At Knox College, a theater production of The Good Person of Szechwan has been cancelled after being ruled offensive.
Written by a German marxist in the early 1940s and performed in top theaters across the world since then, The Good Person of Szechwan considers morality through a prostitute’s struggles in a rural Chinese community.
Knox College decided this art was just too dangerous.
Theater department Reichsführer, Elizabeth Carlin Metz, declared that the cancellation “needed to happen.” Metz explained to the College Fix, “I believe that academia needs continually to be vigilant about the shifting nuances in addressing sensitive texts, I think we must put them in our syllabi and on our stages so that we can interrogate our assumptions and examine our past in order to understand [our] present…We need to acknowledge privilege in all sectors and the inherent bias that ensues. And we all need to listen.”
An interesting choice of words considering Metz’s faculty page claims, “As a stage director in both the profession and academia, I am most stimulated and delighted by theatre that is visceral, provocative, and challenging.”
Just not too visceral, provocative, and challenging.
Still, it would be unfair to blame Metz alone. The cancellation was ardently supported by Knox students. Reflecting the emotion, Knox’s student editorial board lamented that “The theater department is a very white department — like many departments at Knox — and it needs to acknowledge that they are coming from a place of privilege and prejudice.” Theater department faculty, the board ruled, thus “need to make sure the plays they choose to produce and the way they talk to their students are respectful, productive and progressive.”
Again, think about those words: “need to make sure,” “produce,” “respectful, productive and progressive.” It’s an overt rallying cry for closed-minded indoctrination. But the editorial board wasn’t done: They concluded by clarifying that their judgment isn’t up for debate: “To try to convince students of color that a play they feel is racist is in fact not racist is silencing their opinions.”
This is the ideology of Robespierre and totalitarianism.
But wait, it’s even more idiotic than that. After all, by declaring that The Good Person of Szechwan must be cancelled because it must offend those of Chinese ancestry, Knox College actually creates a prejudice against Chinese themes. This is western coddling and appropriation of an Asian culture, or what Edward Said would describe as “Orientalism.” It’s also the exact opposite approach to Said’s rallying cry in Orientalism, where Said notes,
“Human agency is subject to investigation and analysis, which it is the mission of understanding to apprehend, criticize, influence, and judge. Above all, critical thought does not submit to state power or to commands to join in the ranks marching against one or another approved enemy. Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow. But for that kind of wider perception we need time and patient and skeptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.”
Rather in trusting in the power of art to challenge, entertain and inform, Knox College has knelt to “a world demanding instant action and reaction.”
It’s pathetic.
