Identity Politics, Art, and the Class Struggle: A Reply
to the “Stay in Your Lane” Doctrine
The rule that writers should “stay in their lane”, meaning
that novelists, playwrights, poets, and screenwriters should only write about
characters sharing their own race, gender, or sexuality, has become a harmful
orthodox belief in modern culture. Supporters claim it is a progressive step
that acknowledges past injustices. However, it is actually a reactionary idea
that benefits privileged segments of the professional-managerial class rather
than serving the interests or hopes of working people.
The doctrine's core idea is simple: artistic legitimacy
depends not on insight, imagination, or truthfulness, but on the author’s
biography. This identity acts as a passport to certain topics and a barrier to
others. What seems, at first, like a moral stance, is actually a way to
allocate cultural resources—such as grants, awards, fellowships, review space,
festival invites, and publishing deals—within a narrow, wealthy social circle.
As James McDonald notes, the doctrine functions as a bureaucratic tool that
distributes limited opportunities among different layers of the academic and
cultural middle class, disguising a pursuit of professional advantage as a
matter of justice.
This ideological policing overlooks the true structure of
the publishing industry: a few large conglomerates focused on profit, where
choices are influenced more by marketing teams, risk managers, and quarterly
earnings than by artistic quality. The “stay in your lane” rule doesn't
challenge this situation; instead, it offers the industry a moral
justification, allowing it to frame its commercial decisions as ethical.
The Attack on Imagination
Art depends on the writer's capacity to go beyond personal
biography. A novelist who can't imagine lives beyond their own isn't genuinely
a novelist. Similarly, a playwright who can't understand others' perspectives
has forsaken the essence of dramatic art. Ultimately, literature shines when it
uncovers common human experiences that transcend differences—the universal
elements underlying concepts of “otherness” and “sameness.”
Fencing off subject matter based on race or gender does not
protect the oppressed. Instead, it undermines art's role as a means of human
understanding. It limits literature to a bureaucratic process of verifying
identity, replacing the universal ability for imaginative empathy with a
narrow, local view of what is authentic.
The institutional manifestation of this doctrine is the
emergence of the “sensitivity reader,” representing a new form of ideological
oversight within publishing houses. These readers review manuscripts to
identify content deemed “offensive,” “inaccurate,” or “harmful” based on
evolving upper-middle-class identity politics standards. This process
constitutes a form of censorship disguised as concern. As with all censorship,
its primary aim is not to control the powerful but to suppress those who
question the status quo.
Categories like “offence” and “harm” are flexible and can be
broadened to include anything those in charge consider inconvenient. It’s quite
possible—and probably— that a framework designed to regulate language on race
or gender now could later be used to target writers discussing class
exploitation, oligarchic wealth, or socialism. These topics can also be
reinterpreted as “upsetting” to someone.
Kuang’s Intervention and the Limits of Liberal Critique
Rebecca F. Kuang’s willingness to speak openly about this
issue is significant, given her stature. At the Hay Festival, Kuang criticised
the American publishing industry’s tendency to categorize books based on the
author's identity rather than their content. She highlighted that a writer like
Kazuo Ishiguro would not be classified as science fiction if he were associated
with a different background. Kuang also called the demand for authors to write
only characters of their own race illogical. She observed that discussions
about race are increasingly confined within rigid, reductive
frameworks—frameworks that conveniently divert attention from issues of class.
Kuang’s idea that a writer must look beyond personal
experience to write truthfully and compassionately points to a longstanding and
advanced branch of Marxist thought on art. Soviet critic A. K. Voronsky
maintained that an artwork's truthfulness isn't judged by its alignment with
ideological norms. Rather, it is judged by the genuine aesthetic response it
evokes in viewers: feelings of joy, empathy, or deeper understanding. Art
functions as a form of cognition—an approach to understanding the world—and its
worth depends on its ability to uncover what others have overlooked.
Voronsky cautioned against mistaking genuine insight for a
desire to impress, which only leads to affectedness and misunderstanding. The
idea of 'stay in your lane' conflates personal history with truth, identity
with understanding, and politeness with artistic value. Kuang does not believe
the publishing industry will reform itself. She observed that public pledges in
2021 were superficial, with no real change in who gets published or who holds
power. Notably, when HarperCollins workers protested for better pay and
conditions, Kuang didn't limit her response to comments on representation.
