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Robert Alexander
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Literary Journalism
and Social Justice
Edited by
Robert Alexander · Willa McDonald
Literary Journalism and Social Justice
“Editors Willa McDonald and Robert Alexander have compiled an excellent col-
lection of scholarly essays focused on not just literary journalism as a whole, but,
burrowing down, issues specifically revolving around social justice—rather than,
say, Wolfe’s predilection for getting inside subcultures of all types. This focus yields
important essays from major literary journalism scholars from around the world
and spotlights the urgent need to accelerate research into this afflicting-the-
comfortable realm as we move deeper into the third decade of this tumultuous,
increasingly anti-democratic century.”
—Bill Reynolds, Professor of Journalism at The Creative School, Toronto
Metropolitan University, Canada, and Editor of Literary Journalism Studies
“It is my contention that the volume is likely to be a milestone in the field of global
literary journalism studies, but will also be of interest in other fields, such as
journalism and communication studies, comparative literature, sociology, ethnog-
raphy, and the humanities at large. This original book presents many provocative
ideas and bold approaches, evidence that literary journalism studies is playing a
crucial part in advancing social justice.”
—Isabelle Meuret, Senior Lecturer, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Robert Alexander • Willa McDonald
Editors
Literary Journalism
and Social Justice
Editors
Robert Alexander Willa McDonald
Department of English Language Faculty of Arts
and Literature Department of Media,
Brock University Communications, Creative Arts,
St. Catharines, ON, Canada Language and Literature (MCCALL)
Macquarie University
Sydney, NSW, Australia
ISBN 978-3-030-89419-1 ISBN 978-3-030-89420-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89420-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank the many people who were involved in
this book throughout the many stages of its production. In particular, we
would like to thank the researchers whose work appears in the following
pages who have shared their knowledge and insights on the topic—the
intersection of literary journalism and social justice—enriching our under-
standing of this nascent academic field.
Thanks as well to the International Association for Literary Journalism
Studies for supporting us, circulating our call for papers, and hosting two
panels we proposed on Literary Journalism and Social Justice at its 14th
annual conference held at Stony Brook University, Long Island, New York,
in May 2019, and to the contributors to these panels. We would also like
to thank the staff at Palgrave Macmillan—in particular, Mala Sanghera-
Warren and Emily Wood for their patience and expert guidance through
the editorial process, and the reviewers whose thoughtful comments have
strengthened this collection.
Thanks also go to Sue Spearey, Nancy Cook, and David Butz for their
invaluable assistance in the early days of this project, as well as to Bunty
Avieson, Sue Joseph, and Matthew Ricketson who provided advice or
v
vi Acknowledgments
were early readers along the way. We also thank friends and colleagues at
our respective universities.
And finally to our families:
Carolyn, William, Madeleine, and Mango

Tian, Mingy and Freddles
faithful companions who shared their suddenly shrunken world of 2020

and 2021 with this book as it came into being.
Contents
1 Introduction:
Literary Journalism and Social Justice 1
Robert Alexander and Willa McDonald
Part I Approach: An Appetite for Justice 19
2 “Throw
the Rich Woman’s Castoffs Back in Her Face”:
Moa Martinson’s Rejection of Charity in Favour of
Class-Based Solidarity 21
Anna Hoyles
3 Louis
Roubaud, Social Justice and Lost Children 35
Kari Evanson
4 The
Poetics of Resistance: The Literary Journalism of
India’s Dalit Protest Movement 49
David O. Dowling
Part II Encounter: Engaging Subjects 67
5 Witnessing
and the Theorization of Reportage 69
Pascal Sigg
vii
viii Contents
6 Telling
a True Story No One Wants to Read: Literary
Journalism and Child Sexual Abuse 83
Matthew Ricketson
7 Standpoint
Theory and Trauma: Giving Voice to the
Voiceless 99
Sue Joseph
8 Making
Visible the Invisible: George Orwell’s
“Marrakech”117
Russell Frank
9 Bearing
Witness to Epistemic Injustice: Joan Baxter’s
The Mill129
Callie Long
10 Young
Voices, an Old Problem: When Latin American
Chroniclers Tell Stories About Childhood and Youth143
Laura Ventura
Part III Representation: Strategies for Change 155
11 Social
Justice as a Political Act: Action and Memory in
the Journalism of Rodolfo Walsh157
Pablo Calvi
12 American
Literary Journalism as Liberatory Praxis:
Narrative Experimentation and Social Justice175
William E. Dow
13 Literary
Journalism and the Scales of Justice: A New
Mobilities Approach195
Robert Alexander
14 Literary
Journalism and the American Prison Press209
Kate McQueen
Contents ix
15 Communication
Across Borders: Testimonial Memoir as
Literary Journalism for Mobility Justice225
Willa McDonald
16 Territorial
Rights, Identity, and Environmental
Challenges in Latin American Literary Journalism243
Dolors Palau-Sampio
17 Literary
Journalism and Critical Social Practice: Latino
and African Immigrant Communities in the Works of
Gabriel Thompson and Rui Simões259
Isabel Soares, Rita Amorim, and Raquel Baltazar
Part IV Response: Changing Attitudes and Prompting

Action 277
18 Phronetic
Journalism: How One Reporter’s Story
Helped Women “Mutilated” by Their Gynaecologist
Fight for Social Justice279
Jennifer Martin
19 Stories,
Students, and Social Justice: Literary Journalism
as a Teaching Tool for Change293
Mitzi Lewis and Jeffrey C. Neely
Index311
Notes on Contributors
Robert Alexander is Associate Professor of English at Brock University.

With Christine Isager (University of Copenhagen), he is the editor of Fear
and Loathing Worldwide: Gonzo Journalism Beyond Hunter
S. Thompson (2018).
Rita Amorim is an assistant professor at the School for Social and Political
Sciences, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, where she teaches English for
Specific Purposes. She is a research fellow at Centre for Public
Administration and Policies (CAPP) and the Group for African Studies
(GEA), and her research interests cover the fields of literary journalism
and travel literature, African Lusophone culture, transatlantic studies, and
English as a global language.
Raquel Baltazar is an assistant professor at the School for Social and
Political Sciences, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, where she teaches
English for Specific Purposes and Written and Oral Expression. She is a
research fellow at Centre for Public Administration and Policies and her
research interests are in foreign-language learning, literary journalism and
travel literature, African Lusophone culture, and transatlantic studies.
Pablo Calvi is the author of Latin American Adventures in Literary
Journalism (2019). An associate professor at Stony Brook University
School of Journalism, he is also the associate director for Latin America at
the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting. His writing appears
in The Believer, Guernica, El Mercurio, and other publications.
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
William E. Dow is Professor of American Literature at the Université

