PEN America: Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde
The harder and stronger Palestinians fight for liberation, the more, like lightning bolts of ever increasing luminosity, they bring the relief of the world system into clearer view: the impotence of the United Nations; the imperialist contempt for international law; the complicity of the Arab neo-colonial states with Western capitalism; the fascist racism at the heart of modern European and U.S. capitalism, as murderers and maimers operate in Western capitals; the neo-colonial structures of the Arab and Third World; and the hollowness of Western liberal democracy and its constellation of civil society institutions.
—Max Ajl, “Palestine’s Great Flood: Part I”
This essay takes up the last, reverberatory clause of Ajl’s indictment of Western imperialism in light of the Palestinian fight for liberation: the hollowness of our civil institutions, specifically our cultural institutions. It does this through the case of PEN America, a human rights organization with an alternatively storied and sordid history.
PEN claims to protect the freedom of writers, but is best understood as an exemplar of American cultural imperialism. The contradictions between PEN America’s purported mission and actions became wickedly clear in late January 2024.[1] By this time, even through the blinkers of American news media, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians was unignorable. While in October the press carried water for the IOF by repeating the story that it was unclear who bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital (Israel, definitely Israel), killing, by some estimates, 500 Palestinians seeking refuge there, by December major Western outlets like CNN and The Washington Post were reporting that the IOF had left NICU babies to die and rot in Al-Nasr Hospital. South Africa had lodged its case to the ICJ charging genocide and the ICJ would soon find their case plausible. According to Euro-Med Monitor, in early December, after receiving death threats for months, the IOF bombed poet-professor Refaat al-Areer’s apartment, martyring him and his family.
As the West chanced glimpses at this horror, writers organized to demand PEN take a more unequivocal stance on the killing, jailing, and torture of writers and journalists in Palestine. Despite this pressure campaign, the Los Angeles branch of PEN decided to proceed with a conversation between comedian Moshe Kasher and self-identified “Proud Zionist” Mayim Bialik, who, prior to the event had made social media posts opposing ceasefire. Palestinian writer Randa Jarrar and members of W.A.W.O.G. (Writers Against the War on Gaza) interrupted the event. PEN had Jarrar ejected.[2]
PEN’s ejection of a Palestinian writer in favor of platforming a Zionist celebrity opposed to ending the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians punctuated several months of muted responses from PEN.
[1] PEN America is the largest of the more than 100 PEN centers worldwide which collectively form PEN International. PEN America will be referred to as PEN for the remainder of the essay.
A Liberal Imperialist in Control: Suzanne Nossel & PEN
PEN’s failures in early 2024 were not the result of cluelessness. Rather, the organization was helmed by an out-and-out imperialist who had already committed to using its humanitarian clout to further U.S. foreign policy interests. Enter PEN’s CEO since 2013, Suzanne Nossel, who can be best understood through a sustained look at her history prior to PEN.
Since graduating from Harvard, Nossel ascended into the highest circles of privilege and power. She began her climbing as an associate at McKinsey & Company, moved on to the Council on Foreign Relations, then served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary under the Hillary Clinton-led Department of State.
As a think tank employee and state official, Nossel assiduously greased the wheels of massively destructive campaigns against Arab nations and wrote apologias when these campaigns failed. She did so through her influential 2004 essay in Foreign Affairs, “Smart Power,” her role as a high-ranking state department employee, testimony as an Amnesty Executive Director, and through articles and op-eds in major outlets like Foreign Policy and The New York Times. Amid allegations of human rights violations, Nossel helped set in motion the catastrophic invasion of Libya, manufacture consent for intervention in Syria, and justify policies relentlessly hostile to Iran.
While one could survey noxious ideas across Nossel’s body of work, her 2004 “Smart Power” represents its most succinct distillation. Why “Smart Power”? It was published in Foreign Affairs, a publication dedicated to hashing out imperial grand strategy, where the U.S. application of force abroad to maintain its position at the head of the world system is a granted. The 2004 timing of the publication was crucial as liberalism tried to form a post-9/11 foreign policy vision. “Smart Power” is widely cited in academic and popular publications (400+ citations in Google Scholar; a Wikipedia entry). A 2009 New Yorker column, riding high on Obama-era triumphalism, includes a fawning profile of this imperial architect: “She’s in her late thirties, she has the strawberry-blond ringlets of a Dickens heroine, and she’s the chief operating officer of Human Rights Watch.” The profile ends with a truly cursed quote from Nossel about her soon-to-be boss in the State Department, Hillary Clinton: “‘Hillary was impressive,’ Nossel said a couple of days afterward, in her office, about a third of the way up the Empire State Building. ‘She didn’t gloss over the difficulties, but at the same time she was fundamentally optimistic. She’s saying that, by using all the tools of power in concert, the trajectory of American decline can be reversed. She’ll make smart power cool.’” Hillary Clinton adapted Smart Power as a guiding principle in her role directing the U.S.’s imperial power as the head of the State Department from 2009-2017. Nossel played a crucial role in providing a theory of imperialism in liberal terms.