Instead, she joined picket lines and helped organize rallies. When asked about
her publishing hopes, she focused on unionizing rather than diversity quotas.
This preference for collective, class-based action over individualist identity
politics is a key point to explore.
Identity Politics as a Tool of Class Division
None of this happens by chance. As Niles Niemuth pointed
out, the American ruling class and its European counterparts promote racial and
identitarian politics to serve a specific purpose: to break apart working-class
unity during times of rising inequality, widespread social unrest, and a
revived strike movement. Framing every social crisis as primarily a racial
issue is not just fashionable thinking; it is a deliberate political strategy
employed by the Democratic Party, trade unions, and the layers of the
pseudo-left connected to them.
Identity politics shifts focus away from class by dividing
workers into demographic groups. It turns social conflict into a race for
recognition instead of addressing exploitation. It also gives the ruling class
a moral language that hides its role in creating inequality and provides the
culture industry with profitable narratives that maintain capitalism.
The “stay in your lane” idea is not just a misguided
cultural trend; it is part of a larger ideological push to stop the rise of an
independent working-class movement.
Toward an Emancipatory Literature
The fight for artistic freedom cannot be won on the terrain
that identity politics stakes out. It requires the unity of writers, editors,
printers, warehouse workers, booksellers and readers across every line that the
doctrine insists on drawing between them. It requires rejecting the
bureaucratic policing of imagination. It requires a defence of the universal
capacity of human beings to understand one another — not through the narrow
lens of identity but through the shared experience of labour, exploitation,
struggle and hope.
A genuinely emancipatory literature will not be built on the further subdivision of shelves by the author’s biography. It will be built on the collective struggle of workers across the cultural economy. It will be built on the recognition that art, like all human labour, is threatened by the same forces that threaten wages, conditions and democratic rights.
The Domestic Uncanny and the Retreat from the Social: Platform Literature in an Age of Reproductive Crisis
This essay situates Making Space within a broader ideological pattern. It argues that the domestic uncanny the supernatural child, the haunted home, the disintegrating marriage has become a privileged form through which platform‑mediated fiction processes social contradiction. But rather than illuminating those contradictions, such works frequently privatise them, rendering structural crises as personal anxieties and political dilemmas as matters of mood. The result is a literature that is technically competent, emotionally legible, and algorithmically optimised yet socially miniaturised, historically weightless, and politically evasive.
In Making Space, the uncanny child serves as more than a narrative device; it reflects a broader literary pattern in which the household becomes the main setting for crises. Kuang’s story explores Jess’s longing for motherhood, driven by her personal history and societal pressures that expect newly married women to have children, through the enigmatic boy who appears in the woods. The supernatural element doesn't expose the conflicts around reproductive labour but heightens Jess’s internal emotional struggles.
This captures the domestic uncanny as it has evolved recently. Instead of using the supernatural to distance the reader from the real world, it explores the protagonist's inner psychological state. The uncanny serves as a metaphor for feelings like anxiety, dread, or desire, emphasising the self rather than questioning the external world.
Historically, the uncanny has served a different function. In the Gothic tradition, the haunted house or monstrous child often revealed the era's repressed social contradictions: class conflict, colonial violence, patriarchal domination. In the domestic uncanny of the platform era, however, the supernatural tends to obscure rather than illuminate. It becomes a device for privatising crisis, rendering structural pressures as personal emotional burdens.
The Social Conditions of Reproduction — and Their Absence
Deciding to have children is currently influenced more by external factors than personal psychology. These include worsening material conditions such as stagnant wages and job insecurity, the decline of public childcare services, rising housing expenses, and the commercialisation of reproductive services like fertility clinics and surrogacy. Additionally, societal pressures on women to embody a “fulfilled” domestic role while bearing the financial burden of austerity also play a significant role.
These conditions form the fundamental basis for reproductive choices. They are not mere background elements; they are crucial. Yet, in Making Space, they are almost absent. Jess’s crisis is shown as caused by desire, fear, and personal longing. The social context is presented only as a minor influence, illustrated by the repeated question “when will you have children?” rather than as a set of structural obstacles.
