As the United States marked its 250th anniversary, authors Stacey Abrams, Eddie Glaude Jr., and Viet Thanh Nguyen examined American storytelling and national identity. This event took place at the New Orleans Book Festival. (C-SPAN)
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Transcript
Speaker:
Coverage of the New Orleans Book Festival.
Faith Dawson Simmons:
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Can you please take your seats? We’re ready to begin our session.
Welcome to the Fifth Annual New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University, a Mardi Gras for the
mind. Thank you for joining us at the Ford Foundation Stage here in McAllister Auditorium. Can we
please have your attention for a brief announcement?
Speaker:
Tulane University promotes and protects the free exchange of ideas. We prohibit any physical or virtual
disruption, shouting down, blocking, or suppressing an invited speaker’s right to speak. Please note,
disruptions of this nature will result in removal from the event. Thank you for your support of the New
Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University.
Faith Dawson Simmons:
My name is Faith Dawson Simmons, and I’m a friend of the festival. Today’s session is Who We Are:
Stories That Shape a Nation. And it’s my pleasure to introduce to you our guests today: Stacey Abrams, Eddie Glaude, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and our moderator, Charles Blow. Enjoy the conversation. Please join me in giving them a warm welcome.
Charles Blow:
Hello.
Stacey Abrams:
Hi.
Charles Blow:
So I want to do very brief introductions. You have that in your programs, and you know these very
famous people already anyway.
First, Stacey Abrams, a politician, voting rights advocate, and author of 17 books such as Our Time Is
Now and the novel While Justice Sleeps. And she’s known for her leadership in expanding voting access in her historic campaigns for Governor of Georgia.
Next, we have Eddie Glaude, the James S. McDowell Distinguished University Professor in the
Department of African American Studies at Princeton and the author of works including Beginning
Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own and the forthcoming America
USA: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries.
And finally, Viet Thanh Nguyen. Did I say right?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Sure.
Charles Blow:
Okay. I was in it back like, “I don’t want to butcher it.” Okay. The Aerol Arnold Chair of English and
Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is also a novelist and essayist whose books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer and
the nonfiction work, Nothing Else Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.
I want to start with a question to all of you. How have stories worked, literature worked, to define the idea of America?
Stacey Abrams:
So I will relate it to a novel that I wrote, While Justice Sleeps. I intentionally never state race in the books. I do descriptions, and you can tell if you have been near America, what race people are. But my intention was to do it so that every character was experienced through the story and not through this one marker. I’m the daughter of, my dad was a shipyard worker at Ingalls in Pascagoula, but my mom was a librarian. And I grew up reading voraciously, and without exception, anytime there was a Black or brown character, they were described by their race. If it was a white character, they were described by their identity and their character and their expectations and their dreams.
And for me, that is emblematic of America, that for so long we have allowed race, and gender to a lesser extent, to be used not just as signifiers, but as qualifiers about what you are permitted to believe or to be. And as America has gotten, for a while, I mean, we can talk about authoritarianism in a minute, but as we’ve progressed as a nation, that distinction got weakened, and it got to the place where I could write a book and my editor did not come back to me and say, “I need you to do…”
And I think that speaks to the evolution of America, that we have gotten better at allowing people to be
the whole of themselves, not diminishing the importance of those markers, but not using those markers as the entirety of who they are or who this country is.
Charles Blow:
Wow.
Eddie Glaude:
First of all, it’s just an honor to be on this panel. And you guys need to understand how special this is.
You got someone born and raised in Moss Point, Mississippi, and someone from Pascagoula, Mississippi.
Stacey Abrams:
Gulfport, technically. I’m from Gulfport.
Eddie Glaude:
Gulfport.
Stacey Abrams:
Thank you.
Eddie Glaude:
From Gulfport, but you know, dad work at Ingalls. I got you.
What kind of stories? What kind of stories? What kind of stories? I mean, in some ways we could talk
about fantasy. We could talk about fable. We could talk about melodrama. We could talk about epic.
There is a way in which the story of America, or the stories of America, aim to figure it in a particular sort of way, as a redeemer nation, as the city on the hill, or as Reagan would call it, the shining city on the hill; as a kind of sacralized democratic entity, that it is in so many ways a reflection of God’s will in the world, all of which is aimed at producing a particular understanding of who we are as a nation in relation to the world.
And I think to think about it in terms of those genres of writing, each is doing a particular kind of work.
To think about the American story in terms of melodramas is to think about good and evil. We always
need our heroes and our villains in this story. And we’re always the hero or the heroine.
To think about it in terms of fantasy is to ensure America’s innocence. That’s linked to melodrama, but
there’s a sense in which America’s innocence is absolutely necessary as we give voice to a kind of story of that we’re always already on the road to a more perfect union, which is almost like confession for Catholics. That is, no matter what our sins are, we’re okay, right? That’s all we need to do is confess them, and then we’re okay because we’re always already on the road, you see?