Nossel’s Smart Power accepts the post-9/11 commitment to U.S. global military hegemony.[3] It rejects the Bush-era naked militarism (think of the invasion of Iraq) for a multilateral approach in which the U.S. is the head of a coalition of subordinate powers (think of the NATO destruction of Libya) and extends its power less visibly by using proxies (think of the massive amounts of arms flowing into Ukraine, Israel, Syria—or the Saudis dropping U.S. bombs on starving Yemenis). It also involves an all-of-the-above approach, using diplomacy, sanctions, culture, etc. to advance U.S. interests. Nossel sees these efforts as complimentary: “A renewed liberal internationalism strategy recognizes that military power and humanitarian endeavors can be mutually reinforcing.” Nossel also accepts the principle of “preemption” i.e. U.S. aggression (think of the Bush Doctrine’s pre-emptive strikes), recasting it as “smart preemption” through language that shades away from violence but does not take violence off the table. In effect, Nossel widens the definition of preemption to involve any number of uninvited U.S. interventions that violate the sovereignty of other states. In sum, Nossel’s “Smart Power” is a crystallization of a post-9/11 liberal re-commitment to global hybrid warfare in think tank addled platitudes.[4] Very cool.
If the dismantling of Iraq and Afghanistan was the outcome of the Bush era, the legacy of Obama and Biden includes the dismantling of Libya, destabilization in Syria and Yemen, and the intensified and world-shattering acceleration of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Nossel’s goal of maintaining global U.S. hegemony that maintains the capitalist order heavily overlaps with that of the neo-cons; the difference is in tactics. Indeed, Nossel’s “Smart Power” may be more pernicious because hiding the exercise of U.S. power through proxies is a powerful way to mystify the U.S.’s relentlessly violent foreign policy.[5]
However, the way Western media consumers receive U.S. imperial activity is far different. Smart Power’s emphasis on “foreign policy that is viewed as liberal” [emphasis mine] has meant replacing George W. Bush on a warship declaring “Mission Accomplished” with a series of humanitarian justifications that in the case of Israel have descended into farce. Nada Elia succinctly describes one distinct flavor of imperialism with a humanitarian face as ‘imperial feminism’: “Such are the consequences of imperial feminism, which presents women’s rights as a Western gift to the benighted Orient, and of pinkwashing, which celebrates Israel as gay-friendly, because its soldiers can fly a Pride flag after torturing Palestinian prisoners.”[6]
The arc of liberal administrations claiming to free Libyans from an Orientalized sovereign and protecting the rights and freedoms of women in Afghanistan in the late 2000s and early 2010s terminates in the blistering contradiction of bombs and aid packages raining down on Gaza.
The unapologetic and unrestrained pursuit of U.S. interests justified by “Smart Power” has been catastrophic for the Arab world. Ali Kadri, a theorist of empire, war, and capital argues that “U.S.-led imperialism in the Arab region pursues a clear policy of state decapitation and depopulation.” Historically, “since the second half of the twentieth century, the number of war and war-related deaths in the Arab Mashreq is in the millions. The number of refugees is even greater. Together, deaths related to war, expulsion from the land, and premature austerity-related-mortality, or deaths occurring long before the historically determined life expectancy, are tantamount to depopulation.” This depopulation campaign is reaching its apogee in Gaza.
Along the way to Gaza there was string of quiet wars, led by liberal imperialists. Foremost for Nossel and the HRC-led State Department was the catastrophic early 2011 intervention in Libya. Here humanitarian discourse was mobilized to preempt “a genocide” for which there was no actual evidence. Nossel herself, as a State Department employee working to craft U.S. policy in relation to the UN Human Rights Commissioned reported to the House of Representatives her office’s work as instrumental in ejecting Libya from the UN General Assembly membership and, ultimately, the U.S.-led NATO invasion of the country. [7] This invasion resulted in NATO bombing civilians. After the gruesome killing of Gaddafi, the state plunged into chaos from which it has not recovered. This chaos includes multiple states committing arms and weapons to various factions, vying for colonial position on Africa’s northern shore; the return of slavery; flooding as the result of post-NATO invasion neglect of crucial infrastructure; and ethnic cleansing, infamously the Tawergha massacre.
Libya should hang from Nossel like an albatross. The veteran journalist and author Chris Hedges cited Nossel’s hiring as executive director in his resignation from PEN: “The appointment of Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department official and longtime government apparatchik, as executive director of PEN American Center is part of a campaign to turn U.S. human rights organizations into propagandists for pre-emptive war and apologists for empire.”
[3] “Washington...should thus offer assertive leadership—diplomatic, economic, and not least, military” (131).
[4] Hybrid warfare as defined by the Tricontinental: “a combination of unconventional and conventional means using a range of state and non-state actors that runs across the spectrum of social and political life (Ceceña, 2012; Borón, 2012; Korybko, 2015). Korbyko (2015) defines the term hybrid war as: “Externally provoked identity conflicts, which exploit historical, ethnic, religious, socio-economic, and geographic differences within geostrategic transit states through the phased transition from colour revolutions to unconventional wars in order to disrupt, control, or influence multipolar transnational connective infrastructure projects by means of regime”
[5] Nossel: "Smart power means knowing that the United States’ own hand is not always its best tool: U.S. interests are furthered by enlisting others on behalf of U.S. goals."
[6] Nada Elia, Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism Inter/Nationalism & Palestine, Pluto Press, 2023.
[7] In praising Nossel, the American Jewish Committee’s Jacob Blaustein Institute for Advancement of Human Rights, wrote: “During her two years in office, she and others were able to return a scrutiny to massive human rights violators such as Iran, Libya and Syria through new mandates to investigate situations. To some extent, they were also able to reduce somewhat the obsessive focus on Israel as compared to other countries, although the structural bias against Israel within the UN system continues.” JBI is actively running cover for genocide, describing Israel’s response to Hamas as “one of the clearest examples of its adherence to the proportionality principle.”
Imperial Capture: An Insider Account
Nossel’s tenure at PEN has been marked by internal turmoil and the prioritization of Nossel’s imperial worldview.
