Outsiders in the mainstream

Michiko Kakutani's book dips into some compelling cases of outsiders driving change in the world

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider

Author: Michiko Kakutani

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 256

Price:  Rs 599

Michiko Kakutani, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former chief book critic of The New York Times, is out with a new book called The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider. It is an absorbing work of non-fiction built around the idea that we are living in “the era of the outsider” in fields as diverse as governance, business and the arts since people’s faith in traditional institutions has eroded. While elites are mourning the loss of power, “radical voices at the margins” are seizing this moment of renewal and rebuilding.

When the author was a high school student in Connecticut, USA, in the 1970s, the English literature curriculum focused on classics written by “famous white men” such as F Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, George Orwell, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and John Knowles. She recalls being assigned to read only one novel written by a woman; it was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

Reading lists of American high schoolers have undergone a major shift. Ms Kakutani notes that it is now common to assign books by Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Sandra Cisneros, and Chinua Achebe. The English curriculum has grown far more diverse than it used to be by including books by women, people of colour, and LGBTQ+ writers, which are markedly different from those written by famous white men.

The author’s examples come mainly from the US but the situation has changed in the Indian context too. Students in India get to read literature by Dalit, Adivasi and LGBTQ+ writers, and works from various Indian languages translated into English. These voices were either absent or rare in reading lists that prioritised famous white men or writers of Indian origin — regardless of gender and sexuality— who had become famous abroad. Even courses on Indian writing in English were dominated by Indian writers living in the US and the UK.

Outside the hallowed space of literature, there is a growing number of content creators who use platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Spotify and TikTok to distribute their art and music, advocate for causes that they believe in, and fight to “circumvent old-school gatekeepers”. The author strikes a balance between applauding the “democratizing effects of the internet” and cautioning readers about how the same technology is available to anti-democratic forces.

She notes, for instance, that the “most daring, innovative and exhilarating new art is being created by members of one underrepresented or sidelined groups” because there is a hunger for new stories among people with purchasing power. At the same time, there are others who feel threatened by outsiders “reshaping the cultural landscape”. Those who want to cling to the status quo mobilise local communities to ban books or introduce laws that make it hard or impossible to teach about misogyny, colonialism, racism, and homophobia in schools.

The emergence of disruptors is not new. Ms Kakutani examines other “pivot points in history, from the waning of the Middle Ages to the aftermath of the Second World War” to understand how the established order is challenged from below when people want to right systemic wrongs. The civil rights movement to abolish racial discrimination and segregation, and the suffragette movement to advocate for women’s right to vote are powerful examples. More recently, nationwide student protests urging American university administrations to suspend academic collaborations with universities in Israel, has certainly shaken the status quo.

Ms Kakutani also dips into some compelling cases of outsiders driving change in the world of business, such as workers unionising to protect themselves from being exploited by corporate bigwigs like Amazon and Starbucks, employees in regional offices providing feedback to multinational companies so that products are more relevant to local demands, and blockchain enthusiasts creating technology to limit the control of tech giants that act as intermediaries.

This book uses “the Overton window”—a theory named after policy analyst Joseph P Overton—to explain how ideas like same-sex marriage and the legalisation of marijuana, that “were once regarded as marginal or threatening by the public can migrate into the mainstream” through insistent advocacy over a period of time. Closer home, it took decades of work by LGBTQ+ community members, grassroots activists, and lawyers before the Supreme Court eventually read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in 2018. 

The book is enjoyable but does not address how the more things change, the more they seem to remain the same. Ms Kakutani is critical of Donald Trump and supportive of Barack Obama and Joseph Biden. While Americans get to choose between Democrats and Republicans, people in other parts of the world pay the price when the US wages wars, supplies weapons and topples governments. Let’s wait and see whether Kamala Harris will change things.

The reviewer, a journalist and educator, is @chintanwriting on Instagram and X