And so these stories function in a particular sort of way, we could say ideological way, aimed at
producing a certain understanding of the nation and a particular understanding of ourselves as moral and political agents, because stories are always bound up with character formation. The way we tell our stories, how we tell our stories, impact who we take ourselves to be as human beings.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It’s a thrill to be on this panel. Thrilled to be with you. You are the most enthusiastic audience I’ve been in front of since Portland, Oregon, and that says a lot.
My last book was called To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other. And that book is very much about
the power of storytelling. Now, I don’t have to convince anybody in this room because you’re here at a
festival of books. We all believe in the power of stories to save us. But if we believe in that, if we grant
stories that power, we should also acknowledge that stories can destroy us as well. And that’s what the nature of American storytelling is.
Think about it. Iran today, according to the Trump administration, we’re destroying Iran in order to save
it, which is what we’ve done throughout our history over and over and over again. And I have a very
personal and intimate relationship to that because I was born in Vietnam, but made in America. I came
here in 1975 as a refugee from the war in Vietnam, and I arrived one year before the bicentennial, and I
became conscious just in time to see the bicentennial unfolding. And it was weird as a Vietnamese
refugee to encounter the mythology of the United States, which I clearly understood as a story.
And as a refugee, we understand our place in American society. Refugees are here to be grateful to the
United States because we’ve been saved by the United States. Now, it’s true that many of us who are
refugees wouldn’t need to have been saved by the United States if the US hadn’t invaded our countries in the first place, but… we’re not supposed to bring that up.
I’ll just give you one short anecdote. We arrived in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. That was our
refugee camp. And I swear to God, for 40 years, I never thought twice about why that camp was called
Fort Indiantown Gap. It was obviously a fort to defend or to fight against Indigenous peoples.
And my parents, on leaving that camp, the first thing they did was they bought a house. That’s what you do as part of the American Dream, that story. They bought a house, and the deed said Lower Paxton Township. In 1700, most of the Indigenous peoples, the Susquehannock, also known as the Conestoga, had been wiped out. Most of the ones who remained were massacred by a gang called the Paxton Boys. And so for our American Dream to be realized as Vietnamese refugees, it had to be done on land that was cleared by genocide. And we weren’t even aware of that, which doesn’t absolve us of our culpability, but it does go to the show how deep the roots are of American storytelling, that that kind of genocide is erased in order for the dream to be fulfilled.
Charles Blow:
I want to stay on this just a little bit longer. There are particular books that are part of the American canon and are considered what shape American identity. A few that might fall into that: Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Maybe you would include Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. None of those are by Black authors, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asian.
I want to know which books, in your view, have done the most damage in crafting an American story and which have done the most good.
Stacey Abrams:
I’m not going first.
Eddie Glaude:
English professor.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh my God.
Eddie Glaude:
The English professor.
Stacey Abrams:
You wrote about destroy. You’re like-
Eddie Glaude:
You have to defer to the English professor.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’m a very unpopular person. I mean, I published an essay on Lit Hub that said, “Most American literature is the literature of empire.” And people got very upset. They’re like, “What? Mark Twain and William Faulkner, these guys weren’t apologists for empire. They were critical of empire.” They aren’t the most of American literature, but most of American literature, by quantity, is unseen when it comes to some of the dilemmas that you’re raising on race, gender, patriarchy, homophobia, heteronormativity, and colonialism and imperialism.
So I don’t know if there’s a singular book that has done the most damage, although it’s probably the Bible, but that’s not technically American literature. I don’t know if you’re reprimanding me or what. I’m a Catholic. I read the Bible, okay? So I feel comfortable saying-
Charles Blow:
So this is a book review.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, a book review. But I think there’s so many books that have inspired me. And I would just add that
some of the major works of American literature are Black works of American literature, which is
American literature.
I mean, I wrote a novel called The Sympathizer, which is partly an homage to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible
Man, which had a huge influence on me. And I think all the time, as everybody does here probably, about Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison, she was an editor in the 1970s, a Black woman looking around the
American literary landscape as an editor and as a writer. And she said, “The center of American literature was somewhere over there, but I’m over here. I could move myself over there, or I can make the center move to me,” which is exactly what she did. And now we all live in Toni Morrison’s universe.
That impulse to put your experience at the center and not to worry about what the canonical center of
American literature is, that that move has been so important to me, looking at Black literature but also
literature by other peoples of color.
And the last thing I’ll say is I always like to look at the second most famous work by a writer, because the most famous work by a writer is the work that tends to be elevated because it affirms the American story to us. So Martin Luther King Jr, it’s I Have a Dream. But to me, the most important speech is Beyond Vietnam, which nobody reads for very good reason. We were talking about James Baldwin backstage. Most people read Notes of a Native Son or The Fire Next Time. I love No Name in the Street because then he gets into not just the civil rights work and not into just Black empowerment. He gets into anti-imperialism. He gets into saying, “I identify with Arabs over Israel.” We don’t want to talk about that. So I love the question, and I also think it forces us to think about what works we canonize and then what works we overlook, even when we’re trying to look for the things that tell us the truth about the United States.
Charles Blow:
You have just made me feel so much better about the book that didn’t sell so well.
