This panel was generated by the speakers’ collective concern that education, whether through purging high school curricula of American racial history or through refusing funding to universities unless they agree to restricting campus free speech guarantees or modifying some academic programs, has become an unforeseen mechanism of executive control. Mandating school changes, however, is only one aspect of Trump’s broader initiatives to limit the very production of knowledge and its inclusion of dissent. We need only to look at Trump’s wish to eliminate slave objects in the Smithsonian or his hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center to see his distrust of uncontained knowledge and cultural production. In our exploration of different literary texts, from drama to fiction to memoir and essay, we discuss the methods and rationale for quelling free inquiry to promote greater authoritarianism.
“One of the paradoxes of the times we live in,” Judith Butler remarked in an interview before the election of Donald Trump, “is that democracies can produce autocrats and fascists who then attack the democratic institutions by which they were first elected.” What Butler described is now the lived reality in the United States. Rather, by his successful intimidation of members of his own party, his normalization of excessive executive power, and his appointment of long-term judges willing to ignore precedents or deny civic rights, Trump is carving out a future America that will be disfigured beyond recognition.
What Trump has done, audaciously, is to imagine his future, even as most of us have not yet figured out the present. But we must imagine the future, Butler warns, because “in our acts and practices, we do implicitly reproduce an idea of the future.” As we are repeatedly warned that our physical and economic security is threatened internally and externally, basic distrust and fear rally support for extreme measures. What Butler calls “fascist passions” is a willingness to “strip people of the basic rights they require to live, and to do so without regard to their probable demise.” However controversial the word “fascist” has become, Butler is warning us of historical precents that promote authoritarianism. After discussing several works that expose the means for controlling knowledge, the panel will invite an open discussion for other examples from what we have termed the “Trump Handbook,” shorthand for gaining assent for a new, deeply undemocratic, America. We will allocate 20 minutes to this exchange.
Dr. Marcia Blumberg , in The Need for Doubt” will begin by re-examining John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 play, as less about competing narratives of protecting a child against clerical sexual abuse than as a means of exposing the collapse of disinterested investigation into the facts . It is a debate between fear-stoked prejudice and institutional power versus vulnerability and truth. Trump ‘s control of knowledge can be seen in his campaign as a defender of “religious freedom” in order to cultivate the Catholic vote even as he denigrated racial, sexual, and religious minorities. Blumberg uses Diana Taylor’s term “percepticide,” an allied form of knowledge control, which operated via the rejection of facts and a practice of deliberate evasion.
Dr. Meryl Borato will discuss a real-life example of knowledge control in Tara Westover’s Educated. The memoir tells the story of the author’s childhood in rural Idaho in a survivalist Mormon family where she suffered abuse. Published in 2019, during Trump's first term, Westover's book was praised alongside J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, for its revelation of neglected segments of American society, the very populations whom Trump cultivated. Her paper, “Dangerous Memoirs,” re-reads Westover in the context of Vance’s political ambitions and our new authoritarian reality. Borato will examine how Trump’s approach to truth and J.D. Vance’s efforts at self-redefinition have altered perceptions of Westover’s perspective on education, now often characterized as "woke," "radical," and "dangerous."
Dr. Jeanne Colleran’s talk, “Epistemic Injustice and Increased Precarity in Trump’s America,” explores Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice and its link to knowledge control. She discusses Miriam Toews’ Women Talking, revealing how women’s rights are restricted under the guise of morality, paralleling broader patterns of patriarchal and political oppression while exploring how any shared understanding of "extremist behavior" has imploded. Colleran concludes by looking at Valeria Luiselli’s essay, Tell Me How it Ends, about child migrants.