Paris-Est (UPEM) and Professor of English at The American University of
Paris. He is an Associate Editor of Literary Journalism Studies
(Northwestern University Press) and has published articles in journals
such as Publications of the Modern Language Association, Twentieth-
Century Literature, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, and
MELUS. He is the author of the book, Narrating Class in American
Fiction (2009), and co-editor of Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st
Century (2011), Richard Wright in a Post-racial Imaginary (2014),
Latitudes Unknown: James Baldwin’s Radical Imagination (2019), and
The Routledge Companion to American Literary Journalism (2020).
David O. Dowling, professor in the School of Journalism and Mass
Communication at The University of Iowa, is the author of nine books,
the most recent of which are The Gamification of Digital Journalism:
Innovation in Journalistic Storytelling, A Delicate Aggression: Savagery
and Survival in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Immersive Longform
Storytelling: Media, Technology, and Audience. His articles on journalism,
narrative, emerging media, and digital culture have appeared in journals
such as Literary Journalism Studies, Digital Journalism, Convergence,
American Journalism, and Journalism & Communication Monographs.
Kari Evanson is Senior Lecturer in French at Fordham University. She
holds a joint PhD in French Literature and French Studies from New York
University and an MA in French Cultural Studies from Columbia
University. She recently contributed a book chapter, “Grand Reporters in
Guyane: Bringing the Exotic Back Home” to Locating Guyane (Eds. Sarah
Wood and Catriona MacLeod, 2018). Her research focuses on juvenile
delinquency and the press in interwar France and specifically how the press
contributes to the formation of social causes. She is also interested in liter-
ary journalism, reportage, and themes of imprisonment.
Russell Frank is a folklorist by training and a journalist by trade. He
worked as a newspaper reporter and editor for 13 years before joining the
journalism faculty at The Pennsylvania State University. Much of his schol-
arly output has been about literary journalism, journalism ethics, and what
he calls newslore—folklore in the news and the news in folklore. He is the
author of Newslore: Contemporary Folklore on the Internet and Among the
Woo People: A Survival Guide for Living in a College Town.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Anna Hoyles holds a PhD in “The Literary Journalism of Moa Martinson

(1890–1964)” from the University of Lincoln. She has also published on
anarchist and communist newspaper comic strips in her role as a research
assistant on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded
project “Comics and the World Wars: A Cultural Record”.
Sue Joseph has been a journalist for more than 40 years, working in
Australia and the UK. She began working as an academic, teaching print
journalism at the University of Technology Sydney in 1997. As a senior
lecturer, she taught creative writing, particularly creative nonfiction. Now
as an associate professor, she holds an adjunct position at Avondale
University College, is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of South
Australia, and is a doctoral supervisor at the University of Sydney and
Central Queensland University. She is currently Joint Editor of Ethical
Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics and Special
Issues Editor of TEXT Journal of Writing and Writing Courses.
Mitzi Lewis is a professor in the Fain Fine Arts College at Midwestern
State University. She is co-founding editor of Teaching Journalism and
Mass Communication. Her teaching has been recognized with awards
from MSU and from the Association for Education in Journalism and
Mass Communication Small Programs Interest Group.
Callie Long holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities. Her back-
ground is in journalism, organizational communication, and media devel-
opment, focusing on public health.
Jennifer Martin is Lecturer in Journalism at the School of Culture,
Communication and Creative Arts, at Deakin University, Melbourne,
Australia. Martin is an award-winning journalist with more than 25 years’
experience in print, radio, and online. Her book Emotions and Virtues in
Feature Writing: The Alchemy of Creating Prize-Winning Stories (Palgrave
2021) maps how journalists employ narrative and reporting devices to
communicate emotions and virtues to readers. Her research interests
include the role of emotion in literary journalism, the role of women in
society, and how the media tells the stories of marginalized communities.
Willa McDonald is Senior Lecturer in Media at Macquarie University
where she teaches and researches literary/narrative journalism and creative
nonfiction writing. Her publications include Warrior for Peace: Dorothy
Auchterlonie Green (2009) and The Writer’s Reader: Understanding
Journalism and Non-fiction (2007).
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Kate McQueen is a writer and a lecturer in the Writing Program at

University of California Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on cultural con-
ceptions of crime and justice, with an emphasis on nonfiction narrative.
She also co-directs the Prison Journalism Project, a non-profit based at
Penn State University that trains and supports incarceration-impacted
writers, and serves as an editorial adviser to Wall City, a prisoner-run mag-
azine produced at California’s San Quentin State Prison.
Jeffrey C. Neely is Associate Professor of Journalism at The University of
Tampa. Along with his research in teaching literary journalism, his schol-
arship includes examining the role of narrative in applied ethics and iden-
tity formation.
Dolors Palau-Sampio (PhD, Autonomous University of Barcelona) is
Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Valencia (Spain). Prior to her
academic career, she worked as a journalist for nine years. Her research
focuses on journalistic genres and styles, accountability, quality, and narra-
tive journalism.
Matthew Ricketson is an academic and journalist. Since 2017 he has
been Professor of Communication at Deakin University in Melbourne,
Australia. He has run journalism programs in two other universities and
has been teaching courses about literary journalism since 2000. He has
worked on staff at The Age, The Australian, and Time Australia magazine,
among others. He is the author of three books and editor of two. Most
recently, he co-edited a book entitled Upheaval: Disrupted Lives in
Journalism. He is a chief investigator on three Australian Research Council
grants. In 2011 he was appointed by the federal government to assist Ray
Finkelstein QC in an Independent Inquiry into the Media and Media
Regulation, which reported in 2012.
Pascal Sigg is a PhD student in the English Department at the University
of Zurich. He holds a BA degree in Journalism and Communication, a BA
in English and German, and an MA in English and Comparative Literature.
In his doctoral project he analyzes self-reflection in the reportage of writ-
ers such as David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, and Rachel Kaadzi
Ghansah.
Isabel Soares is an associate professor (with Habilitation) at the School
for Social and Political Sciences (ISCSP), Universidade de Lisboa,
Portugal, where she is also Vice-President for Quality Management and
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
Director of the Language School. As a research fellow at CAPP and GEA,

her research interests cover the fields of literary journalism, imperialism
and post-colonial studies in Portuguese and English-speaking countries,
and English as global language. Soares was a founding member of the
International Association for Literary Journalism Studies (IALJS) and its
President between 2016 and 2018. As a novelist she publishes under the
name Isabel Tallysha-Soares.
Laura Ventura is an adjunct professor at University Carlos III in the
Humanities Department (Madrid). She is a journalist and writes for the
Argentinean newspaper La Nación, reporting from Spain. She holds a
PhD from Universidad Autónoma (Madrid), where she studied Latin
American cronica.
List of Tables
Table 16.1 Literary journalistic stories analyzed 247

Table 19.1 Survey respondents by continent of origin 298
Table 19.2 Questions corresponding to the four stages of transformative
learning theory with reported mean scores and standard
deviations300
Table 19.3 Categories and examples identified in responses to the
question, “Do you collaborate with other instructors, classes,
or academic programs when covering social justice issues in
your literary/long form/narrative journalism class? If yes,
please elaborate.” 302
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Literary Journalism

and Social Justice
Robert Alexander and Willa McDonald
I have never seen a conflict between journalism and activism. As a journalist,