Stacey Abrams:
I would add as an addendum, there are the works that we venerate as canon, and then there are the books that most people read. And I would argue that genre has often served a function of destroying our sense of self by creating these, not just unattainable, but these very ritualized experiences that so many of us can never access.
Again, when I started writing, my very first novels were romance novels. When I started publishing in
’99, there had only been three Black women who’d ever been permitted to publish romance novels in the mainstream with Black women on the cover. And so when I was able to publish, I wrote romantic
suspense, so I killed a lot of people, and whoever survived fell in love, but it was a struggle to find editors who would permit me to publish. And the thing was, my first romance novel was actually a spy novel, but publishers would not publish spy novels by or about Black people. I dare you to name a single espionage writer who writes about people of color as the main character. You can’t. Or women. And so much of the literature or the writing that is consumed by the average reader in America for so long did not include Americans. It only included a very specific form of being American.
And if you’re reading romance, heteronormative, cisgender romance, it is always a nubile white woman
falling in love with a noble white man, and they have a Black friend by the 1980s. You get into the 2000s, and then their friends are Asian because that’s the new thing. The challenge is that we shape our understanding of who we are by what we think we can see and believe. If you go to fantasy, most fantasy novels written in the last 50 years have a very specific set of tropes where, if you find characters who have any racialization to them, they are either the victims or they are
the villains. And so I think it’s also important for us to understand that the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we consume that are beyond the normal structure of literature tell us stories with such repetition that we start to believe that’s the only thing. So if you are a trad wife in training, you got your training from Barbara Cartland, and we’ve got this arc that we have to start exploring.
And that’s why romance for me, and legal thrillers, are really important genres to write in, because I want to use genres where the average person feels like they can go in, get something, and get out, but they’re taking more with them than they expect. And so I try to enter those genres because I want them to leave thinking about things without me beating them over the head with it, but with them exploring something they didn’t think they needed to know, but it’s now become normalized for them that it is so.
Eddie Glaude:
So I’ve been sitting here, thank you so much for both of those, I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out
how to answer the question objectively. And I thought, “Well, that’s not going to be helpful. Let me just
answer it by way of my particular interests.” So if I were to single out a book, one book that has done a certain kind of work that might be damaging, you see how I’m qualifying this, it would probably be Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And it’s because, in my view, the novel is ranked sentimentality, and because of the sentimentality at its heart, it proceeds from an assumption, an assumption that is at the heart of the American project, that freedom is the possession of white folks to give and to take away.
And to the extent that freedom is the possession, belongs to you to give and to take away, the way in
which you read people who are enslaved, who are denied freedom, is that they’re flattened, they’re
emptied out. They can’t be full human beings in some ways. So Uncle Tom’s Cabin shouldn’t bear the
burden of distorting and disfiguring the American character, but given what I’m interested in, it does a lot of work. But then I would think about Melville’s Moby-Dick. If you think about what Faulkner is grappling with, there’s a way in which reading Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark gives us this interesting orientation or invitation to read the American literary canon, not just in relation to what it says, but what it doesn’t say, and how those absences reveal a particular understanding of the US project.
So I would invite us all, whether it’s good or bad, to just sit with what is called the canon and what isn’t.
Because I think there you will find a very, very complicated picture of a very, very complicated nation,
which is our own.
Charles Blow:
Stacey, I think this touches on what you were saying, but I want to ask the question directly to you guys. How much of the work that you do is intended as a correction or a filling of a void or an expansion of the American story in ways that you feel it is necessary to expand it?
Stacey Abrams:
All of it for me. My very first novel is called Rules of Engagement. It’s based on my ex-boyfriend’s
dissertation. It was a very bad breakup, so he’s in prison in the book.
Eddie Glaude:
You put him in prison?
Stacey Abrams:
I did, and he will be there forever, but it was because I wanted to talk about environmental justice issues. As Eddie pointed out, we both grew up on the Gulf of Mexico, we grew up in the Gulf Coast, but I used to come to Louisiana to debate, and you had to go through Cancer Alley. And I wanted to talk about environmental justice and the fact that in the late ’90s, early 2000s, we were
having this national debate or international conversation about how newly industrialized nations like
Vietnam, like most of the nations in Africa, were being told, “You have to skip past what all of the
colonizers did. You got to solve environmental injustice right now. So you don’t get any of the benefits of industrialization, and now you’ve got to stop doing the stuff that made us powerful.”
And I could not write that in a way… so I wrote an essay about it, but then I thought, “I could write a
romance novel about it.” And so I wrote a romance where, if you read it, it’s about how do we think about this made-up nation called Jafeer, off the coast of Africa in the Persian Gulf, how it navigates these issues.
My most recent novel, Coded Justice, is about AI, DEI, and veterans’ healthcare. Every novel I write-
Charles Blow:
That’s also a romance?
Stacey Abrams:
It is not. It is not. It’s a legal thriller. And then I write children’s books about, one’s called Stacey Speaks
Up, and it’s about a kid who sees another child who can’t get lunch. And so I use my novels… I write
fiction. I write fiction that helps to reset or to state the stories that I wish I’d been able to read or to
reframe how the people I know should be experienced in the world.