In 2013, PEN was looking for a new CEO after the newspaper veteran Steve Isenberg announced his retirement. While staff lobbied for a candidate with a literary background, the board chose Nossel, a hawk feathered in blood. The announcement of Nossel’s hiring blindsided staff and polarized the cramped Soho office. Nossel’s ties to the highest levels of the foreign policy establishment and projected presidential candidate Hillary Clinton were not lost to them, though they hoped PEN would be a pit stop on the way to a position in the Clinton administration.
According to a former PEN employee who spoke on condition of anonymity, soon after Nossel’s arrival at PEN she began a unilateral, tumultuous transformation of the direction of the organization.
Nossel’s cleaning house included running out one of the only women of color on staff. She made decisions unilaterally, did little to build relationships, refused staff requests to be paid for off-the-clock labor necessary to continue the organization’s programming, and shortchanged employee benefits. Layoffs were followed by high-profile resignations, including that of the director of advocacy. Nossel and management are currently embroiled in a high-profile battle with its union, PEN America United.
Nossel also transformed PEN’s output. This meant ceasing publishing original works by writers, burying that digital archive, and requesting PEN staff publish links to her editorial writing on international affairs from other websites like Politico.[8] PEN began to reflect Nossel’s imperial worldview and, under Nossel, PEN maintains what Juliana Spahr describes as “a symbiotic relationship with national security interests.” This includes a PEN conference on “The Future of Truth” which featured an ex-CIA director and general, an ex-attorney for the NSA, and a former DOD employee.[9]
Under Nossel, PEN’s literary programming is disintegrating and its advocacy has contorted itself to accommodate the increasingly unpopular foreign policy positions of the Democratic establishment. While Nossel is a particularly risible character, it is unlikely a Nossel-less PEN is redeemable. As documented by Deborah Cohn and Megan Doherty, PEN has historic ties to the CIA and State Department and has served as a vehicle for U.S. soft power abroad.
[8] At the same time, as chronicled in a 2019 New Yorker story, a white staffer (Antonio Aiello) appears to have been involved in attempt to launch a “congress” composed of minoritized writers meeting in an informal workshop setting. The program was attached to the deep pockets of the Riggio Foundation and shrouded in secrecy, perhaps because one workshop participant was Stephanie Riggio who, unbeknownst to the others, was running the show. Despite the seemingly intentional diverse composition of the workshop, discussions of race and gender were discouraged by the lead white staff member, Jackson Taylor (also in charge of PEN’s prison writing program) who, in response to pushback, banned class discussion before pulling the plug on the project altogether. The purpose of the workshop appears muddled. On one hand, it appears to simply be Stephanie Riggio’s vanity project, a way for her to purchase access to other writers. If you squint hard enough in the initial branding of it as a “congress” you might see PEN blundering its way toward trying to develop low-rent Congress for Cultural Freedom 2.0.
[9] See Spahr’s DuBois’ Telegram, Harvard University Press, 2018, 168.
Loud Silence: PEN and Genocide
The fact of PEN’s ties to the foreign policy establishment and national security state should be all any writer needs to know to join efforts to hammer the organization to dust. However, it is also important to understand how PEN has used language to weaponize a humanitarian and rights-based discourse to mystify genocide. These distinctions matter because they can be applied to other literary and cultural organizations whose communications confuse the fact of the matter.
PEN’s response has been to defend Israel and Israeli expression first, and then to either stay silent on the matter of Palestinians or present a weak defense of Palestinian cultural resistance. Before October 7th, PEN had regularly issued condemnatory press releases immediately following attacks on any international writing community. It issued such a statement in its email to subscribers on the morning of October 7th. As early as October 13th, Israel’s assault on Gaza was labeled “a textbook case of genocide” by a prominent scholar in Jewish Currents, yet PEN remained silent on the atrocities committed by Israel for months. Their next email to subscribers was on December 27th, requesting year-end donations.
As of the moment of writing of this essay in May, June, and July 2024, even after overwhelming evidence and untold suffering, a boycott of its 2024 literary awards by the awardees that caused the cancellation of the awards ceremony, and a letter signed by thousands of writers and artists, asking PEN “to respond to the extraordinary threat that Israel’s genocide of Palestinians represents for the lives of writers in Palestine and to freedom of expression everywhere,” PEN has refused to use the word “genocide.”[10] It prefers the comfortable liberal framing of a “war and humanitarian crisis.” “War” suggests a symmetrical conflict between two sovereign nations with standing armies. In the broadest terms, what is occurring is, rather, the assault by a settler-colonial state backed by the full might of U.S. imperial power upon an already displaced, rightless Palestinian population. The object of this assault, as has been expressed by Israeli officials and identified by the ICJ, is mass civilian death and the displacement of civilians from Gaza (genocide). If we are to be more specific, Israel has decided to kill as many civilians as possible (genocide) in the belief that this will destroy the base of support for Hamas, which is waging a guerilla struggle for liberation for the Palestinian people. This struggle is supported by the larger Axis of Liberation.[11] In either case, there is a radical asymmetry in power and Israel has decided in this struggle to radically accelerate the process of a genocide which began before October 7th to achieve its ends.
Yet PEN’s “war and humanitarian crisis” is presented without location or agent. The “humanitarian crisis,” beyond genocide, is the famine raging in Gaza, the preconditions of which were created well before October 7th and which has been inflicted upon Gaza by the stranglehold Israel holds on its airspace, waters, and surface. It has included the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure. It has included a series of flour massacres in which the IOF shot and killed hundreds of starving Palestinians trying to collect aid from convoys at the Kuwait roundabout.
