Shortly after Anne Michaels won the Giller Prize, Canada’s foremost literary fiction award, on Nov. 18, she posted a lengthy letter on social media. “I write in solidarity with the moral purpose of every writer bearing witness,” she wrote. “I write because the dead can read. Every reader throughout the decades who has written and spoken to me, whose gaze has met mine on the page, has given me courage. And with every word I’ve spoken tonight, I want to give that same courage.”
To which one peorson on Twitter replied: “My gawd, that’s a pretentious way of saying nothing.”
The implicit accusation is that Anne Michaels should have boycotted the Gillers, which awarded her a $100,000 prize, courtesy of the gala’s main sponsor, Scotiabank. Scotiabank has come under heavy fire by the pro-Palestinian movement for its investments in Israel—as have the Gillers, by association—and now, too, has Anne Michaels.
After recently discussing the messy politics of the Giller controversy, we wanted to zoom out and take a broader look at the politicization of the Canadian arts landscape. How did our art and artistic institutions become so deeply political? When did we start demanding artists weigh in on geopolitics? And why don’t we have more right-wing art to balance this out? Culture critic Lydia Perović, who writes the newsletter Long Play, joins Bonjour Chai to discuss.
Credits
- Hosts: Avi Finegold and Phoebe Maltz Bovy (@BovyMaltz)
- Production team: Michael Fraiman (producer), Zachary Kauffman (editor)
- Music: Socalled
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