So I have a novel about a Black ethnobotanist, or she’s actually Afro-Latina. She’s on the run with a thief, but you get to learn about ethnobotany and what that says about cultural biodiversity without me having to say those things. And so I do think one of the roles that fiction in particular can play, and genre fiction specifically, is to restate and to move us. As you said, we were told to be here, and when Toni Morrison told us to move, it’s not just in the canon; it is in our understanding of the stories that shape us. And so I am very intentional about using the stories I write to invite us into spaces we are told not to be and to explain things to us that we are told we are not smart enough to understand, but to meet people where they are, not where I want them to be. And I think the best writers in fiction who understand the whole of America do that.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Okay. I went to school at the University of Communists at Berkeley, and I majored in English and ethnic
studies, two of the most woke majors on the most woke campus in the United States of America. And
immediately upon setting foot on that campus, I became an angry Asian American, which is the only
Asian American I’m interested in, as I started to discover all the things that had happened in American
history that had been sort of hidden for me growing up in the United States as a grateful refugee.
And I wanted to become a writer, which was kind of rare for a Vietnamese person at that time. And I
followed the impulse that is told to a lot of us who come from so-called marginalized backgrounds, which is, “Tell your story and fit it into the American mosaic as part of American multiculturalism.” And there’s always a new niche. So for me, back then it was like, “I’m going to tell the Vietnamese refugee story.”
And the problem with that model, it’s a beautiful model, but the problem with that model, of course, is
that we’ll just keep on filling in that mosaic with a new title as a new population arises, and then we don’t get to see what frames that mosaic. And for me, my thinking about this started at Berkeley because I was a politically active person. And at that time in the 1990s, we were fighting what were called the culture wars in this country around who is an American, what should be read, what should be in the canon, what should be in the curriculum.
And as we’ve discovered 40 years later, the culture wars are actually inseparable from real wars. That’s
why in this country, even as we’re pursuing real wars against Venezuela and Iran and Palestine, we’re also pursuing culture wars against the unholy trinity of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And I feel that if those of us who are storytellers about the American mosaic, if we don’t understand that DEI cannot be separated from imperialism and colonialism, we don’t understand what’s actually happening in this country.
So I wanted to be a writer. I got a PhD in English. I read all this stuff, and I wanted to write novels and
nonfiction that would engage with the body of American literature so that I wasn’t just going to be a
Vietnamese American writer. If I’m a Vietnamese American writer, if I’m introduced as such, then you
better introduce F. Scott Fitzgerald as the white male American writer. Okay? So I’m not interested in that contributory model that is forced upon us as so-called minorities. I wanted to challenge the entire body of American literature and what it represents.
But in order to do that, I wanted to write entertaining stories. So Stacey’s absolutely right. I write spy
novels, for example, and war novels and gangster novels. But what’s also important is that underneath all the entertainment, there’s a point that I’m trying to make. And I have to repeat myself over and over and over again because I think it’s really hard for Americans to understand.
We are a country founded on beauty, democracy, equality, liberty, and on and on that we all know. We’re also a country founded on brutality, genocide, enslavement, colonization, perpetual war, and these two things cannot be separated from each other. That’s what Americans can’t understand. It’s not that the beauty will overcome the brutality, that’s the narrative that we like to tell ourselves. The reality is that the brutality made the beauty possible. That’s so difficult for Americans to comprehend.
And I like to think that my fiction and nonfiction is designed to entertain, to get you to laugh, and then get you to focus on this very uncomfortable contradiction at the very basis of American society, which exists and which determines the fact that we keep on repeating the cycle over and over and over and over again. So if you’re surprised by the fact that we’re bombing Iran, you haven’t paid attention to American history.
Eddie Glaude:
Really quickly. So my writing, Charles, there’s a professional practice. I’m an academic by training, and
then there’s the more public-facing writing. And so on one level, I would describe what I try to do is to
offer the nation language to understand itself differently. So that’s the motivation, and that involves a kind of fearless, philosophical mining of the archive. So I bring a set of philosophical questions to the
historical record in order to expose a different way of understanding who we are. So that’s at a certain level of abstraction. So I’m obsessed with history, identity, and agency. But that obsession is not so much simply a correction of bad stories; it’s also deeply autobiographical. I’m trying to figure out me in relation to this place. I’m a country boy from Mississippi, wounded, trying to figure out
who I am, understanding that those wounds, those interior storms, can evidence themselves in the world and the world in which I grew up in.
As my dad would say, “I’m not here to love you. I’m here to prepare you for something. Because if you
survive me, you can survive them.” You’ve heard that?
Stacey Abrams:
Oh, yeah.
Eddie Glaude:
Right? And so I’m trying to figure out this place to offer it a language. And in doing so, I’m also trying to
figure out this, me. And I think it’s that relationship that keeps the writing from becoming, at least I hope, from becoming just a screed or something… There’s something intimate and moral, not just simply corrective. So I’m not obsessed to correct. I’m trying to figure something out and to describe it in a way that can move us in the world differently, if that makes sense
Charles Blow:
Yes. First, you put very eloquently what my mother would just say: “I’m not your little friend.” That’s
how she… But I want to follow up with that because this is a real tension, I think, a lot, particularly, I
think, with minority, marginalized writers in the American literary system.