PEN’s dangerously inaccurate descriptions of the direction and agents of violence in Gaza find their parallel in PEN’s response to Palestine Solidarity activism in the United States. On October 31st, PEN issued a bulletin on “Handling Rising Antisemitism on Campuses,” putting their weight behind a narrative that campus protests are characterized by antisemitism while also calling for campuses to undertake “enhanced security measures.” They did so before making a statement about the more numerous and violent hate crimes against Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim individuals as well as the intensifying criminalization of their and their allies’ protests.
On December 7th, PEN wrung its hands over the “Crisis of Polarization and Free Speech,” again working to frame the conflict as symmetrical and the problem as a lack of moderation, rather than that of the historic slaughter of a civilian population by a nuclear-armed settler-state. In this bulletin, Nossel repeats the canard that “the conflict” is eternal: “recognizing the many-sided nature of a dispute that dates back millennia and has confounded generations of diplomats and statesmen.” The conflict is not eternal. It is a political-historical phenomena in which European political Zionism found imperial sponsors in Britain, France, and the United States across the 20th and 21st centuries.[12]
As police began to wield rubber bullets, clubs, and zipties against students seeking to end the genocide via university divestment across the nation, PEN issued a press release condemning the protests and focused on criminalizing speech, alleging “that some protesters taunted [students] with antisemitic slurs.” In this case, PEN links to a news report that quotes protestors as chanting “Long live the intifada,” “Hey hey, ho ho, the occupation has got to go” and “Killers on campus.” Though it wasn’t always the case, the notion that criticism of Zionism and its adherents or the State of Israel is not antisemitism should be common sense at this historical juncture. However, PEN appears to have adopted those definitions provided by staunch supporters of Israel like the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt that equate criticism of the state of Israel with anti-Semitism and expressions of solidarity with Palestinians and the freedom of Palestine with antisemitism.[13] In its communications, PEN has often translated statements of solidarity with Palestine and criticisms of the state of Israel with exceptional and isolated cases of antisemitism, inviting readers to buy into the myth, gleefully embraced by the center and right, that campus Palestine solidarity encampments are hotbeds of antisemitism. In doing so, PEN’s “defense” of student freedom of speech has been so feeble as to be meaningless.[14]
Even as the repression of student protests against genocide assumed historic proportions and PEN spoke out against them in an April 29th bulletin, it still could not help centering the potential hurt feelings of some students in the face of Pro-Palestine/anti-genocide chants: “The fact that peaceful protests may involve rhetoric or slogans that some students and members of the campus community find deeply abhorrent or offensive cannot be viewed as justification for calling in outside police or the National Guard.” Nowhere in this communication are mentions of student demands or the genocide and epistemicide that have fueled them, replacing attention to the dead, displaced, and suffering with attention to the emotional barometer of imperial subjects identifying with an ethnostate.
PEN’s two-step of first centering the feelings of those who don’t like Palestine solidarity protests before expressing concern over the lives of Palestinians and physical safety of students reached farcical levels in early May. After seemingly adopting the ADL’s definition of antisemitic speech, PEN issued a press release on May 1st stating its “concern” over enshrining into law overly broad definitions of antisemitism. PEN is concerned about the criminalization of speech it helped fan. At this point a violent reaction against the student encampments by colleges and universities themselves was already in full swing, culminating most visibly in UCLA authorizing cops to shoot faculty and students with bullets coated in rubber.
PEN’s slow-footed reactions and constant false equivalency might be seen as the product of a hapless and wildly out of touch organization more concerned with the disposition of its donors than with facts on the ground. But it’s also possible that PEN, headed by a liberal imperialist, is engaging in a purposeful strategy of leveraging the credibility of a humanitarian organization to flood the zone with shit in order to muddy the field of the debate.
During the month of February, well after PEN was catching heat for its silence, it tweeted its condemnation of the actions of several nations against writers (“we condemn,” “PEN America Condemns”). It did not use condemnatory language against the state of Israel. It posted or reposted tweets critical of Russia (11), China (6), and Iran (4), more than those of the entity engaged in destroying every university in Gaza (3). It posted summaries of other organizations’ defense of journalists in Gaza. None of its tweets name Israel as a killer of journalists or writers. Rather, these deaths are blamed on the “War in Israel and Gaza.” None of the tweets express that PEN explicitly affirms the defense of journalists in Gaza. PEN names as under threat a number of threatened artists and activists in China, Russia, and Iran. These posts often include pictures of the artists. Nowhere does PEN explicitly articulate its concern for a single Palestinian writer, artist, journalist, or intellectual that is under threat (though they all are) or who has been murdered by Israel. Rather, they include a summary of another organization’s mourning the death of Palestinian visual artist Fathi Ghaben. In an entire month’s worth of communications read carefully and taken at their word, PEN takes no position on the genocide of Palestinians, does not condemned Israel for this genocide, and mourns no Palestinian writer.
Contents of PEN Tweets and Re-posts in February 2024.
