Fargo Nissim Tbakhi's "Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide"
Christina Sharpe: "Tbakhi names 'Craft' as 'the network of sanitizing influences exerted on writing in the English language' by the professional contexts through which it circulates and acquires prestige, including universities and publishing houses: 'the influences of neoliberalism, of complicit institutions, and of the linguistic priorities of the state and of empire.'"
Tbakhi: "Craft is the result of market forces; it is therefore the result of imperial forces, as the two are so inextricably bound up together as to be one and the same. The Craft which is taught in Western institutions, taken up and reproduced by Western publishers, literary institutions, and awards bodies, is a set of regulatory ideas which curtail forms of speech that might enact real danger to [a] constellation of economic and social values [...] If, as Audre Lorde taught us, the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house, then Craft is the process by which our own real liberatory tools are dulled, confiscated, and replaced."
Sharpe: "Craft tells us that the market matters. Craft tells us to modulate our words. Craft tells us that if 'we' do it well enough, 'they' will listen. Craft tells us to be silent about genocide. To be silent about genocides, about antiblackness and white supremacy."
Tbakhi: "Anticolonial writers in the U.S. and across the globe have long modeled alternative crafts which reject these priorities and continue to do so in this present moment."
see https://proteanmag.com/2023/12/08/notes-on-craft-writing-in-the-hour-of-genocide/