To what degree are you writing to exhale something, or to writing to yourself or to a younger you or to a community of you? And to what degree you are being forced, as Toni Morrison put it, to write through the white gaze, that writer is writing to other people to explain to them you, your community, the people you’re writing about. What is that tension like for you?
Stacey Abrams:
Your turn to go first.
Eddie Glaude:
Yeah, my turn to go first. In those early drafts, you know that in some ways you… who am I writing for in
this moment? Am I writing for… as an academic, I’m never an academic, as an intellectual, am I writing
for a certain set of folk who know this particular bibliography, and I want to demonstrate to them that I
have mastery over these sets of arguments, and then how that then gums up what I’m trying to achieve because I’m busy trying to perform for them as opposed to exploring what’s on the page?
But I think something that I learned working on the Baldwin book, Baldwin, to paraphrase it, the
messiness of the world is actually a reflection of the messiness of our interior lives. And so Baldwin is
always making this move through a kind of autobiographical reflection that doesn’t rest here, because if it stays here, it’s narcissism.
So the idea is: how do I engage in the exploration of all that makes me who I am? I’m going to go back to this relationship to the man that I’m named after, who I looked just like and who scared me to death. What does it mean to think about that and then move from there to the nation as such?
So you disrupt the false opposition that you can engage in this because Baldwin is trying to, let me say
this really quickly. Baldwin, I think, is offering us a third way. He’s not the only one. So it’s not that we
have to just simply write social-realist work, just reflect all the hell that we’re catching, nor do we need to just become aestheticizing, that we’re just going to do the art. No. We’re going to find that sweet spot where we pay attention to the material conditions of our lives and the complexity of who we are at the fish fry. We can do both-and.
And how do you find that middle way at the level of language? And that goes back for me to hear my
mama in my ear and to know that when she reads my paper, every book is called a paper, when she reads that paper, she can say, “Well, you tried to do something there, boy. That’s pretty good.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I totally agree. The subtitle of my last book was Writing as an Other, and that’s partly about the things
we’ve been talking about, the otherness of people within a nation or the otherness of nations outside of our own nation. But in order for us who are categorized as minority in some way, we also have to confront the otherness within ourselves. And the otherness within ourselves is inseparable with the otherness of our people within a nation, because otherness for a so-called minority is both individual and collective.
We have no choice when our otherness is imposed upon us. We can say, “I don’t want to be that
population,” but we don’t have any choice. That’s what racism and sexism does to us. So in order for me to confront the gaze, my answer to that is that the only way for me to confront the white gaze and
dominant gaze is to write for myself first. And that’s actually really hard to do. Write for myself first, and then write for my people first, however that’s defined. And then everyone else can listen in.
And so when I wrote The Sympathizer, it’s a novel constructed as a dialogue, a confession from one
Vietnamese person to another Vietnamese person. Now, when you do that, there is no translation. So for example, I went to Singleton’s Deli this morning for pho. If any of you are here from New Orleans, go to the Singleton Deli for pho. It’s only on the weekends. If I were to write in The Sympathizer-
Charles Blow:
Are they underwriting this session, by the way?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
This is a Vietnamese person. I’m recommending this to you. Okay? It’s good pho. But if I were to write in The Sympathizer, “I ate a bowl of pho, a delicious beef noodle soup,” you know I’m not talking to a
Vietnamese person. Imagine again, in an early draft of the Great Gatsby, if Fitzgerald had written, “I prepared for Daisy a sandwich, two slices of bread between which there’s something delicious.” You would never do that. So if you write for yourself and your people, you never translate and you never apologize. These are the two core principles that allow you to refuse that dominant gaze.
And then the one final example: I sold my soul to A24 and HBO to make The Sympathizer TV series.
They paid me a lot of money, nowhere near the same amount of money as they paid Robert Downey Jr,
but a lot of money. But when they did that, I was like, “If I’m going to sell my soul, how do I do this
properly? How do I do this?” It’s always a question, right? You’re going to sell some portion of yourself,
but how much of it and for how much?
So what I said was, we were negotiating with all these producers, and the producer who I finally agreed to work with, what turned out to be Israeli-Canadian. He’s also a white man, but I thought the Canadian part offset that. And then the co-showrunner is his friend, also a white man, but also Canadian. So that
balanced itself out. And then the other co-showrunner who really ran the whole thing was Park Chanwook, who’s Korean. And I thought this was the perfect combination because Hollywood would totally sell me out, because Americans just cannot get their… when they approach the Vietnam War, they approach it from an American point of view. And so I really needed to find people who are not Americans to work with on that TV series.
So there’s various ways, I think, in which we could resist the dominant gaze, but it really depends if it’s an individual effort or, in some cases, collaboration, which involves a whole nother set of problems and
challenges.