I search for the truth. But as a moral person, I am also obliged to do something
about it.
—Barbara Ehrenreich1
1
Barbara Ehrenreich, “Bio” Barbara Ehrenreich. http://barbarehrenreich.com/barbara-
ehrenreich-bio/ quoted in Nancy L. Roberts, “Literary Journalism and Social Activism,” in
The Routledge Companion to American Literary Journalism, eds. William E. Dow and
Roberta S. Maguire (New York: Routledge, 2020), 263.
R. Alexander (*)
Department of English Language and Literature, Brock University,
St. Catharines, ON, Canada
e-mail: ralexander@brocku.ca
W. McDonald (*)
Faculty of Arts, Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts,
Language and Literature (MCCALL), Macquarie University,
Sydney, NSW, Australia
e-mail: willa.mcdonald@mq.edu.au
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
R. Alexander, W. McDonald (eds.), Literary Journalism and Social
Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89420-7_1
2 R. ALEXANDER AND W. MCDONALD
Today, as in the past, literary journalists around the world are using their
craft to address the unfair distribution of power, wealth, rights, benefits,
burdens, and opportunities. In recent years, they have been particularly
drawn to respond to the impacts of capitalism, globalization, climate
change, sexism, heteronormativity, racism, speciesism, and the global lega-
cies of colonialism. Disparities in levels of access to economic opportunity
are creating inequalities both within communities and between nations.
The uneven availability of basic services including housing, sanitation, and
health care are disproportionately affecting women, children, migrants,
ethnic and religious minorities, indigenous people, the disabled, and those
identifying as members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender com-
munities. Social and cultural inequalities influence access to information,
education, and participation in democratic processes. They also limit who
can speak and whose voices are heard. Forcible displacement, moreover,
has seen more than 80 million people driven from their homes, without
access to institutional or state-based social justice remedies, and this num-
ber is rising.2 Non-human species and ecosystems are threatened by human
activities driving habitat loss, the introduction of exotic species, and cli-
mate destruction. All of these instances of social injustice have been areas
on which literary journalists have focused the distinctive powers of the
genre in which they work.
This volume takes as its central concern an examination of the promi-
nent place which a commitment to social justice has occupied in the global
history of literary journalism, a genre that combines journalistic methods
of fact-gathering with narrative and other techniques associated with lit-
erature. From Henry Mayhew’s vivid documentation of the lives of the
poor in mid-nineteenth-century London to Nellie Bly’s first-hand exposé
of the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island to Svetlana
Alexievich’s record of the voices of the victims of the Chernobyl disaster,
Elena Poniatowska’s influential accounts of the oppressed and marginal-
ized in Mexico, and Behrouz Boochani’s award-winning narrative
describing the conditions experienced by refugees to Australia in compul-
sory detention on Manus Island—literary journalists have consistently
been motivated by an appetite for truth-telling and a desire to address
inequality and its consequences.
2
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), “Figures at a Glance”, last
modified 18 June 2021, https://www.unhcr.org/en-au/figures-at-a-glance.html.
1 INTRODUCTION: LITERARY JOURNALISM AND SOCIAL JUSTICE 3
Literary journalism combines reportorial rigour with the sort of com-

plex reader involvement the techniques of literature make possible. The
chapters in this volume explore the ways this fusion of fact and feeling
makes literary journalism a uniquely compelling force for social change.
The works they explore deliver the facts of the many social injustices
afflicting the world in a way which encourages readers to engage emotion-
ally with the lives those injustices have harmed. What becomes evident is
that literary journalism’s capacity to elicit the sort of response necessary
for change derives from some of its most fundamental features. It’s there,
for example, in the basic critical attitude and desire to reveal that journal-
ists typically bring to the stories they cover. But, unlike conventional jour-
nalism, it’s also there in the close, often long-term relationships, literary
journalists develop with their subjects as well as in the innovative literary
resources these writers call upon to represent those encounters. Finally, it’s
also there in the empathetic and active responses readers may bring to this
unique complex of strategies.
The authors of these chapters cover a range of social justice issues.
Treated here you will find instances of retributive, procedural, and dis-
tributive injustice, economic injustice, environmental injustice, as well as
various stains of injustices of class, race, indigeneity, gender, mobility, and
access to knowledge. But while certain patterns emerge in the topics cov-
ered—such as mobility, carceral, epistemic, and environmental injustice—
the book makes no claim to exhaust the full range of often intersecting
social justice issues or theories. What it does do, however, is foreground
the way four specific features of literary journalism have proven to be par-
ticularly well adapted to addressing social justice concerns:
1. Approach: the critical attitude which motivates literary journalists in

the way they select and cover stories;
2. Encounter: the special relationships the immersion techniques of
literary journalism encourage its writers to develop with their subjects;
3. Representation: the flexible and innovative, often multi-scalar, rhe-
torical techniques literary journalists employ to tell their stories; and
4. Response: the powerful affective responses this combination of fea-
tures can produce in readers and the changes and actions to which
they may lead.
A focus on these aspects of the genre offers a framework for thinking

about the specificity of literary journalism’s engagement with social
injustice.
Part One: Approach: An Appetite for Justice

The impulse for social justice is deeply ingrained in the history of journal-
ism. As Barbie Zelizer has remarked, one of the main functions of journal-
ism has been its role as a critical voice in the public sphere. It is a voice that
has announced itself in many countries.3 Included in this volume are stud-
ies of writers, past and present, from Austria, Australia, Canada, China,
England, France, India, Iran, Latin America, Portugal, Sweden, and the
United States. The contexts in which each writer works are different—and
an appreciation of those differences is essential to the sort of detailed, his-
torically sensitive journalism they practice. But, also discernible in the
studies of the writers presented here is ample evidence of what Nancy
L. Roberts calls “a palpable, deep-seated sense of moral concern about
societal problems, often developed over a period of years through immer-
sion in first-hand experiences.”4 That concern may have resulted from
experiences accumulated in the field, but it is also striking how many of
these writers were led to the topics on which they report from a personal
familiarity with injustice.
An exemplary historical case of personal circumstances spurring a nar-
rative critique of social inequality is the literary journalism of Moa
Martinson. A prolific novelist and journalist as well as trade unionist, activ-
ist, and impoverished mother of five, Martinson’s writing was enriched by
her depth of knowledge of her own world in ways that could not be
matched by any journalist from outside. As Anna Hoyles shows, Martinson’s
corrosive experiences of charity doled out by the wealthy, led her to the
conclusion that state-based welfare was a better route to a fairer distribu-
tion of society’s resources than private charity. In her analysis, Hoyles
demonstrates the value of Martinson’s use of literary techniques—such as
narrative structure, dialogue, description, and subjective voice—to
describe the humiliations of being forced to accept charity, while instead
arguing for “mutual aid and solidarity” as a solution to the problems of
poverty.
Charitable institutions were also under fire in the literary journalism of
writer Louis Roubaud for failing to provide distributive justice to children
3
Barbie Zelizer, “How Communication, Culture, and Critique Intersect in the Study of
Journalism,” Communication, Culture & Critique 1 (2008), 86–91.
4
Nancy L. Roberts, “Literary Journalism and Social Activism,” in The Routledge
Companion to American Literary Journalism, eds. William E. Dow and Roberta S. Maguire
(New York: Routledge, 2020), 265.
and young people caught in the juvenile justice system in France between
the wars. Kari Evanson’s analysis of Roubaud’s investigations of the juve-
nile correctional facilities—which largely housed poor children and
orphans who had become wards of the state, rather than criminals—dem-
onstrate the way they had become part of the “machinery of social injus-
tice.” While some of the children were incarcerated and trained for a life
of imprisonment rather than for responsible and productive adulthood,
many were trapped in a system of charity that misused them as cheap
workers. Evanson’s chapter shows how, by writing in the present tense,
and by drawing the reader in through his use of “we,” Roubaud “discov-
ers the institutions at the same time as his readers, thus giving the impres-
sion that he is writing the report as he travels.” His readers, in effect,
become his travelling companions on a Dantean journey through the mis-
eries of the juvenile justice system. And yet, as Evanson also points out, it
is a journey in which Roubaud is both Dante and Virgil, for the writer had
himself in his youth been an inhabitant of the Mettray juvenile penal col-
ony. Although shielded by his bourgeois background from the worst
deprivations experienced by the colony’s lower-class prisoners, a privilege
which instilled in Roubaud a class consciousness which informs all of his
reporting, Evanson also shows Roubaud’s writing on France’s juvenile
justice system was driven by an oath he swore in his Mettray cell “to later
tell this story in the papers.”
Direct personal knowledge also underlies the activist writer Meena
Kandasamy’s confrontation with caste oppression in India. In his analysis
of Kandasamy’s writing, David O. Dowling demonstrates the importance
of her work towards enabling Dalits, particularly women, to be heard
regarding their abuse and marginalization. Typical of testimonial writing,
personal experience underpins much of Kandasamy’s writing which
attempts to translate Dalit oppression to a world-wide audience. Dowling
argues that Kandasamy’s body of work illustrates the role that literary
journalism can play—through the sharing of personal experience—in
identifying injustice, communicating its circumstances and consequences,
and mobilizing collective action. In the process, he raises questions about
the efficacy of state institutions as the sole remediators of inequality. While
Rawls and Miller promoted the idea of achieving distributive social justice
through formalized bureaucracy and government institutions, Dowling
shows Kandasamy’s writings demonstrate the problems of this approach
in India because of entrenched class discrimination. He proposes that
Kandasamy’s literary journalism resonates with Amartya Sen’s proposal
of a “realization-focused approach,” one that takes into account the