This absence is more than just a lack of imagination. It reflects a wider ideological narrowing in modern genre fiction, especially in works created for and distributed via platform infrastructures. The domestic uncanny depicts crises without addressing their roots. The supernatural child replaces social realities, making the home the sole focus of meaning.
Platforms like Amazon and TikTok heavily influence literary form through their economic incentives. They favour quick consumption, emotionally clear content, immediate confessional stories, narratives suited to short videos, and fiction that emphasises personal psychology over social intricacy. Consequently, the resulting literature tends to be psychologically intense, socially simple, politically non-committal, formally concise, and algorithmically optimised.
Amazon's short fiction anthologies, like The Time Traveller’s Passport, are crafted for quick reading, emphasising 'content' over literary depth. Virality, easy discovery, and platform compatibility drive their form. In this landscape, stories that highlight personal emotional struggles tend to be favoured over those engaging with broader social issues. Kuang’s story exemplifies this trend, not an anomaly. Its focus on inner life reflects the environment in which it was created and distributed.
The Return of Plekhanov’s “Extreme Individualism”
The Marxist critic Georgi Plekhanov, writing over a century ago, diagnosed a tendency in bourgeois art toward “extreme individualism,” in which artists become “condemned to sterile preoccupation with personal emotional experiences… marked by the fantasies of a morbid imagination.” His critique targeted the Symbolists and Decadents of his era, but its resonance with contemporary platform fiction is striking.
The domestic uncanny of the present moment reproduces this individualism under new technological and economic conditions. The artist is not isolated in a fin‑de‑siècle salon but embedded within a digital marketplace that rewards personal confession, emotional spectacle, and algorithmic compatibility. The result is a literature saturated with feeling yet evacuated of social content—a literature of mood rather than critique.
Kuang’s Making Space exemplifies this tendency. It is atmospheric, emotionally legible, and technically competent. But it is also inward‑turning, socially miniaturised, and ideologically conservative in its imaginative horizon. It stages a crisis of reproduction without acknowledging the structural conditions that make reproduction itself a site of crisis.
The online speculation that Kuang’s productivity is evidence of AI assistance is a distraction and a gendered one. It reflects a suspicion directed disproportionately at women writers whose output exceeds marketplace expectations. But more importantly, it misidentifies the real issue. The question is not whether the work was produced with AI. The question is what social vision the work advances.
On that count, Making Space is revealing. It is a story that gestures toward the largest questions sacrifice, futurity, reproduction while retreating into the confines of the household. It converts structural crisis into private dread, social contradiction into supernatural metaphor, and political economy into personal anxiety. The AI discourse obscures this ideological function. It treats the work as a technical artefact rather than a social one.
The domestic uncanny is not necessarily conservative. It can shed light on contradictions within domestic labour, reproductive crises, and the social structure of intimacy. However, in the platform era, it has often shifted towards privatisation, inward focus, and ideological narrowing. A thorough critique of modern genre fiction should examine not only the works themselves but also their production conditions: the platform's economic logic, algorithmic influences on form, the breakdown of public social imagination, the commercialisation of literature as content, and the retreat from social issues into domestic themes.
Making Space is a modest, well‑crafted example of this retreat. It is not a failure of talent, but a symptom of a broader cultural formation in which the household becomes the only imaginable stage for crisis, and the supernatural becomes a device for avoiding the world rather than confronting it.
Review: Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang. Harper Voyager, 2022. 560 pages.
"I heard a traveller from an antique land….” (Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias” (quoted in Kuang 147)
“She learned, in fact, that revolution is always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential”
R F Kuang’s-Babel
“The historical significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian revolution consists in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture that is above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly human.”
Leon Trotsky
'What is art? First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings and moods; art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader 'good feelings.' Like science, art cognises life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. However, science analyses; art synthesises; science is abstract; art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man; art to his sensual nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.'
Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky,
R.F. Kuang’s Babel through a Marxist lens
It takes a brave and gifted writer to play fast and loose with British history and get away with it. However, Rebecca F. Kuang, who has a master's and two PHD’s, manages to pull this off with an erudition that belies her tender years.
R. F. Kuang’s “speculative fiction” is an attack on capitalism, or, to be precise, British imperialism. In Babel, she quotes Frantz Fanon: “Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence”.