Stacey Abrams:
I write in multiple genres. So I write children’s books, romance, legal thrillers, and then nonfiction. And
for me, all of these are vehicles for my firm belief in social justice. But I write with three points. One is: I
write what I want to read and what I wish I’d been able to read. I remember the books I could find, and
my mom was a college librarian, and I can tell you the books I could find that talked to me as me, where I didn’t have to hunt for an analog or wish I was something else in order to enjoy the story.
I write for what I want to see. What world do I want us to have, and what does that look like? And then I
write for what I want people to understand they have the power to be. And so particularly when I write
nonfiction, I’ve wrote a leadership book called Lead From the Outside. And it was exactly what you two
described. It was, “Okay, this is who we’re told we have to be to be successful in America. I’ve come
close to an approximation of it. Let me tell you what I figured out.” And I describe it tongue-in-cheek as
Lean In for the rest of us, like those of us without billion dollars and stock options, but we still deserve
this opportunity.
Or when I wrote Our Time is Now, which has been banned like Eddie’s books, I don’t know if all of yours have been banned, but I don’t think Eddie has a book that’s allowed in the US Naval Academy, and mine on democracy and voting rights. And I want to talk about what kind of America we can have. And so I try to write about what imagination we could have as Americans if we believed our own stories. What stories should we be telling to the next generation about what we did to make it so?
And what’s most important to me, as someone who believes in not voting rights for the esoteric, but for the power, we have to believe that we don’t have, there’s not a conditionality to our access to democracy.
Our full citizenship was granted at our birth, despite what they’re trying to do to the 14th Amendment.
And I reject this notion that I have to read this thing or believe this thing or have this position in society
for my democracy to be real. I was in Hattiesburg this morning. My uncle passed away, and we drove up this morning for his funeral and I came back. And he was a complicated man, like every Black man in Mississippi is. But I remember the fact that he was so full of joy. He was in the service, and he floated from job… he had two kids, and he did the best he could with what he was and who he is. And there are some who would read his obituary and tell themselves a story of who he is, and it is not nearly the fulsome story he deserves.
And when I ran for governor, my family was proud of me, but I remember my uncle squeezing my hand
because he could tell his friends that it was his niece that was doing this thing, because he remembers the fact that his father was sent to World War II and the Korean War and not permitted to vote when he came back to Mississippi. And he lived long enough to see the sum of their family, in one generation on, have this access.
And so when I think about the stories we tell, I talk about popular fiction, and I write in self-help and in
children’s books because I think we’ve created this rarefied notion of who deserves full citizenship, whose dreams deserve to have agency and identity, but who also has the right to dream at all. And we learn to dream not just from what we are taught, we learned to dream from what we see. And I think we have the responsibility in our storytelling to, yes, put ourselves into it. So you will read me trying to find the man who was supposed to have married me a few years ago. I still haven’t found him. I’m still looking. But you will also read me talking about the America I wish we could build. And I will talk about the people who I think are so beautiful and so amazing, who do not think that they are
worthy of the dreams they have.
And if I’m doing my job, then I’m excavating all of that. Some of it is self-indulgent, but my responsibility is to make certain that when you leave something I’ve written, you believe something you believe to be true.
Charles Blow:
You touched on banned books, so I think that’s a way for me to sneak into a little bit of contemporary
politics because I have a sneaking suspicion that there may be one or two people in here who wants to talk about that.
Stacey Abrams:
Is there something going on?
Charles Blow:
There’s something maybe going on a little bit different than it used to be. Okay. PEN America found that 6,870 book bans were enacted during the 2024-2025 school year across 23 states and 87 public school districts. According to PEN, never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country.
What do you believe is driving this book banning, and what will it mean for our understanding of who we are as a country?
Stacey Abrams:
Viet said it. They are afraid of DEI. Let’s think about what that is. Diversity means all people. Equity
means fair access to opportunity. Inclusion means respect for belonging. And when you are a wannabe
white, Christian nationalist, protonatalist, ethno-fascist, DEI is terrifying.
Charles Blow:
I need the Book Fest staff to rush and make T-shirts to have available to everybody on the way out.
Stacey Abrams:
But the reason that matters is: why do we have DEI? DEI is, and I love how you’ve said it, and I’m going
to steal it when you’re not here to hear me do it, DEI existed as a corrective measure in America that was born at the time of the Revolution, because white men who did not own land fought a war so they could be heard too.
So the very first DEI folks were the white guys who didn’t like the landed gentry that got to vote and they didn’t. We currently have a DEI vice president because if you graduate from a public school funded by Title I, which was a DEI law to give Black, brown, and poor children access to public education, then you are a DEI baby, and that’s JD Vance.
So I say that to say: they are not mad because DEI failed. They’re mad that it worked. They’re mad that
we have the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, that we have the 19th Amendment, that we have the
Immigration Nationalization Act that said that you didn’t have to be from Europe to come to America and stay. They’re mad because we have the Americans with Disabilities Act. They’re angry about the Fair Labor Standards Act. They’re mad about FMLA, that said women could have babies, take care of their families, and still go to work and not be dependent on men who did not want them to get divorced.