injustices of everyday life, identifying them and asking how they can be
eliminated.
Part Two: Encounter: Engaging Subjects

Of course, not every work of literary journalism which addresses a social
injustice has its roots in the author’s biographical circumstances. Such case
do, however, point to the intensely personal way writers of this genre
engage with the subjects of their stories. It’s now a commonplace that
literary journalism is characterized by the immersion techniques its practi-
tioners use to achieve an intimate understanding of their subjects, one
which defies stereotyped and simplistic representations. Immersion allows
writers to engage with those subjects, objectified in conventional journal-
ism, in the singular fullness of their idiosyncratic humanity. In doing so,
writers also free themselves from the narrow band of affective response
prescribed to conventional journalism’s impersonal observer, allowing
them to enjoy a fresh openness in their relationship with their subjects
which Alan Trachtenberg has called “an exchange of subjectivities.”
Pascal Sigg describes the challenges to conventional journalism which
occurred in the theorization of the genre of “eyewitness account” known
as reportage, in Europe between 1880 and 1935. In these years, Sigg
explains, a sense emerged of the entangled relationship of practice, form,
and theme in the genre, and with it a dawning awareness of the ethical
responsibilities of the reporter in their status as phenomenological subject
and producer. This shift first became apparent in the work of the Czech
writer Egon Erwin Kisch who, in a series of manifestoes, theorized the
reporter as an eyewitness who “shaped reality” for readers. In this regard,
the reporter did more than transmit facts: rather, they provided the truths
of “a witness directly involved in the event,” a position which, in its sub-
jective dimension and mediating role, involves a greater ethical responsi-
bility than that of the distanced observer. As Sigg explains, Walter Benjamin
added nuance and political urgency to this thesis with his observation that
media as it was emerging in the 1930s was “aestheticizing … political
life,” inducing a passivity in readers and consumers which helped fascist
forces in their efforts to disempower the “newly proletarianized masses.”
In reportage, this tendency had the potential, Sigg writes, to function as
“a kind of propaganda of the existing” rather than of the possible. But the
situation could be remedied, Benjamin argued, if the writers of reportage
were to reflect on their role in the production of these mediated represen-

tations. In this respect, he assigns an activist role to the writers of report-
age for, as Sigg points out, reflection on the conditions of production is a
critical step in altering social conditions, carrying with it the potential to
turn the previously passive readers into collaborators in social change.
The author’s reflection on their status as producer, moreover, brings
with it a new openness to the human subjects of the stories they tell.
Immersion implies that reporters engage with these subjects in, what
Matthew Ricketson here describes as, “the full range of their humanity”
rather than as the two-dimensional characters one might find in a police
blotter. Such specificity is crucial for a full understanding of accounts like
those of child sexual abuse presented to the Royal Commission into
Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–17), implicating
even the most high-ranking member of the country’s Catholic church,
Cardinal George Pell.5 As Ricketson notes, readers have a strong inclina-
tion to turn from all but the most basic facts of such alarming stories. Lost
in this response is the possibility of any real understanding of such abuse
or sense of the suffering of its victims. Both, however, are essential if the
problem is to be addressed in a way that garners the sort of public support
necessary to initiate change. Ricketson finds a formula for engaging the
compassion and understanding of readers in the book Cardinal: The Rise
and Fall of George Pell, journalist Louise Milligan’s 2017 account of the
abuse scandals and Pell’s connection with them. As he explains, Milligan
overcame the obstacle of reader aversion by narrating the scene of her
“awkward difficult” first encounter with one of the witnesses to the Royal
Commission hearings. Milligan makes full use of all of the narrative
resources Tom Wolfe outlines in his introduction to The New Journalism—
scene, dialogue, point of view, and status details. Crucially, though, she
relates this account in the first person and includes her own thoughts and
5
A verdict against Pell in the County Court of Victoria in 2018 on charges of sexual
offences was unanimously overturned by the High Court of Australia in 2020. Shortly after-
wards, Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse
revealed previously redacted findings on Pell, which included that by the 1970s he knew of
child sexual abuse by clergy but did not take adequate action to address it. Report of Case
Study No. 35: Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne, Royal Commission into Institutional
Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, November 2017, https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/
download/publications/tabledpapers/9c261d94-a04a-4a81-9350-99aa3f951269/
upload_pdf/un-redacted%20Report%20of%20Case%20Study%20No.%2035%20-%20
Catholic%20Archdiocese%20of%20Melbou….pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf.
feelings at the discomfort of her reluctant subject as she haltingly but