Of course, Kuang is free to quote whom she pleases, but Fanon is not the healthiest of anti-imperialist writers. Fanon (1925–1961) was a Martinique-born psychiatrist, anti-colonial theorist and participant in Algeria’s war of independence. His major works, most notably The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, combined clinical experience, existential-philosophical reflection and militant polemic to expose the psychic and violent dimensions of colonial domination.
Fanon remains indispensable for understanding the brutality of imperialism, the profound psychological injuries inflicted on colonised peoples, and the legitimating role of national liberation as a political response to colonial oppression. However, his work tends to overemphasise the peasantry and the “national” element. Fanon’s analyses sometimes valorise “the people” and guerrilla insurgency in ways that underplay the historically decisive role of the industrial working class as an emancipatory force.
Kuang was born in China but grew up in the United States. Aged 29, she has already written five books, has a list of impressive book awards and survived graduate work at both Oxford and Cambridge. Kuang’s first three books comprised a trilogy: The Poppy War (2018), The Dragon Republic (2019), and The Burning God (2020). Yellowface was published in 2023, and her latest, Katabasis, was published recently.[1]
Poppy Trilogy
Kuang’s The Poppy War trilogy is not a moral fable but works as a social document. In Kuang’s world, the countryside supplies labour, food and recruits. Peasants are dispossessed by landowners, corvée, and military levies; they are often the immediate constituency of insurgent movements. Urban workers, miners, artisans, and the conscripted soldier class appear as concentrated sites of industrial labour, political organisation, and military potency.
In the novel, local merchants, industrialists tied to foreign capital, and landowning elites who broker deals with imperial powers function as a comprador class—they defend property, seek stability for capital accumulation, and will sell national sovereignty to protect their interests. The novel’s bureaucratic and military apparatus—police, generals, intelligence organs—embodies the state as an instrument of class rule. They administer repression, manage economic concessions and mediate between imperial interests and local elites.
To her credit, she warns against relying on nationalist elites or petty-bourgeois adventurism to carry out democratic or social reforms. In semi-colonial settings, the proletariat must assert independent leadership—organise urban workers, factory committees, soldiers’ committees, and alliances with the poor peasantry, rather than subordinating itself to comprador regimes.
Despite her tender age, Kuang possesses a verbal brilliance and erudition probably unsurpassed by any novelist of her generation. She has mocked many sacred cows. In Yellowface, she attacks the right-wing MeToo# movement. She hates contemporary identity politics, which typically originates in petty‑bourgeois layers with ambitions inside the cultural and professional hierarchy of capitalism. Kuang faced heavy criticism for writing Yellowface. The public dispute over the book's accusations that an author has appropriated or misrepresented Asian experience cannot be reduced to questions of individual taste or moral purity. It is rooted in the publishing industry's concrete class relations and economic imperatives.
On the surface, the row frames itself as an ethical debate about representation. However, its intensity and public amplification stem from a crisis in cultural markets. Publishing has become an arena of intensified competition for scarce positions — advances, awards, media visibility — driven by conglomeration and profit-maximising behaviour. Large publishers, retailers, and tech platforms compress cultural diversity into marketable identity niches, while monetising promotional narratives and outrage cycles. The HarperCollins one‑day strike and workers’ testimonies show how publishing workers face low pay, expanded workloads, and corporate cost‑cutting even as firms seek cultural “brands” to sell; this creates an environment in which status and visibility are disproportionately valuable to authors and gatekeepers alike.
As the dispute over Yellowface shows, a writer does not write under conditions of their choosing, and artistic greatness is not something merely willed. Some periods are more favourable to genius than others. I am not saying Kuang is a genius, but the limitations of American intellectual life during the recent epoch will have shaped her. With a fascist gangster in the White House, it will be interesting to see how much she curses and kicks against the confines.
As the brilliant Marxist writer Leon Trotsky once wrote: If environment expressed itself in novels, European science would not be breaking its head over the question of where the stories of A Thousand and One Nights were made, whether in Egypt, India, or Persia.” To say that man’s environment, including the artist’s, that is, the conditions of his education and life, finds expression in his art also, does not mean to say that such expression has a precise geographic, ethnographic and statistical character. It is not at all surprising that it is difficult to decide whether certain novels were made in Egypt, India or Persia, because the social conditions of these countries have much in common. However, the very fact that European science is “breaking its head” trying to solve this question, as these novels themselves show, indicates that these novels reflect an environment, even if unevenly.