We have all of these things because DEI works. And if your authoritarian ideological intention, because
authoritarianism is a political system, ideology is what you want to do with that power, and the fascism
that wants that power cannot have DEI as a belief system. And so every book that has been banned is a book that makes DEI not just manifest, but regularized. That’s why they’re terrified: because who we are, it’s education, what we know; the economy, what we do; and elections, who’s in charge. And every book that they have banned says that more people than they like, who believe things they are afraid of, are entitled to the fulsome nature of what we say America should be.
That’s why we’ve had more books banned, because they know it’s working. And they know in 2046, the demography of America said that there will not be a majority race in this nation. And majority-minority status has been fine for us; welcome aboard.
Charles Blow:
And now you understand why we Georgians put on our best orthopedic shoes and stood in those mines trying to vote for Stacey.
Eddie Glaude:
I’m not following [inaudible 00:47:41].
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think that’s the last word.
Eddie Glaude:
Underscore, next question. She has answered it.
Charles Blow:
Okay. Okay, well, I’ll give you another question then. Are we entering a new Lost Cause myth-building
stage in America?
Eddie Glaude:
We’re not entering it. We’re here. If there’s a historical parallel, it is in fact the period after the death, the murder, of Reconstruction. It’s that period of Redemption and Reunion. When you look at the archive, you see the repetition; you hear the debates about what is being taught to our children.
It happens also in the 1920s. The so-called Roaring 20s, the Jazz Age, is also an age of nativists. It’s also the decade of the Klan. You can think about 1926 is the sesquicentennial, the 150th anniversary of the nation. And at the exposition in Philadelphia where they’re going to celebrate the founding of the nation, it had been approved for the Klan to hold its convocation. So you’re going to have celebration of the flag and the burning of the cross happening at the same time.
And of course, we know in 1924 that they passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which is the legislation
that the Klan was most proud of. And so the debates that we’re having today around immigration actually have at its root a longing, a nostalgic longing, for the immigration regime of the 1920s, a piece of legislation written by the Klan.
And so in the ’20s, of course, this is the result of the impact of Redemption and Reunion. And so I say this all the time that when we think about the Lost Cause, when we think about the folks who were taught the story of the Civil War in the way that it was taught, who were taught the story of carpetbaggers invading the South and Black people who weren’t capable of holding or exercising the burdens of citizenship, taking on governance and the responsibility of governance as that being the problem, you think about all of those young people who were taught that turned out to be the adults in Georgia, turned out to be the adults in Mississippi and Florida and Alabama, who actually engaged in monstrous behavior.
So I’m worried, of course, about what will happen with our babies in this second Lost Cause, but I’m
actually more worried about what’s going to happen to their babies, what they are not going to know and who they can turn out to be, because the historical record actually shows the consequences of the lies that they teach and tell.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’ve done a few events now with my friend Kimberlé Crenshaw, and she makes a parallel argument about the Lost Cause and about the return of fascism and authoritarianism in the United States. And part of her argument, to paraphrase, is that fascism has already been in the United States. That was the part of Reconstruction. I mean, these kinds of tactics around fascism and authoritarianism have already been experienced by Black people before.
And of course, that circulates into European fascism and the importation of American racial techniques
and concentration camps and reservations and purity laws and so on into Nazi Germany. So it’s a very
complicated web of things that’s not simply American, but that the Lost Cause ideology is a part of white supremacist ideology that’s global at the moment. So the fear of replacement is taking place not only in the United States, but also in Europe as well.
So we can’t separate fascism from authoritarianism, from white supremacy, from the particular narrative of the return of the Lost Cause in the United States. But there’s another twist to this, which is that Reconstruction, or the failure of Reconstruction, the suppression of it, also takes place at a moment when the United States starts to close its borders on immigration as well.
So 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act, this is the second racially discriminatory immigration law passed in the United States. First one was 1875 Page Law, which was directed at Chinese women. So this began a period of ethnic cleansing in the United States. And Ellis Island, which was basically… basically Ellis Island says, “If you’re white, you’re all right. You can come on in. We’re not going to check your papers. Everybody’s allowed to come in on the Eastern side of the United States.” What started happening in the late 19th and early 20th century was Angel Island Detention Center was set up, where if you were Chinese, you were detained, you were interrogated, you were imprisoned. A lot of Chinese immigrants committed suicide inside of Angel Island, and they have carved their anger and their sorrow into poems on the walls of those barracks, and you can read them in translation in a book called Island.
And so everything that was happening then in the late 19th and early 20th century with the suppression of Chinese immigration foreshadows what’s happening with ICE right now. And so this kind of Lost Cause ideology goes hand in hand with the effort to ethnically cleanse the United States, which is also what we’re seeing at this present moment.
And for me, one of the challenges as we think about this is that what the MAGA movement wants to do is to co-opt multiculturalism. They want figureheads who are people of color. And I’m ashamed to say there are a lot of Vietnamese people who are willing to perform that function, but the ethnic cleansing part is the contradiction. And so now we see this rising… there was a rising tide of support from some Asian Americans and from some Latinos for Donald Trump, and that’s declining because people are realizing he doesn’t like you either. And so there are built-in contradictions in this white supremacist movement that are tied into this confusion around multiculturalism. MAGA doesn’t like multiculturalism, but it still needs it at the same time for a multicultural fascism under white supremacy.