This does not reflect the content of links included in the posts.
| Black History Month | 12 |
| Campus Speech | 18 |
| Book and Movie Bans | 34 |
| State policy and legislation on speech and education | 34 |
| National Policy – Social Media Regulation | 3 |
| Human Rights Legislation, United States | 1 |
| Libraries are Good | 3 |
| Suzanne Nossel Editorial or Article in Non-PEN Publication | 9 |
| PEN-associated author boost | 8 |
| Disinformation and AI | 4 |
| Prison and Justice Writing Program | 2 |
| PEN Literary Programing | 2 |
| PEN Summary of Programming | 1 |
| PEN Statement Defending Jan 31 Ejection | 1 |
| Other | 5 |
| Russia: Criticism of State Actions | 11 |
| China: Criticism of State Actions | 6 |
| Iran: Criticism of State Actions | 4 |
| Israel: Criticism of State Actions | 3 |
| Sudan: Criticism of State Actions | 2 |
| Mexico: Criticism of State Actions | 2 |
| Vietnam: Criticism of State Actions | 2 |
| Thailand: Criticism of State Actions | 2 |
| Egypt: Criticism of State Actions | 1 |
| United States: Press Freedom | 1 |
| PEN Statement on War in Israel and Gaza | 1 |
| War in Israel and Gaza – Death of Palestinian Journalists | 1 |
| Ukraine: Pro-Ukraine Programming | 5 |
| Individual Victims of Repression | |
| Li Qiaochu (China) | 1 |
| Ilham Tohti (China) | 1 |
| Alexei Navalny (Russia) | 3 |
| Vladimir Kara-Murza (Russia) | 1 |
| Darya Kozyreva (Russia) | 1 |
| Narges Mohammadi (Iran) | 2 |
| Sepideh Rashno (Iran) | 1 |
| Fathi Ghaben (Gaza) | 1 |
It is unfathomable that a free speech organization that feels compelled to weigh in on international affairs would not dedicate the majority of its communications to denouncing the unprecedented mass killing, jailing, and displacement of Palestinian writers, journalists, and academics.
Here we might turn to the Palestinian prisoner Walid Daqqa, killed by Israel in 2024 in April through imprisonment, in regard to the larger structure of human rights discourse as applied to Israel: “This discourse, employed by human rights organizations, concentrates its special efforts in order to prove specific violations considered by the Israeli judiciary and media as the exception to the rule, which is respect for human and prisoners’ rights. The result is that contrary to the pretense of exposing and being transparent, in reality this discourse hides facts and obscures truth.”[15] We know that under an apartheid system within Israel and military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, there is no respect for human and prisoners’ rights; rather, the system is committed to genocide. PEN reflects this centrist and liberal discourse of normalizing the idea that in general Israel is an equitable democratic society marred by a few exceptional incidents. This idea has no connection to reality and the distance grows greater by the day. Palestinian resistance has revealed, again, that Israel is a massively, structurally violent settler society where violence against Palestinians is gratuitous and regular. This same human rights discourse treats signs (even if fabricated) of resistance to this gratuitously violent order as themselves gratuitously violent and not as an exception (as Israeli acts of savagery are treated as exceptional) but rather indicative that resistance itself is systemically illiberal and that those who resist are placed outside of the order of ordinary rights. It is a shame Palestinians are silenced, fired, beaten, jailed, bombed, and killed. But that is what happens.
[10] On the UN Goldstone report in regard to Israeli war crimes in Gaza during the December 2009 Operation Cast Lead, Nossel criticized the credibility of the report and, generally, the UN Human Rights Council’s attention to Israel, and suggested that Israel should ultimately investigate itself and hold itself accountable for human rights abuses.
[11] See Ajl, “Palestine’s Great Flood: Part I” in Agrarian South.
[12] See Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020).
[13] Nossel explicitly adapts the equation that criticism of Israel equals antisemitism in a 2020 interview with the Jewish Book Council when she labels the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement as antisemitic: “At times, the defense of free speech can be pitted against the drive to combat antisemitism; for example, through laws that advocate punishing those who support BDS. We are witnessing a spike in antisemitic expression and actions, which is genuinely alarming.”
[14] Indeed, Nossel’s defense of the speech of Neo-nazis is more thoughtful and nuance-mongering than that of Pro-Palestinians protestors: “The ACLU was criticized for supporting the Nazis in their quest to march, but the organization ultimately won itself enormous legitimacy by demonstrating that it was prepared to apply its principles even in relation to a cause that most of its members found abhorrent.”
[15] Walid Daqqa, “Consciousness Molded or the Re-identification of Torture.”
PEN, Who Counts As A Writer, & Bourgeois Mind-Rot
Throughout Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and epistemicide of Palestinian writers, scholars, and intellectuals, PEN has stuck to directing its audiences’ attention to writers jailed in countries who oppose the United States’ strategic interests. A related tool PEN has used in service of shifting attention from the ongoing genocide is its Freedom to Write Index, a purported global survey of those targeted for state oppression via their writing. PEN’s Freedom to Write campaign debuted in 2019. The 2023 index itself reports China and Iran as the top two countries with the most writers jailed. It spotlights the Asia-Pacific (152) and Middle East and North-Africa (105) as the regions with the most writers jailed. Is it a coincidence that these are also the regions where the United States has waged the most wars (Middle East and North-Africa) and is, with the Obama-era pivot to Asia, rapidly expanding its military footprint.
PEN reports 100+ writers jailed in each of these regions. The number of reported writers jailed in the Americas? 10. These numbers, to put it mildly, raise questions about PEN’s methodology and who counts as a writer.
PEN’s methodology: “The 2023 Freedom to Write Index is a count of the writers who were held in prison or detention during 2023 because of their writing or for otherwise exercising their freedom of expression. Individuals must have spent at least 48 hours behind bars in a single instance of detention between January 1 and December 31, 2023. We define imprisonment when an individual is serving a sentence following a conviction, while detention is defined as individuals held in custody pending charges, or those held in pre-trial or administrative detention.”
The numbers this methodology reveals reflect bourgeois conceptions of what constitutes a writer and the imperialist agenda of the counters.
For instance, the 2023 index does not include Walid Daqqa, the Palestinian prison writer and thinker cited earlier, jailed by Israel for 37 years until his death in 2024. The great influence of Daqqa’s prison writing contributed to the extension of his sentence, as well as the medical neglect and torture that quickened his death. In 2018, Daqqa, already imprisoned, was brought to trial for writing a children’s book.