No one can jump beyond himself. Even the ravings of an insane person contain nothing that the sick man had not received before from the outside world. However, it would be an insanity of another order to regard his ravings as the accurate reflection of an external world. Only an experienced and thoughtful psychiatrist who knows the patient's past can find the reflected and distorted bits of reality in the ravings' contents. Artistic creation, of course, is not a raving, though it is also a deflection, a changing and a transformation of reality, in accordance with the peculiar laws of art. However fantastic art may be, it cannot have at its disposal any other material except that which is given to it by the world of three dimensions and by the narrower world of class society. Even when the artist creates heaven and hell, he merely transforms the experience of his own life into his phantasmagorias, almost to the point of his landlady’s unpaid bill”.[2]
Babel-Or the Necessity of Violence
Babel is set at Oxford University in the 1830s. Although it is labelled a historical novel, Kuang insists it has lessons for today’s readers. In an interview, Kuang called her book “a dark text of academia,” saying, “I love campus novels, dark academia novels. Moreover, I knew that when I finished the Poppy War trilogy, I was going to move on and do something in that genre. That is the setting in which I am most comfortable and familiar. Those are the interpersonal dynamics that I observe and most enjoy writing about—between students and rival students, students and teachers, etc.[3]
Roger Marheine writes, “ Kuang pulls no punches in her scathing critique of Oxford professors who are either overt imperial agents of war (e.g. Robin’s father, Professor Lovell), willing dupes of imperial platitudes especially as they practice their daily craft within the very privileged confines of Oxfordian splendour, or specialists blissfully unaware of empire’s greater crimes as they live in academic cocoons and grasp only their own silo of knowledge. One of Oxford’s professors, Jerome Playfair, represents Kuang’s satirical comment on the British gentleman’s code of conduct, as they ruthlessly assert their global dominance.”[4]
Marheine is a pseudo-leftist and, like many on the radical left, echoes the Socialist Worker Party's sentiment that Kuang’s book is a "goldmine of revolutionary politics." While I am loath to downplay Kuang’s radical stance, she is not a Marxist, and this is not a socialist work of historical fiction. Some have argued that the book lacked nuance in its treatment of how characters from different marginalised backgrounds intersected with the imperial centre. The book also lacks working-class characters.
However, Rebecca F. Kuang’s fiction (notably The Poppy War trilogy and Babel) offers rich material for Marxist study: imperialism, ethnic division, bureaucracy, mass mobilisation, culture, and the politics of memory recur throughout her work.
Kuang’s critique of knowledge as imperial plunder in Babel does deserve a Marxist class analysis. Kuang’s Babel dramatises how the production, translation and curation of knowledge are woven into imperial accumulation. Her book shows that texts, languages and librarianship become commodities and instruments of state power. The novel makes visible several features of that process that are vital for organising library, academic and translation workers.
The main thread running through the book is that knowledge labour is expropriated and monetised. Kuang has clearly studied this barbaric practice because her book shows how scholarship and translation produce useful intellectual commodities, annotated corpora, glossaries, and archival order, which imperial institutions appropriate for political and economic advantage. The unpaid or underpaid labour of native speakers, archivists and junior scholars supplies content and expertise that enriches metropolitan libraries and universities, while the material rewards (funding, prestige, job security) flow to imperial centres. This mirrors the contemporary university’s transformation into a profit-generating arm of capital, in which millions of dollars in tuition and research funding are extracted. At the same time, adjuncts, librarians and translators remain precarious and low-paid.
Kuang is not overtly a Marxist; she does not mention Marx by name, but she does strive to present a materialist analysis of capitalism and empire. It would be interesting to review her work in, say, five years to see how much it reflects the growth of fascist tendencies within world capitalism and how a growing radical working class can tackle this. Adopting a Marxist approach would give her already stunning work an even sharper edge, along with a much wider readership than this great writer has achieved so far.
