She probably has a book deal with Random House (Gav Goulder/In Pictures via Getty Images)
![](https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Sam-100x100.jpg)
Author biographies go in fashions, like anything else. As a literary editor, I am the grateful recipient of any number of press releases about new books, so I get to see how they change.
For a long time, anyone who’d written a business or self-help book based on their Ted Talk was described by their publicists as a “thought leader”. Briefly, “influencer” was the thing to be if you’d written a book of lifestyle tips: essentially a way of indicating to booksellers that this pustular teenager had a gazillion followers on Instagram so probably merited the front table treatment even if — being the wrong side of 25 — you’d never heard of them.
Now, though, we live in a more caring and politically conscious age. Hashtags are no longer for selling #swag, but for organising progressive political movements; which can, in turn, be used to sell swag. The way this manifests is in what I am coming to think of as the activist tricolon.
On Monday one publicist wanted to alert me to a “poet, writer and activist”. Last Thursday it was a “veteran, [comma sic] politician and activist“. The day before it was an “Olympic boxer, model and activist”. I’ve had, just in recent weeks, “award-winning actress, model and activist”, “activist, researcher and policy maker”, “bestselling author and women’s empowerment activist”, “former publisher, community advocate, and activist”.
But what is an “activist”? It’s a pretty broad term these days. So broad, I worry, that it is starting to verge on the meaningless. For instance, a recent Guardian headline
Once, it was clear what “activist” meant. It meant: “smelly hippy” (or, if you preferred, “dedicated leafleter, marcher and supergluer of self to solid objects in inconvenient places”). You knew where you were with an activist. Depending on your temperament and geographical location, you either arrested them and dropped them out of a helicopter, or you bailed them out of prison, circulated their samizdat writings and cheered in support of their brave direct action.
The one thing that you tended not to do, whichever side of the divide you were on, was buy their books in any great numbers. In the second half of the last century, stalwarts like Jonathon Porritt would issue earnest books about the politics of ecology, and they would slide out of print. Polemical texts on feminism, Marxism and race consciousness sold in specialist outlets and to politics departments, but with the odd exception — Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch being a notable one — did not trouble the bestseller lists.
Now, they are a positive publishing trend. Movements came with reading lists, and civilians read them. Black Lives Matter was accompanied by a slew of hugely successful books from the likes of Ibrahim X Kendi, Reni Eddo-Lodge and Ta-Nehisi Coates (while a new generation rediscovered bell hooks and James Baldwin).
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SubscribeChange activist to narcissist.
Ha ha. Great article and I learned a new word: “woke-washing.” More than anything, that compound word explains why corporations are so dedicated to wokedom.
Just my 2 cents.
J. Bryant.
Gardener, fisherman, activist.
J – I am a fisherman too, I do a small bit of commercial fishing but the money is so low mostly I stopped that, mostly am just on the water almost every day catching some for the people I care for (most of them do not eat red meat) and friends and acquaintances, and myself and dogs, and mostly to remain sane as I am an outdoors-man, and being on the water keeps me together, and to get the fish as we eat it 4-5 days a week, but mostly to be on the water really – I could not do without being on the water, it is such a huge part of me….
I am just getting the fall garden in – it is dug, the greens planted, turnips, last beans, mulched – later the winter stuff goes in. The grapes are ripening, figs and pears gone, I do jams and marmalade – I need to have nature about, and I have pets and poultry…..
Glad to hear someone else fishes and gardens…..Pity they do not have a chat place here to talk of these things….
Activist too
And it seems the publishing industry is 75% women. I wonder if that has any thing to do with how insanely, destructively, Left it is? Or are the modern males total XXXXXXX too?
Many of these activist books might be more accurately described as progressives “coffee table ballast” rather than “intellectual ballast”.
Or perhaps ‘ zoom virtue displays’ in the bookcase behind the speaker.
Narcissists used to want to seem spiritual rather than shouty and progressive. Passivists rather than activists .
I think a better description of activist books is “racist filth”.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that you don’t have sell that many books to be a “best seller” these days.
Presumably these idiots are snapping up each other’s books. I’m not persuaded that the general public buys them.
They will if your HR department makes you buy them and pretend to read them.
We live in a more caring age? Dubious. We live in an age where pretending to care matters more but try asking a volunteer co-ordinator if they are being overwhelmed by demands to come and help
“colossal wally”.
These activists all go the way of China. Vulgar atheism, disdain for family, solidarity, blind pursue of materialistic accumulation only to end up dying in an expensive SUV in a flooded tunnel. It is the capitalism of the concentration camps.
“Resistance to capitalism has become just another way of selling things.” A splendid summary. As time marches on the once inevitabile revolution has become the evolutionary moment of capitalism. Contrary to the expectations of the experts capital has fed on, rather than collapsed under, the weight of its ‘contradictions.’ Perhaps less rather than more ‘activism’ is the answer.
Resistance to capitalism has become just another way of practising capitalism: capitalism with added hypocrisy.
Touching lack of cynicism about St Marcus and his PR team, there. Really quite affecting.
Maybe Marcus wants to become a global brand like David Beckham.
I am here to express my stylistic preference for the serial comma.