political Shakespeare” pioneered cultural materialism as a critical method. How do you view the prospects of the cultural materialist approaches to literature over the three decades after the publication of the book? How would you respond to the detours and deviations taken by cultural materialism in these years?

At the moment of its inception, cultural materialism was never a fixed philosophy or creed. It was a critical practice and an open-ended philosophy. Like all critical practices, it evolves in relation to the reality it confronts. At the outset, my conviction was that cultural materialism had to be historical, political and philosophical.

I do think that over the last years there has been a great deal of very productive emphasis on the political side of it, particularly historically, but I think there hasn’t been sufficient attention given to the philosophical aspect. This has led to some second-rate work being produced under the name of cultural material-

“I think that literature is profoundly cognitive. All the time it articulates truths, ideas and insights which may liberate us, threaten us.“