[1] keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/07/review-yellowface-by-rebecca-f-kuang.html
[2] The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism-Literature and Revolution Leon Trotsky www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch05.htm
[3] www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/1570.R_F_Kuang
[4] Book Review: Babel by R. F. Kuang-mltoday.com/book-review-babel-by-r-f-kuang/
Katabasis, R.F. Kuang's latest novel, portrays modern class
society primarily through academic elitism and the commodification of
knowledge. The new book marks a departure for Kuang, as her previous work, such
as Babel, focused on class and colonialism.
Kuang’s previous work should be approached with both caution
and admiration. Her earlier novels, the Poppy War trilogy and Babel, drew
considerable attention for their engagement with imperialism, colonialism, and
historical violence. Babel examines British colonialism and the
exploitation of non-Western knowledge through a fantasy lens. These
are legitimate and important subjects.
However, a limitation of this kind of literary-political
fiction is that it frames oppression primarily through race and national
identity rather than class. The enemy in Babel is, broadly, "the British Empire"
understood in racial and civilizational terms, rather than capitalism as a
world-historical system that generates imperialism regardless of which nation
or ethnic group sits at the top.
Katabasis critiques present-day class society, showing the
"ivory tower" as a modern class structure that gatekeeps social
mobility behind walls of wealth and power. The novel presents several arguments about class in contemporary society. The first argues that
academia functions as a modern class hierarchy. Kuang frames the university
system as an "infernal structure" that mirrors a pyramid scheme
rather than a meritocracy. Second, Characters like Alice and Peter are depicted
as "cannon fodder" in a departmental war, spending their best years
doing grunt work to boost senior academics' prestige and reinforcing barriers
to Entry.
The novel also critiques how prestigious universities
gatekeep their institutions, making success nearly impossible for those without
significant "financial privilege". The protagonists are so
indoctrinated into this class system that they believe their lives are
literally "not worth living" without validation from an elite
institution.
If the Katabasis theme seems familiar, it invokes the classical literary descent into the underworld (as in Dante,
Virgil, and Homer). The novel continues Kuang's interest in dark, morally
complex fantasy. It raises many questions, including whether the narrative's
moral framework reduces social evil to individual wickedness or to ethnic or
national conflict, or whether it points towards systemic, class-based
contradictions. From a literary and political standpoint, does Kuang's
"descent" have any genuine social content, or is it primarily
psychological and individual? Great literature, even in fantasy, illuminates
the real social forces that shape human suffering; the test for the reader is
whether Katabasis reaches that depth.
Dante's Inferno is perhaps the most elaborate katabasis in
Western literature, and it is saturated with class content. The organisation of
hell explicitly reflects the social and political contradictions of late
medieval Italy: popes, usurers, and political enemies are placed in their
circles with meticulous class logic. The great usurers of Florence sit in the
seventh circle; Dante was writing at a moment when merchant capital was
beginning to corrode feudal social relations, and his moral geography encodes
that anxiety. The sin of usury (lending for profit) damns early capitalists;
the sin of betrayal damns political traitors to the feudal order.
Kuang's book is not just a history book; her katabasis
metaphor, used in modern terms, takes on a different path. The world of the
labouring poor, the mines, the factories, the slums, was consistently figured
in the 19th and 20th centuries as an underworld into which bourgeois observers
"descended." Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England
is, in a sense, a social katabasis, a descent into the cellars and rookeries of
Manchester to bring back testimony from a world the bourgeoisie preferred not
to see. Émile Zola's Germinal centres on a literal descent into the coal mines;
the underground is the space of proletarian labour and, ultimately, of
proletarian rebellion.
This is where the class dimension becomes most politically
charged. The bourgeoisie imagines itself above ground, in the light of
civilisation and culture; the working class is relegated to the depths. But the
katabasis trope, when deployed honestly, always carries the seed of a reversal;
the hero who goes down returns transformed, with knowledge the surface world
lacks. The revolutionary implications are not hard to see: it is precisely from
the "underworld" of capitalist production from the mines, the foundries,
the assembly lines— that the force capable of overthrowing the existing order
emerges.
As Beejay Silcox observes, “Katabasis is far from perfect.