Neither does the index include the enormous number of Palestinians arrested for social media posts. 410 were arrested in 2022. Reporting from American outlets in December 2023 found Israel had initiated 250 prosecutions for social media posts, mostly of Palestinian students. For PEN, Palestinian posts aren’t writing and Palestinian posters aren’t writers involved in politically resonant and consequential activity.[16] Given the increase in social media arrests after October 7, it stretches credulity to believe that a mere 17 Palestinians exercising their freedom of expression (PEN’s count) spent more than 48 hours in Israeli jails. In March 2024 alone, Israel held no less than 17 Palestinian journalists in administrative detention.
Moreover, Israel’s apartheid system is such that Palestinians can be held indefinitely without being charged under what is termed administrative detention. B’Tselem: “Since March 2002, not a single month has gone by without Israel holding at least 100 Palestinians in administrative detention.” This is to say, Israel can jail a Palestinian for a look, a word, for being Palestinian. Such an extreme state of well-documented oppression calls for latitude in counting who has been jailed for speech or writing given that it can incite jailing but not a formal charge.
And of our 10 writers jailed in the Americas?
The index posits that there are two individuals from the United States and six in Cuba. Are we supposed to believe that of the 1.9 million individuals the United States’ sprawling prison population, only two of them are there because of their writing or for otherwise exercising their freedom of expression?
What of the RICO and domestic charges leveled against 61 individuals organizing against Cop City? According to the ACLU, “the indictment paints the provision of mutual aid, the advocacy of collectivism, and even the publishing of zines as hallmarks of a criminal enterprise.” Why haven’t any of these individuals been counted? Zines aren’t writing? Advocating collectivism isn’t expression?
What of the thousands of people or protestors in the United States jailed or detained on charges of disorderly conduct, the substance of which is insulting a cop aka “contempt of cop”? Isn’t this political expression?[17]
And what of the waves of legislation washing over a bedrock of pre-existing law criminalizing protest? That makes assembling in public space to provide collective voice subject to any number of criminal charges? As we have seen in the violent, carceral responses to Standing Rock, to the 2020 uprisings, and now to Palestine solidarity, the United States wants people to shut the fuck up and will create that silence—remove the signals and signage—from public space through laws that allow the ruling class to say they are not targeting speech or writing but rather bodies, trespassers, loiterers, and maskers.
Some of the most profound poetry in the United States in the past several months has been the sign poetry of student encampments: banners renaming academic halls “Hind’s Hall” or a bookshelf in a student encampment named “Refaat Alareer Memorial Library.” The police have destroyed these poems and beaten and jailed the poets who wrote them. PEN doesn’t bother to identify or track these writers once they are in police custody.
In the largest sense, the United States has sought to strangulate through law and its enforcers what Kluge and Negt call the proletarian public sphere—one that includes zines, graffiti, signs scrawled on cardboard.[18] By hewing to bourgeois definitions of who counts as a writer, PEN’s erasure of that public sphere and its thousands of writers is part of this assault on a proletarian public sphere.
To get to two, PEN only counts in America writers legible as members of a Habermasian bourgeois public sphere, writers who have access to extensive training and accreditation through publication and, generally, present themselves as a proper subject—a needle’s eye for working class, minoritized writers. A wall for the collectives, for the necessarily anonymous. PEN’s quantification of jailed writers condescends, wildly, to the intelligence of anyone who with some knowledge of the world-beating scope of mass incarceration in the United States and how the speech and writing of working class, racialized, and indigenous groups in the United States are the grounds for criminal charges.
And the thousands of students in the United States arrested on various piddly-shit charges applied in an ad-hoc fashion when we know their real crime was expressing Pro-Palestinian speech? Or even just the 132 students arrested at SUNY New Paltz? Do you think PEN will count them?
And what of the uncounted number of individuals in the archipelago of U.S.-operated black sites? Guantanamo? How would we even know why they are there? They have written. They are writing.
There were two writers in 2023 in the United States jailed for their expression.
Michelle Murphy has a word for these kinds of emotionally charged performances of population quantification: “phantasmagram.” She defines the phantasmagram as such: “The term phantasmagram points to the affectively charged and extra-objective relations that are part of the speculative force of numbers.” And we must look at PEN’s numbers as exactly this: speculative fantasy. And a quantitative fantasy that parades as objective the purely subjective racism, classism, and chauvinism that finds jailed writers quite conveniently in states that have found themselves in the crosshairs of U.S. empire for resisting subordination to the U.S.-led global capitalist system.
Yet, even if we were to take PEN’s counts seriously, we could rework them—presto!—to show that Israel leads the world in jailing writers:
According to PEN, China has jailed 107 writers. Iran 49, Saudi Arabia 19, Vietnam 19, Israel 17.
If we consider number of writers jailed against total population size we find that Israel leads even PEN’s fantasy world in writers jailed per capita.[19]
Such analysis is absent from PEN’s report.
Historically, human-rights groups’ distortions of scales of oppression have helped manufacture the popular consent for war on these countries. We might think of the presentation of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya as unique and intolerable locations of oppression in need of U.S.-led intervention: the U.S. bombed the women of Afghanistan to save them. While many nations have jails and militaries and are linked to the accumulation of capital in one way or another, Kadri reminds us that “the power to which war is foundational in financial and ideological terms is the U.S.”[20] PEN’s work mystifying this fact through its incessant pointing away from the U.S. and Israel paves the way for further hybrid wars and the continuation of the campaign of extermination the U.S. is backing against Palestinians.