eventually gains his trust. In this patient and open exchange with her sub-
ject, Milligan models the reader’s appropriate response to him and, by
implication, to the other victims of these crimes and thus to the larger
atrocity, the story of which she tells in her book. There is a mode of listen-
ing beyond mere recording, and as other authors in this volume argue, it
is a vital part of the way literary journalists tell stories with a social justice
focus. Ricketson underscores the importance of listening in a quotation
from Marty Baron, the U.S. journalist and editor who oversaw The Boston
Globe’s coverage of the clerical abuse scandal at the centre of the 2015 film
Spotlight: “It’s really important that we, again, listen really closely to hear
what they say and treat it seriously, because people without power often
have very powerful things to say.”6
The notion that marginalized voices hold reserves of powerful situated
knowledges which too often go unheard is the basis of Standpoint Theory,
which Sue Joseph mobilizes in her discussion of two more Australian
texts—Huckstepp (2000) by John Dale, and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence
(1996) by Doris Pilkington Garimara. Sallie-Anne Huckstepp was a sex
worker and whistleblower who was murdered in 1986 after going public
with first-hand knowledge of police corruption linked to organized crime.
Garimara’s book tells the story of three Aboriginal girls (one of whom was
her mother) who were members of the Stolen Generation. The story
retraces their escape from the Moore River Native Settlement, north of
Perth, Western Australia, to return to their Aboriginal families. Standpoint
Theory recognizes that the disadvantaged are privileged in certain ways of
knowing, precisely because of their personal experiences; their subjective
perspectives, developed in negotiation with power structures, are crucial
to social justice advocacy. Joseph maintains that literary journalism is well
suited to allowing such hidden voices to be heard, particularly traumatized
voices on the lower echelons of society that have been repressed or rejected
by powerful forces. As she writes: “As a ‘civilized’ society, their desire to
be heard is their right—their socially just right.” The case studies Joseph
uses cast light not only on the standpoint of their subjects but in turn on
the standpoint of their social group. By including such stories of hardship,
literary journalism can return agency to the oppressed, while encouraging
6
Isaac Chotiner, “Marty Baron considers his time at The Washington Post,” The
New Yorker Interview, 6 February 2021.
social action on their behalf. As Joseph notes: “The literary journalist then
acts as witness, aiming for amelioration, restitution and social justice.”
Hearing the voices which tell such stories can be a challenge, but so can
be seeing the storytellers, as Russell Frank points out in his chapter on
George Orwell’s famous essay “Marrakech.” Orwell travelled to the
French protectorate of Marrakech in 1939, and in his account of the visit
he refers numerous times to the invisibility of the colonized inhabitants.
Such invisibility is of a different sort than that of the hidden truths con-
ventional journalism takes as its task to expose. In “Marrakech,” invisibil-
ity arises from what Frank describes as the colonizer’s “trained incapacity
to see” the humanity of those they subjugate, a wilful blindness that
exempts colonizers from blame for the misery they inflict. Orwell seeks in
his chapter to bring to light the full humanity of the colonized and thus
implicate the colonizers in their suffering. As Frank notes, though, even
Orwell does not escape this colonial habit of not seeing. In failing to inter-
view, let alone speak with a Senegalese soldier with whom he makes eye
contact and yet in whose face he claims to recognize an attitude of rever-
ence for his colonial master, Orwell is himself implicated in the very blind-
ness he seeks to disclose. Frank argues that, in resisting such stubborn
ethnocentrism, literary journalists expose themselves to the possibility of
seeing Others “in all their strange and familiar humanity for the first time.”
Such an uncanny mode of vision involves engaging with the subject in a
radically open manner, recognizing that the act of recognition itself
imposes a blindness of its own.
Such an attitude of openness to the Other, enhanced by literary jour-
nalism’s technique of immersion, has the potential of challenging well-
worn habits of seeing and hearing which risk effacing the strange otherness
of the journalistic encounter in favour of that which is conveniently famil-
iar. The philosopher Kelly Oliver has described this mode of encounter as
“witnessing,” which she characterizes as a capacity to move “beyond rec-
ognition.” Callie Long demonstrates in her chapter that literary journal-
ism provides opportunities for the sort of witnessing Oliver describes, as
well as evidence of its remarkable ability to reveal an order of injustice
coextensive with many others: epistemic injustice, which Miranda Fricker
defines as “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a
knower.”7 Long explores this in her analysis of Canadian journalist Joan
7
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 1.
Baxter’s book-length investigative account of the 50-year battle waged

between a Nova Scotia pulp mill and the communities, including First
Nations people, which opposed its polluting presence. Research, immer-
sive reporting, and an open ear for personal testimony allow Baxter to
construct a picture of a conflict in which corporate and government forces
consistently disregarded and diminished the knowledge of local groups in
deference to a self-serving and uncritical discourse of progress. Such an
institutionalized failure to hear, echoing as it does the colonizer’s “trained
incapacity to see” noted by Orwell, is an example of one category of epis-
temic injustice which Fricker calls “testimonial injustice.” It occurs, Fricker
writes, “when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibil-
ity to a speaker’s word.”8 Long argues that in hearing and telling the story
of those diminished voices, and drawing attention to the ideological forces
which silence them and delegitimize their knowledge, Baxter’s narrative
journalism provides the affective motive for reader response, not only in
Pictou, Nova Scotia, where this history took place, but in the many other
locations around the world where such injustices are being played out now.
Epistemic injustice is also the theme of Laura Ventura’s chapter on the
work of Latin American chroniclers Juan Villoro, Alberto Salcedo Ramos,
Alma Guillermoprieto, Leila Guerriero, and Josefina Licitra, and the non-
fiction writer Valeria Luiselli. She argues that these writers have become
the voices of those who cannot speak for themselves, particularly children
and young people caught in lives of poverty and neglect whose testimonies
would otherwise remain unheard and in danger of being “swallowed by
time and indifference.” Pointing to the importance of listening to others
if social justice is to be achieved—as suggested by Francois Lyotard and
Iris Marion Young—Ventura champions the polyphonic stories of the
chroniclers that expose the unjust effects of power on the most vulnerable
members of Latin American society. She argues the stories break down
prejudice, encourage empathy, and call for practical action. In this way,
they help readers to understand the complexities of the social problems
described, and perhaps those in their own communities as well. Significantly,
they provide hope to the disadvantaged that they will be heard. “The chil-
dren and youths may well be marginal and marginalized,” she writes, “but
the publications and the authors who give an account of their realities
are not.”
8
Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and Ethics of Knowing, 1.
Part Three: Representation: Strategies for Change