And so these are some of the weaknesses and contradictions that I think can and should be exploited.
Charles Blow:
So I have two more questions, but only six minutes. So this might be the last question, but I hope it’s not. Political movements often have a literary spirit-book text for them. The Tea Party Movement, you could argue, is Ayn Rand. Black Lives Matter, there were some contemporary writers like Crenshaw, like Coates, but also Baldwin’s fury was very much present in that.
What is the literary spirit animal for MAGA?
Stacey Abrams:
I would say-
Charles Blow:
You cannot use a comic book.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I said the Bible, but you didn’t like that answer. I’m serious. I mean, I would say they haven’t even read
the books they should read, like The Klansmen. That should be the Bible of the MAGA movement. That
gave rise to The Birth of a Nation, the movie. Yeah, I don’t know. There’s no good answer because if they actually read… They don’t read.
Stacey Abrams:
I’m going to revise and extend your remarks. I think what you’re pointing to is there’s no coherence to the MAGA movement other than their blind following of an avatar and Donald Trump and their great hope that all of the evils that have now been given a permission structure will be made manifest. And so I would say you were not incorrect in your attribution of the King James canonization of the Holy Word as being a nice roadmap for some of them, because they cherry-picked the pages they wanted to read.
Eddie Glaude:
And I would just add, for those of you who are interested in Great Replacement theory, the French
novelist Renaud Camus.
Stacey Abrams:
I think, to his point, that’s not what they read.
Eddie Glaude:
He wrote a novel in, I think, 2011 called The Great Replacement, and that has motivated a lot of this stuff too.
Charles Blow:
So everyone is saying this Bible thing. All of the Bible or just the Old Testament?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’m not convinced they read the Bible. I’m just saying that it’s the… You said spirit animal, and Stacey’s
absolutely right. They pick and choose the parts that they want.
Eddie Glaude:
And let’s be honest, I grew up Catholic. I have a highly mediated relationship to the Bible. Ask me what
was in the Missalette, maybe I’ll get you… The text itself is-
Charles Blow:
So I do have time for my last question then. This is great. Looking forward, we’re 250 years looking
forward, and I’m not even going to say the next 250, but just the next decade, we see some contraction in the elasticity of the literary world, the entire social world; it includes the arts.
There are a lot of artists that were selling at the height of BLM that cannot sell work now. There are a lot of writers who were in extremely high demand with ridiculous advances who are struggling now to get work published.
Do you think that we are in a long-term contraction of the elasticity of diverse voices in literature, or is
that temporary and we will rebound?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I don’t think there’s any doubt that, and I’m not going to be like Timothée Chalamet here, who got into a lot of trouble, apparently, for talking about ballet and operas as irrelevant art forms, literature will endure. I think it’s obviously up against enormous competition. So the problems of attention span and the economy that you’ve already indicated are going to impact literature, but at the same time, I’m optimistic that there will remain a core of people who will want to get their storytelling from books in whatever version: physical books, e-books, audiobooks. I’m very Catholic about all of those kinds of things. And there is no turning back the dial on whatever we want to call it, multiculturalism, DEI, the
undisputable reality of the United States as a country of diverse peoples from its very origins. And these people know that stories have destroyed them and that stories will save them, and we will continue to have people who believe in the power of storytelling in all of its various forms, but including in the form of literature as well.
Stacey Abrams:
What he said.
Eddie Glaude:
I do want to say, though, that the contraction isn’t just motivated by MAGA. We have to understand how those who aren’t explicitly committed to Trumpism, who aren’t MAGA, but who are using the ugliness of MAGA to course-correct, they’re hiding behind them.
I work in academia, and many of these folks are not Trumpists, but they’re using the Trump-up moment to capitulate in order to roll things back. And it’s happening in academe, and it’s happening in publishing. So there are a lot of folk out here who will condemn Trump, but then use all of that noise as cover to do what they want to do. And that’s rolled back a whole lot of things.
Charles Blow:
Give our panelists a round of applause.
Eddie Glaude:
One more thing.
Charles Blow:
Oh, one more thing.
Eddie Glaude:
Orleans Parish is still voting.
Stacey Abrams:
Yes.
Eddie Glaude:
If you’re from here, go to the polls because they don’t close till 8:00.
Charles Blow:
Thank you to my… Whoa, whoa. There’s another.
Stacey Abrams:
One more thing. Before he thanks us, please help us thank Charles Blow.
Faith Dawson Simmons:
What a great conversation. Thank you so much to our guests, Stacey Abrams, Eddie Glaude, Viet Tan
Nguyen, and Charles Blow. Books from authors you hear from today and throughout the festival are available for purchase at the Festival Tent presented by Hyatt Regency. Author signings take place in the Author Book Signing Tent. A full list of signings is available around festival grounds and on our website.
Thank you so much for joining us, and we will see you at next year’s festival.
Speaker 1:
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