[16] Note PEN’s willingness to identify an anti-state poster in Russia as a writer worth defending.
[17] Lopez, C. E. (2010). Disorderly (mis)conduct: the problem with contempt of cop arrests. Advance: The Journal of the ACS Issue Groups, 4(1), 71-90.
[18] See Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
[19] China 107/1,412,000,000 = 7.57790368e-8
Iran 49/88,550,000 = 5.53359684e-7
Saudi Arabia 19/36,410,000 = 5.21834661e-7
Vietnam 19/98,190,000 = 1.93502393e-7
Israel 17/9,558,000 = 0.00000177861
[20] Kadri, Ali, “Imperialism with Reference to Syria.” Springer, 2019, 31.
The End of PEN(s): Cultural Imperialism & Writers in the Imperial Core
In the face of fierce organizing, PEN has buckled but not broken. The determined, principled actions against PEN by writers and activists have caused it to cancel its 2024 Literary Awards Ceremony and World Voices festival.
PEN has drawn such intense criticism because Palestinian resistance has shown us how profoundly it is failing its purported mission, its prominence as a literary organization, its considerable budget, and because Nossel is a particularly detestable operator.
In this time Nossel has only doubled down, continuing to theorize strategies for waging cultural imperialism in a February 2024 Foreign Affairs article entitled “The Real Culture Wars.” Without a word for Palestinians, Nossel recommends a strategy for which the U.S. and compliant civil institutions avoid direct export of U.S. culture but, rather, enlist compatible artists and intellectuals embedded in those societies over which the U.S. seeks influence. Following the U.S.’s strategy of war by proxy, Nossel advocates cultural imperialism by proxy—divide and conquer. Nowhere in the article does Nossel eschew violence and her language is self-consciously, chauvinistically militaristic, framing culture as playing a leading role in a global battle of Western democracies (beating the shit out of their students) against Orientalized Eastern totalitarians (Russia, China, Iran, Russia): “Western governments should recognize that culture creators are part of the infantry of antiauthoritarianism. U.S. embassy personnel should make a point in developing relationships with key cultural figures.” Global cultural war with shades of millenarianism.
We need to be honest with ourselves here and ask why it took such rank hypocrisy in the face of a world-cleaving genocide for PEN to draw fire from the literary community. Years before October 7th, PEN’s emphasis had already shifted to align with the priorities of liberal imperialism. There was little outcry.[21]
Why? First, I think this speaks to the hegemony of liberal-imperial ideology over these elite cultural leadership positions. Second, discussions of cultural imperialism are muted within literary circles: we have not taken seriously the relationship between cultural production, human rights discourses, and the reproduction of the United States’ imperial power.
Through Nossel, PEN represents an example par excellence of a larger literary non-profit industry that is a hand-servant of liberal imperialism and, in some cases, partially constituted by the violence-directing wings of the state. Their modes of operation include active suppression of radical voices, the weaponization of humanitarianism in service of national war-making projects, and constituting politically feeble theatres of conversation in regard to what constitutes national and international literature.
Whereas we may be more resistant to shallow weaponizations of identity politics in the realm of politics (having an Arab University President crack down on Pro-Palestinian students, as in Columbia’s case, for instance) to maintain a violent status quo, can we say same of our cultural institutions?
It is not enough to give them a pass because they hold up writers from other countries without being curious about how and why they select these poets and how to situate these poets, their poetics, and their politics both within their context and a larger context of international relations. This requires us to know something about the interaction of cultural production, reception, and states.
Here a brief illustration by way of the Latin American literary boom might be useful. As Deborah Cohn and Juliana Spahr have documented, private foundations, the CIA, State Department, cut-outs like the Congress of Cultural Freedom, and literary non-profits like PEN collaborated in the 1960s, mobilizing significant resources to create cultural arenas that both promoted and depoliticized the work of Latin-American authors. Though individual writers did not always stick with the program, such cultural diplomacy was sponsored by the State as part of a cold-war effort to pull authors out of the orbit of Spanish-language publishing networks with more radical politics, particularly those associated with the spirit of the Cuban revolution. State and foundation dollars funneled to organizations like PEN would help soften the attitudes of Latin American authors towards the United States and counter the influence of organizations like the Casa de las Américas, a Cuban state-sponsored foundation that disseminated a new wave of Latin American literature with a revolutionary and de-colonial bent.[22]
This is not a thing of the past. The journalist Chris Hedges recognized that Nossel’s PEN was symptomatic of “the widespread hijacking of human rights organizations to demonize those—especially Muslims—branded by the state as the enemy, in order to cloak pre-emptive war and empire with a fictional virtue and to effectively divert attention from our own mounting human rights abuses, including torture, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring, the denial of due process and extrajudicial assassinations.”
Yet in our present moment, Spahr has noted the increasing willingness of writers supposedly operating autonomously from the larger literary establishment to take state money and participate in state-sponsored international events. Establishment writers like Victoria Chang, Dianne Seuss, and Li-Young Lee have their poems appear alongside articles justifying the killing of Palestinian children as lawful in The Atlantic. Poet Laureates lay low.[23]
Given the liberal establishment’s commitment to genocide in Gaza, ambivalence about the relationships between writers, the state, and literary and human rights organizations must give way to direct, forceful criticism of organizations and poets doing the work of empire or allowing publications to use their work as a fig leaf over genocidal or imperial discourse.
So, as writers, how do we do this? Fargo Nissim Tbakhi outlines a series of actions for writers to take in his trenchant “Notes on the Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide.” They are very good. Do them.