Literary journalism’s modification of the fleeting encounters typical of
much traditional journalism is complemented by the distinctive set of rep-
resentational resources on which it draws. Included here is the full sway of
narrative techniques it derives from fiction as well as a remarkable latitude
for formal innovation. Important, too, is the genre’s unique capacity to
move fluently among different discourses: it can shift scales from the inti-
mately personal to the abstractly panoramic in a manner which allows it to
contextualize individual suffering within the various, often intersecting,
frames of racial, social, economic, environmental, epistemic, and myriad
other injustices.
The genre’s formal flexibility also makes it particularly responsive to the
demands of justice engendered by extraordinary historical moments. One
such juncture was the political tumult of Argentina following the
Revolución Libertadora coup in 1955 which is the historical and political
context of Pablo Calvi’s analysis of Argentine journalist and writer Rodolfo
Walsh’s ground-breaking role in the development of the Latin American
literary form of political testimony known as testimonio. Because of its role
as an eye-witness text—one that is organically related to witnessing—liter-
ary journalism can operate as testimonial literature that seeks redress for
injustices while advocating for the rights of marginalized, disenfranchised,
and persecuted communities. In this chapter, Calvi demonstrates that in
Latin American countries, testimonio, a form Walsh adapted to the fraught
political context in which he wrote, was an important part of a literature
of resistance to the military dictatorships of the 1960s through the 1980s.
It was a literature committed to hearing and telling the truth of the
oppressed while preserving collective social memory. Calvi writes that
Walsh founded “a radically new genre, political testimony, that bridged
the symbolic and the social.” His intention was not only to reveal the facts
of the tyranny but to “inspire horror, so that they can never be repeated.”
As Calvi shows, testimonio in Latin America did not just have literary
power, but could inspire social and political action with the goal of social
justice: “the genre was intended to persuade its readers into taking action
against injustices rooted in class, race and history.” While Walsh did not
live to see it, his testimonial narrative Operación Masacre was added to the
judicial documents of State, creating a social memory that would other-
wise have been lost and enabling some justice for the subjects of his
journalism.
With William Dow’s chapter, the context shifts to the effects of racism
and neo-liberal economics in the United States. Dow focuses on the inno-
vative forms and styles two contemporary writers use to challenge the
reader’s understanding of current struggles of class and race in America.
Of the two books he discusses, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which won the
2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, is the most obviously
experimental.
Primarily a series of prose poems, Citizen incorporates accounts of per-
sonal experiences with public texts in various genres and media to offer a
lyrical counter narrative to the discourse on race which prevails in the
American imaginary. Along with meditations on such widely reported
instances of racial injustice in America as the shooting death of Trayvon
Martin, Rankine offers a record of the many microaggressions—derived
from both the public record and the non-reported facts of personal dis-
course—which mark the experience of African Americans. Although for-
mally different from Walsh’s Operación Masacre, Citizen has similarly
“become a public document of social justice.” Dow’s second example,
George Packer’s 2014 book The Unwinding draws its formal inspiration
from John Dos Passos’s modernist trilogy U.S.A. Although U.S.A. is a
work of fiction, Packer adopts some of its formal features including its
montages of public texts such as headlines and what Dow describes as its
“fractured and fragmented narrative” and “cut-up, discontinuous, and
open structure.” Packer does this to capture the rise of the brutally unfor-
giving social, political, and economic realities which have widened class
difference in the United States in recent decades. In a manner reminiscent
of Dos Passos, Packer sets his personal profiles of Americans from both
sides of this divide against the backdrop of such public historical markers
as “newspaper headlines, broadcast reports, political quotations, and tab-
loid news.”
Such scalar shifts are crucial to the sort of integrated knowledge literary
journalism is so well equipped to convey. What Mark Kramer identified as
the genre’s “mobile stance”9—its capacity for digression, expansion, and
other discursive shifts—can help contextualise the reader’s experience and
understanding of a story. Particularly valuable in stories dealing with social
justice is the fluency with which the genre can shift scales—from the sus-
tained intimacy of the closeup of a story’s main subject to the extreme
longshot that situates that subject in the context of the multiple, often
9
Kramer, “Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists,” 31.
intersecting, political and social forces by which they are afflicted. Such a
mobile frame forges in the reader a powerful bond between feeling and
understanding.
Literary journalism’s formal mobility offers a particularly useful narra-
tive vehicle for the themes of physical mobility and mobility justice which
appear in a number of chapters in this volume. Over the last few decades,
the humanities have increasingly recognized the significance of mobility—
the movement of beings, objects, and ideas—to matters of social justice.
In his analysis of literary journalism as a mobile form, Robert Alexander
uses as a starting point Mimi Sheller’s work on the way the power to con-
trol movement shapes inequality and discrimination, feeding into the
three entangled crises facing the modern world: “the climate crisis, the
urbanization crisis, and the refugee crisis.” Alexander observes that liter-
ary journalism is marked by mobility in two profound ways. The first is the
physical mobility of its writers that allows them the privilege of being able
to travel to immerse themselves in the lives of their subjects—often an
expensive proposition. The second is the rhetorical mobility of the form
that enables journalists to incorporate different discourses, techniques,
scales, and styles in their storytelling, to engage readers and more accu-
rately portray multiple layers of truth about the injustices suffered by their
subjects. Using Douglas Haynes’s 2017 account of a Managuan shanty
town, Every Day We Live is the Future, Alexander demonstrates the way
literary journalism’s mobile stance can facilitate a reader’s ability to under-
stand the mechanisms of injustice and empathize with the people sub-
jected to its realities.
It is the textual mobility of literary journalism that makes it a uniquely
useful form for those rendered physically immobile by incarceration,
detention, or lockdown to communicate their circumstances. Kate
McQueen’s analysis of North American prison narratives highlights the
way incarcerated writers can address the hermeneutical injustices that
result from being rendered invisible by the state. Defined by philosopher
Miranda Fricker, “hermeneutical injustice” occurs “when a gap in collec-
tive interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it
comes to making sense of their social experiences.”10 McQueen’s analysis
of works—including Tom Runyon’s Presidio, Wilbert Rideau’s The
Angolite, and the publications of San Quentin Prison, in particular the
podcast Ear Hustle—demonstrates the way literary journalism can be used
10
Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and Ethics of Knowing, 1.
to communicate with outside audiences to increase their awareness of

prison life and encourage much-needed reform. But it also hints at other
possibilities, including the development of insider knowledge about the
systemic and structural injustices responsible for prisoners’ disenfranchise-
ment, as well as the opportunity to draw prisoners into the public sphere
leading to more nuanced understandings and conversations about punish-
ment and social reform.
Hermeneutical injustice as it overlaps with the injustice wrought by
state-imposed immobility is a theme that continues through Willa
McDonald’s chapter. She analyses two examples of literary journalism
where, in the absence of access by outside journalists, the writers use their
experiences in different forms of state-imposed detention to witness the
experiences of the groups they represent. Wuhan Diary (2020) was com-
piled from Wang Fang’s nightly blog posts from lockdown in China at the
beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, while Behrouz Boochani’s No
Friend but the Mountains (2018) was written while he was in detention as
a Kurdish asylum seeker imprisoned by the Australian government on
Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. These books confirm that border jus-
tice cannot be separated from the social, cultural, historical, and political
contexts that have given rise to forced mobilities and immobilities across
the world, particularly in the wake of colonialism and globalization. They
also illustrate the usefulness of the literary journalism form—especially its
acceptance of subjectivity—for conveying the nuances of experiences of
which audiences have no direct knowledge, while transporting readers
into empathic engagement with the lives of the story’s subjects.
Remoteness of setting also provides a distant veil behind which much
of the environmental dirty work of the extractive and infrastructure devel-
opment industries takes place in Latin America. In her survey of nine long-
form stories on the theme of environmental injustice, Dolors Palau-Sampio
describes the work of a new generation of Latin American writers who are
using the techniques of literary journalism to expose offences committed
in the name of such projects and to render a sweeping, multidimensional
picture of the many injustices they entail. These are complex stories but as
Palau-Sampio shows, their writers integrate the multiple contexts they
involve with vivid, on-the-ground narrative accounts of the lived experi-
ences of those inhabiting the scenes where such development wreaks its
havoc; and they do so, she is careful to note, always with an ear to who is
listened to, who is ignored, and who is punished in the frequently undem-
ocratic processes in which such decisions are made. The resulting fusion of
hard fact with human interest (pioneered, as Palau-Sampio notes in the

landmark environmental writing of Rachel Carson) allows the authors of
these stories to “address environmental issues that have a connection with
economic interests, territorial rights, and social justice more coherently
and comprehensively than conventional news media.”
The comparative aspect of literary journalism studies, implicit through-
out this volume, is the explicit topic of Isabel Saores, Rita Amorim, and
Raquel Baltazar’s chapter on the work of Gabriel Thomson and Rui
Simões. Despite hailing from countries an ocean apart and speaking differ-
ent languages—Thompson is American and Simões Portuguese—and
working in different media—Thompson is a writer, Simões a film direc-
tor—both employ the narrative techniques of literary journalism to por-
tray the “disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, and discrimination”
experienced by communities of immigrants, many undocumented, in the
United States and Portugal. This chapter focuses on the surprising inter-
sections of social justice themes and literary journalistic form in the work
of Thomson and Simões, and particularly the interplay of revelation and
reparation “the immersive, detailed reportage” practised by the two
engenders. Inspired by Orwell, Thompson immerses himself in low-wage
food and service industries in the United States, working shoulder-to-
shoulder with Latino immigrants and impoverished Americans who can
find no other work. The surprising coincidence of these two groups in
Thompson’s narrative complicates, as the best literature does, easy demar-
cations of Us and Them and the stereotypes which accompany them.
Simões performs a similarly reparative gesture in his representation of the
poor Lisbon suburb of Cova da Moura and its large population of African
immigrants, most from Cape Verde. In his film, Simões pushes back
against common perceptions of Cova a Mora as a haven for immigrant
crime by letting his subjects speak to show the many ways members of the
community work together to alleviate the social disadvantages from which
they suffer, acts which, as the authors of this chapter argue, have the effect
of “dignifying the neighbourhood and its culture.”
Part IV: Response: Changing Attitudes

and Prompting Action
As a number of contributors to this volume observe, the literary journal-