There’s a pair of blood-drunk villains who feel like a gory distraction, and a
nonsense MacGuffin. Bone creatures clatter through plot holes. Grand
mythologies collide and compete. Chunks of the novel read like a Rowan Atkinson
sketch. And the 1980s faculty politics look deceptively – or perhaps wearily –
like our own (a fascinating companion read would be Helen Garner’s 1995
landmark provocation The First Stone). But none of that really matters –
especially if you have a score to settle.”[1]
Katabasis is a complex and contradictory work. Kuang is not
a Marxist, yet her work enables a Marxist to explain their approach to
mythology. Marxists insist that artistic and mythological forms are not
autonomous —they arise from and reflect material and social conditions, even as
they develop internally. The katabasis is not merely a timeless archetype (as
Jung or Joseph Campbell would have it) within a deeply ahistorical, idealist
framework. It takes on different social content in different epochs, justifying
imperial class rule in Virgil, mapping the contradictions of feudal society in
Dante, and encoding working-class experience in the naturalist novel.
[1] www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/14/katabasis-by-rf-kuang-review-a-descent-into-the-hellscape-of-academia
Yellowface and the Crisis of the Culture Industry: Identity, Cynicism, and the Commodification of Outrage
Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface has often been seen, promoted, and interpreted mainly through the narrow lens of “race” and “cultural appropriation.” This is no coincidence. It echoes the publishing industry's tendency to turn every social issue into a marketable story category. However, this view misreads the novel. Yellowface is fundamentally a satire targeting a fading industry that has co-opted social justice language and stripped it of meaning. The story is straightforward: June Hayward, an average white novelist, sees her more talented friend Athena Liu choke on a pancake. Afterwards, June takes Athena’s unpublished manuscript, edits it, and publishes it using a racially ambiguous pseudonym. The narrative doesn’t explore deep philosophical themes; instead, it offers a clear look at how literary success is built today through publicists, algorithms, advance payments, the exchange of blurbs, and the constant danger of online cancellation.
Kuang, still in her twenties, writes with a weariness that suggests she has seen the industry's worst firsthand. Her disdain is clear. Editors are portrayed not as guardians of literature but as risk regulators. Marketing teams shape books' ideological direction. Diversity is reduced to a sales target, a mere demographic checkbox. The novel’s sharpest critique exposes how a supposedly progressive industry has adopted the language of representation yet remains fundamentally unchanged: profit-driven, cynical, and resistant to true artistic experimentation.
Yellowface vividly illustrates how outrage has turned into a commodity. Instead of merely selling books, the industry now markets narratives surrounding them. It emphasises the author’s identity, moral stance, and overall “brand.' The industry thrives on scandal, public shaming, and reputational downfall as spectacles. According to Kuang, social media functions less as a space for democratic discussion and more as a marketplace where reputations are bought, inflated, and ruined to boost engagement.
Kuang’s harsh observation that “allegations are hurled everywhere, reputations are destroyed, and after the chaos, everything stays the same” captures the novel's core truth. Nothing truly shifts because the outrage itself is the end goal. The recurring pattern of accusation and forgiveness serves only to attract attention, which in turn boosts sales. This isn’t a misrepresentation of the industry; it’s its fundamental principle.
Identity politics and the Pseudo Lefts
The novel is less successful in its handling of the deeper structural forces that make this cynicism possible. Kuang gestures toward a defence of imaginative freedom: the idea that writers should not be confined to their own biography, that the demand for “authenticity” is a reactionary constraint masquerading as progress. She is right. Literature has always depended on the ability of writers to inhabit lives not their own.
But Yellowface never follows this insight to its logical conclusion. It remains trapped within the same identity-based framework it appears to satirise. The novel critiques the absurdities of online mob behaviour, the bad faith of critics who insist that only certain authors may write certain histories, and the hypocrisy of publishers who weaponise diversity for profit. Yet it stops short of asking the central question: why has identity politics become the culture industry's dominant ideological language? The answer is not psychological. It is economic.
Yellowface and the Pseudo‑Left
Rebecca F. Kuang’s 'Yellowface' is widely seen as a novel focused on “race,” “representation,” and “cultural appropriation.” This limited interpretation is deliberate, mirroring the ideological tendencies of today's pseudo-left—an environment that neglects serious class analysis and instead enforces cultural boundaries as political lines. Rather than addressing these themes directly, Kuang satirises an industry that has commodified identity discourse and critiques pseudo-left trends that supply the moral language behind this commodification.