In addition, we should approach literary organizations with a well-earned skepticism and have a clear and common-sense set of criteria when judging whether or not an organization can be trusted to not coopt our cultural labor into acceptance of an intolerable imperial order.
What to do will always be an open-ended question as strategies are tested, as conditions and capacities change. In the meanwhile, the following is a list of questions to ask of cultural organizations to try to determine where they stand and what actions to take and demands to make in relation to them:
The basic stress-test: Where does the organization stand on Palestine?
If it has made statements, has it gone beyond both-sides condemnation?
Has it identified Israel’s conduct as genocide?
Has the organization signed onto the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israeli (PACBI)?
Does the organization maintain ties to Zionists?
Does the organization platform Zionists?
Does the organization platform Palestinians?
Does the organization receive funding from the state or major foundations? What are the politics of those foundations? Who sits on the boards of those foundations? What characterizes their political donations? What are their other institutional links and loyalties?
Does the organization, through its pensions, retirement funds, and/or foundations, have investments in Israel (like Israel Bonds), Israeli companies (like Elbit Systems), or the military industrial complex (Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, etc).
If the organization has an international dimension:
Does its internationalism converge or diverge with U.S. state policy?
How does it characterize the United States’ role in international affairs? Is it able to criticize U.S. militarism and hard power?
If it criticizes states or state actors in the name of human rights, what is the balance of that criticism? Is it focused disproportionately on those political formations of countries the United States is actively involved directly or through proxies in sanctioning (Venezuela, Iran), bombing (Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, etc.), or manufacturing the consent for conflict (China)? Does it account for human rights abuses done by the U.S., Israel, or other junior partners in the U.S.-led order (Canada).
If it platforms dissident writers, does it do so only to feature writers whose discourse centers on criticizing state entities opposed to U.S. strategic interests while remaining mute on the colonial and imperial violence of the U.S. led imperial order? Do they platform writers opposing ongoing settler-colonial violence within the U.S., Canada, Israel, or British or French colonies?
If it hosts conversations or conferences:
Do these depoliticize cultural production? Do they evaporate the political i.e. depoliticize issues in attention to universalism?
Do these create space for decolonial, anti-imperial, socialist, anarchist, or communist ideologies?
Let’s push our stress tests further to that wide swath of literary organizations busy being silent. Here, I am thinking in particular about those organizations that constitute their “voices” through the writers they make their face via literary reading and speaker series, city and regional literary organizations, conferences:
Do they feature authors who speak to stress-test issues like Palestine? Or anti-imperialism or actual decolonial or left-revolutionary movements? Or do they only feature authors who say it’s all very complicated? Or authors who are rigorously silent on issues like this?
Do they feature Palestinian authors?
If the organization has a more local orientation, what are the stress test issues in your community that involved the interlinked webs of carceral and imperial power? Police abolition is one such instance given the well-documented connections between the IOF and various police and sheriff’s departments across the United States.
As writers, it is not enough to simply get Nossel fired or to stain PEN’s reputation, though that’s a start. We must continue to identify, critically debate, and counteract the instantiations of cultural imperialism where they appear in our spheres of action.
A major power of the avant-garde is its capacity to recognize when a new break with the conventional order is warranted and to make that break, hard and complete. In the lightning flashes of Palestinian resistance, the time for that break is now.
Historically, organizations like PEN worked to create prestigious discourse networks defined against revolutionary-spirited publishing houses like Casa de las Américas. Our break with PEN and the PENs of the world must be hard and complete. In that rift, what’s to be done is an open and thrilling question. But let me propose that whatever we do must be finely attuned to the political, economic, and social dimensions of our emergent moment in its multiple scales and geographies. Let me propose that we create new cultural networks allied with revolutionary and liberatory politics in general and Palestinian resistance in particular; that we break down the firewalls that quarantine the so-called literary from the political; that we recognize, strengthen, and expand existing publishing and cultural-political networks already doing this work. And through it all, we must be more than writers. We must read and write in a dialectical relation with political action and the reproduction of that action.
We owe it to the decimated universities and libraries in Gaza, to the massacred writers, academics, journalists, street-artists, prison writers, those inscribing and reinscribing on the surface of their consciousness those burning words they would speak or write if their bodies were freed. We owe it to Palestinians keeping the evolving flames of their culture alive in the diaspora, the tents of Rafah and encircled camps and villages in the West Bank. We owe it to the wider resistance struggling to liberate Gaza and all of Palestine from an occupation that has taken selfies of itself burning libraries and turning Palestinian universities into military bases and torture houses. We owe a robust anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and (really) decolonial literary culture fighting for the liberation of all to the writers not yet born in a still undecided future.
[21] I took PEN’s righteous posturing at face-value when an editor for them solicited and published poems from me eight years ago for their now-defunct poetry series.
[22] See Deborah Cohn, The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism During the Cold War, Vanderbilt University Press, 2012; Juliana Spahr, DuBois’ Telegram.
[23] U.S. poet Laureate Ada Limón has made no public statements about Israel’s genocide. Amanda Gorman, the National Youth Poet Laureate and who performed a poem at Biden’s inauguration, has made no public statements about Israel’s genocide.
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Joe Hall is a writer and educator. His books of poetry include Fugue & Strike (Black Ocean 2023) and People Finder, Buffalo (Cloak 2024). Current Affairs on Fugue & Strike: “a remarkable poetic project, unlike anything else in literature today.” Hall has performed and delivered talks nationally at bars, squats, universities, and rivers. Protean, Postcolonial Studies, mercury firs, Best Buds! Collective, dollar bills, and an NFTA bus shelter have all featured his writing. In Buffalo, he has taught community-based poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workers.