ism of social justice has an instrumental concern with drawing attention to
problems of fairness and equity in a way which encourages readers to
change their attitudes and, the hope is, to act. The writers’ empathic
engagement with their subjects provides a pattern for reader response.
The effects of this modelling, moreover, are enhanced by the genre’s nar-
rative dimension which encourages readers to identify with those subjects
in a way which fosters the sort of experience sharing that is the basis for
empathy. Literary journalism also, through the writer’s close attention to
a story’s multiple contexts—historical, political, economic, cultural, and
so on—grounds these experiences in an analysis of the actual forces
responsible for the injustices witnessed. In this way, while the narrative
elements of these stories provide the emotional incentive for readers to
act, the contextual components suggest where those actions should be
directed.
But does it work? The final two chapters of this volume take up this
question, one from the perspective of the Aristotelian concept of phronesis,
the other from the experience of those teaching works of literary journal-
ism which foreground social justice concerns. In the first, Jennifer Martin
proposes the notion of “phronetic journalism”—journalism that commu-
nicates emotions and virtues to readers and which, in turn, may prompt
those readers to act for social change if they choose to enact their own
virtues. Phronesis is the main virtue that Martin includes in a new analytical
framework she has developed, which she calls the “Virtue Map,” in an
attempt to answer “the deceptively simple question of how journalists
make us feel when we read their work.” Phronesis is accompanied in the
map by courage, empathy, honesty, resilience, and responsibility. Martin
reflects on Melissa Davey’s award-winning article, “The Investigation into
Dr Gayed” to illustrate the way phronesis functions in literary journalism.
The gynaecologist Emil Gayed performed unnecessary medical proce-
dures, including hysterectomies, on women from a regional east-coast
town in Australia. While the women complained to the relevant authori-
ties, their concerns largely went unheard. Davey’s moving story of the
experiences of many of the women whose lives Gayed affected had consid-
erable social impact, triggering a class action by his victims, an indepen-
dent inquiry by the NSW State Government which led to changes in
hospital policies, and an ongoing police investigation into his practices.
The literary journalism form, and the storytelling opportunities it offered,
enabled Davey to combine different discourses—the women’s heartfelt
stories with scientific medical information—but most importantly, it pro-
vided an adequate platform to allow the women’s voices to be heard.
The final chapter in this volume takes these texts into the classroom to
test empirically the perceived effectiveness of the genre as a vehicle for rais-
ing awareness of social justice. Drawing on the transformative learning
theory of Jack Mezirow, the chapter’s authors Mitzi Lewis and Jeffrey
C. Neely asked instructors of literary journalism teaching in universities
and colleges around the world if it has been their experience that “literary
journalism might help deliver facts of the lives of the marginalized, facili-
tate an empathic engagement with those lives, and create movement
toward improving those lives.” Responses came from instructors in 14
countries (although most were from the United States) and were divided
among those who taught the subject academically, as a practice, or as a mix
of the two. On the whole, instructors reported feeling that such works
could transform students’ understanding of social justice, opening their
eyes to “issues of race, poverty, environment, immigration, and gender.”
They were not, however, convinced that this transformation was enough
to change students’ “worldview or specific behaviors—at least in the
course of a single semester.” This finding, however, came with a caveat
that should be a reminder to all who doubt the efficacy of literary journal-
ism to effect social change. As Lewis and Neely observe, “changes in
worldview are difficult, if not impossible, to observe.” They tend to evolve
slowly over time and do not necessarily give way to actions which support
social justice causes which, as the authors also note, “demand a higher
degree of individual initiative than attitudinal changes, as well as direct
opportunities for involvement.”
And yet, the chapters in this volume show that literary journalism, with
all of its strengths and its commendable track record, does have something
valuable to contribute. Change rarely happens because of one story, no
matter how dramatic and revelatory. Rather, as the work of many of the
writers here demonstrate, it is usually incremental, the result of a sustained
chipping away at a problem, sometimes over many years. But change can,
and does, happen. Literary journalism’s unique combination of rigorous
reporting with the storytelling techniques of literature allows journalists
and writers to deliver in a nuanced way the facts of the complex lives of the
marginalized and disenfranchised. And it often goes further, achieving an
empathic engagement with those lives, and creating opportunities to
change attitudes and lived realities. This collection, in bringing to light
many writers around the world whose work responds to disadvantage,
hopes to provide encouragement to journalists aspiring to challenge what
Rob Nixon has called the “slow violence” of the forces responsible for
social injustice.
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by William E. Dow and Roberta S. Maguire, 263. New York: Routledge, 2020.
Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and Ethics of Knowing. Oxford:
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Greenberg, Susan. “Slow Journalism,” Prospect, February 2007. https://www.
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PART I
Approach: An Appetite for Justice

CHAPTER 2
“Throw the Rich Woman’s Castoffs Back

in Her Face”: Moa Martinson’s Rejection
of Charity in Favour of Class-Based Solidarity
Anna Hoyles
Introduction
“Real people,” wrote the Swedish writer Moa Martinson (1890–1964), in
1928, “hate philanthropy!”1 Her lifelong antipathy towards charity was, as
she once told Swedish Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson, based on “prac-
tical experience” and this was reinforced by political belief.2 The influence
of socialist thinkers, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and, above all,
Peter Kropotkin all emerge in her writing on the subject. The concept of
1
Helga, “Filantropi.”
2
Martinson, “Moas Stugfönster.”
A. Hoyles (*)
University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2022
R. Alexander, W. McDonald (eds.), Literary Journalism and Social
Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89420-7_2
22 A. HOYLES
charity appears in at least sixteen of Martinson’s articles.3 A number of the