The story is straightforward: June Hayward takes her deceased friend Athena Liu’s manuscript and releases it under a racially ambiguous pseudonym. The resulting scandal isn't rooted in the work's quality or the theft itself but in the pseudo-left’s preferred currency—moral outrage. Online mobs, activists, and publishing gatekeepers target June not for dishonesty but because she broke the pseudo-left’s sacred rule: stories “belong” to identities, and identities “own” their histories.
Kuang’s satire reveals how this reasoning benefits the publishing industry. Identity politics divides readers into demographic segments and turns literature into branded moral commodities. This enables publishers to profit from outrage, guilt, and “representation” with the same cynicism used for any other product. Instead of challenging this system, the pseudo-left offers ideological support, substituting universal artistic freedom with bureaucratic limits and political solidarity with a competitive marketplace of grievances.
Yellowface falls short in fully developing its critique. Kuang hints at the reactionary tendency of limiting writers to personal biography but avoids addressing the class dynamics that benefit from such restrictions. The novel criticises the absurdities of online denunciation but doesn't fully show how economic interests drive identity discourse in the culture industry. The main issue that Yellowface alludes to but doesn't fully explore is the crisis of authorship in capitalism. Today, authors are perceived more as content providers than as literary creators. Their value is judged not by artistic quality but by their marketability. Their identities become intellectual property, and their moral positions are used as marketing tools.
The industry’s focus on “authenticity"—the belief that only certain identities should tell certain stories—is not a step forward. Instead, it controls labour, limits who can write what, and reduces artistic possibilities. This shifts literature into a bureaucratic system of permissions and bans, replacing the writer's universal imaginative freedom with ideological constraints that benefit the market more than art.
Yellowface as Workplace Novel
Readers who approach Yellowface after Babel—a more ambitious novel that examined language, empire, and capitalism—may perceive a narrower focus. However, this confined scope is intentional. Yellowface primarily functions as a workplace novel, offering a vivid portrait of an industry consuming itself. It satirises a professional setting where moral claims are instrumentalised, identity categories are commodified, and writers are compelled to participate in their own commodification. Its strength lies in its honest portrayal of this environment, while its weakness is its hesitation to critique the societal crises underlying it.
The novel presents itself as a commentary on race and authorship politics. However, it still leaves its key question unasked: who gains from a cultural discussion that reduces every literary issue to the author's identity?
The answer is straightforward. The publishing industry gains, and capital does too. Similarly, the culture industry benefits. In this context, identity politics is not a radical challenge to authority but rather one of its most powerful ideological tools. "Yellowface" is valuable for its depiction of that industry. However, it is less effective as a critique of the political issues it discusses because it stops short of addressing the class relations that shape the entire field. Nonetheless, its shortcomings are instructive, highlighting the limitations of satire that fails to challenge the economic foundations underlying the world it portrays.
Notes
Academic Studies on Yellowface
- Traesar, Livia. Publishing Whiteness: Racial Authorship, Cultural Appropriation, and Market‑Driven Multiculturalism in R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface. Rubikon: Journal of Transnational American Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2026), pp. 37–51. A detailed analysis of Yellowface as a critique of neoliberal diversity discourse, showing how “diversity” functions primarily as a market strategy rather than a transformative commitment.
- Nasir, Ayesha & Akhter, Muhammad Saeed. Racial Diversity in Kuang’s Yellowface: A Neo‑Colonial Study. Advance Social Science Archive Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2026). Examines the novel through postcolonial and Critical Race Theory frameworks, arguing that the publishing industry commodifies diversity while reinforcing existing power structures.
Works on Diversity, Identity Politics, and the Culture Industry
- Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012.
- Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017.
- Banet‑Weiser, Sarah. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Duke University Press, 2018.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Columbia University Press, 1993.
- Brouillette, Sarah. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford University Press, 2014.
- Dyer, Richard. White. Routledge, 1997.
- Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
These works collectively map the ideological terrain in which the pseudo‑left operates: neoliberal multiculturalism, institutional diversity discourse, and the commodification of identity.
Additional Theoretical Context
- Adorno, Theodor & Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment — for the foundational critique of the culture industry.
- Eagleton, Terry. The Function of Criticism — on literature, ideology, and class.
- Saha, Anamik. Race and the Cultural Industries — on how capitalism weaponises identity categories.
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