articles are fictional; others relay what Martinson claims are true events.
Some merely mention charity in passing, while others take it as their sub-
ject and have titles like “Philanthropy” and “Compassion.” The earliest is
from 1923 and the latest is from 1953. It is clear that “philanthropy”
(filantropi), which she used interchangeably with the words “compassion”
(barmhärtighet) and “charity” (välgörenhet), was a topic about which
Martinson felt consistently deeply. In Swedish, philanthropy is synony-
mous with charity: according to the Swedish National Encyclopaedia, they
simply mean “actions intended to unselfishly help people in need.”4 This
chapter establishes some of Martinson’s objections to charity (for reasons
of space not all can be covered) and the alternatives she proposed, while
highlighting the literary journalism tropes she utilised to express her ideas.
Moa Martinson is primarily seen as a novelist of the proletarian or
workers’ school of literature. Although both earlier and later writers are
included in the canon, depictions of the proletarian school have focused
on its “golden age” (Nilsson 2017, 103), which followed the emergence
of a group of young male writers at the end of the 1920s, all from poor
backgrounds and lacking formal education. These included Ivar
Lo-Johansson, Artur Lundkvist, Jan Fridegård and Harry Martinson, who
for the first time substantively brought to the fore the experiences of
Sweden’s working-class men. Moa Martinson stands out as the only female
member of the group. Many of her twenty books, published between
1933 and 1959, are novels where she depicts working-class women’s lives
with an honesty, in relation to both sexuality and poverty, that met with
critical opprobrium at the time. Prior to her first novel Martinson also
wrote over 200 articles, letters, poems and reviews in activist (socialist and
feminist) and local press. Subsequently, she published less frequently, but
still produced over 100 further pieces of newspaper writing. Martinson’s
journalism has not previously been translated into English (all translations
here are the chapter author’s own) and has not until now been recognised
as literary journalism.
Literary journalism is frequently described as factual writing that reads
like a novel or short story, with narrative and description taking centre
3
Martinson was born Helga Swartz and did not become Moa Martinson until her late
thirties. To avoid confusion she is referred to throughout this chapter as Moa Martinson.
However, many of the references are in her original name.
4
Nationalencyklopedin, 226.
2 “THROW THE RICH WOMAN’S CASTOFFS BACK IN HER FACE”: MOA… 23
stage.5 Susan Greenberg claims that “If there is a single thing that distin-
guishes literary journalism from other forms of reporting it is the use of
narrative rather than expository prose.”6 Common tropes within literary
journalism are: the recreation of scenes that the journalist has experienced
first-hand, the use of dialogue to show the journalist’s accuracy and to
establish character, the employment of the third person (treating subjects
as personas in a novel), and the use of status details to explore character.7
The collection of such an extensive amount of information requires that
the journalists immerse themselves in the world of their subject. The detail
provided by this and the presence of a first-person narrator are used to
provide authority in the writing.8 The frequent presence of a narrator also
entails a subjectivity in the writing. Literary journalism is usually written
from a specific point of view, or views.
A self-taught journalist, Martinson’s newspaper work is often highly
autobiographical reflecting her life, not only as a mother of five living in
poverty but also as a political activist. She was a member of the syndicalist
trade union, Sveriges Arbetares Central Organisation (SAC), and appeared
frequently in its newspaper, Arbetaren (the Worker). Martinson wrote both
for and on behalf of her working-class peers, using her personal experi-
ences as political authority. She bore witness to the poverty and injustice
surrounding her (affecting her own family but also her friends and neigh-
bours) and was unapologetically subjective.
Although some of Martinson’s writing is almost a century old, many of
her arguments are almost identical to those found in literary journalism
discussing social justice today, for instance, in relation to food banks.9 This
chapter defines social justice as a belief in fairness in society, in that every-
body deserves equal access to social, political and economic rights and
opportunities. At first it seems as though charity may be complementary
to social justice; however, the two are often seen as each other’s antithe-
sis.10 Martinson certainly saw them as such.
5
Wolfe, “New Journalism,” 13.
6
Greenberg, “Ethics,” 517.
7
Wolfe, “New Journalism.”
8
Kramer, “Breakable Rules,” 29.
9
Greenberg et al., “Food Pantries;” Garthwaite, “Stigma.”
10
Hankela, “There is a Reason”; O’Boyle, “On Justice”; Smith-Carrier, “Charity isn’t just.”
24 A. HOYLES
Literary Journalism on the Side of the Oppressed

John Hartsock points out that literary journalism, as opposed to conven-
tional news journalism, “attempts to engage in an exchange of ‘subjectivi-
ties,’ or at least tries to narrow the distance between subject and object in
an empathetic engagement.”11 In doing so it “sparks our emotions” and
elicits our sympathy for its subjects.12 This is an aspect frequently used by
literary journalists as a weapon in the battle for social justice. According to
Kevin Kerrane, Victorian literary journalists such as Charles Dickens and
Henry Mayhew chose to use literary tropes less for artistic reasons than
because of a “sense of moral or political urgency: a determination to dra-
matise the reality of poverty, prostitution, and prejudice.”13 Martinson
therefore is not alone in utilising literary journalism in the cause of social
activism. There has been a plentiful supply of both male and female writers
internationally who have placed themselves on the side of the oppressed
and found the techniques of literary journalism to be the most effective
way of creating engagement with their causes. Yet, in one respect,
Martinson is unusual: many other writers have identified with and written
in support of the poor, but Martinson writes as someone deeply affected
by poverty herself and therefore able to give an authentic and non-
patronising account of its effects and also those of charity. In doing so she
does not solely wish to arouse pity and compassion, but she also calls for
justice and solidarity.
Charity’s Humiliation of the Poor

The article “Prostinnan’s välgörenhet” (“The Dean’s Wife”) (1924)
establishes Martinson’s visceral dislike of charity early on in her writing
career. In it, she combines her personal experience with her storytelling
expertise to create a vivid piece of literary journalism, bringing to the fore
the arrogance, humiliation and anger she connects with philanthropy. In
her first sentences, Martinson sets the scene by providing journalistic
detail, ensuring that we are aware of the veracity of the facts—we find out
the weather and, to a certain degree, the date:
11
Hartsock, “Aesthetics,” 36.
12
Hartsock, 20.
13
Kerrane, “Making Facts Dance,” 17.
It was two days before Christmas Eve 192… The rain fell steadily and the
snow was melting. I was in the most miserable mood for I had a heavy load
on my kick-sled, there was mainly just gravel on the road, and I was aware
that my funds fell far short of what was needed. I stepped into a shop in the
station community to get something I had forgotten when I made the other
simple Christmas purchases.14
The paragraph is subjective, full of personal facts and written in an idio-

syncratic manner, but it is effective. Even today many will recognise them-
selves in the depiction of being short of money, forgetting a purchase and
having heavy bags to carry. For readers who have ever used a kick-sled (still
common in Scandinavia), the portrayal of melted snow, gravel and a
weighty burden is particularly evocative; getting home under those cir-
cumstances would be difficult.
We are explicitly told the author’s mood but are given enough informa-
tion even without this to understand that she is not happy. The article also
provides a historical picture, giving us an insight into a life lived in the
country, where the nearest shops are those that have sprung up around the
rural railway station and where there is neither enough money for
Christmas nor for adequate transportation. Inside the shop, Martinson
finds a boy waiting to be served and a hyper-elegant woman. Her opinion
of the woman, the dean’s wife, is apparent from the beginning: “The boy
and I stood waiting for the lady to finish her countless purchases. Finally,
the talking and the criticisms were at an end, but then it came to pass that
madam had been given too many packages that ‘absolutely’ had to be
taken home straightaway, and her eyes fell on the lad.”15
It is evident already that the hyper-elegant woman is wealthy and selfish.
The word “madam” denotes both her class status and her attitude; it
becomes a derogatory word. She is charmingly patronising to the boy.
The dean’s wife uses the diminutive “little friend” as a noun for the boy
and tells him that she will tip him if he carries her packages to her home.
The boy would clearly prefer not to but takes a couple of parcels. The
woman gracefully protests that she has no wish to coerce him to assist her
and will carry them herself. However, the shopkeeper intervenes, telling
the boy to obey, and receives a gracious nod from the dean’s wife in return.
The scene in the shop becomes a microcosm of the class system—the
14
Helga, “Prostinnan.”
15
Helga.
26 A. HOYLES
dean’s wife is, in this community, close to the summit of the pyramid of
rank, while the boy, by virtue of his lack of wealth and age, is at the bot-
tom. The shopkeeper facilitates the woman’s power and is himself reliant
upon it. He aligns himself with her; Martinson identifies with the boy.
The article is not simply a class polemic: Martinson’s aim is to engage
the reader and she injects humour and a historical reference into the arti-
cle. When the boy is admonished by the shopkeeper, Martinson writes, he
“stood there as a personification of Bishop Brask’s clause, ‘To this I have
been forced and compelled’, took another couple of parcels and trudged
outside.”16 Hans Brask was a popular historical figure who, according to
legend, when forced to sign a decree with which he disagreed, hid a note
under his seal distancing himself from the act. In comparing the little boy
to Brask, one of the nation’s great historical figures, Martinson employs
incongruity humour—the disparity highlighted by the juxtaposition is so
stark as to be absurd.
Once outside the shop, and the shopkeeper’s hearing, the dean’s wife
becomes less charming towards the boy. Martinson justifies being able to
recount this conversation word for word by telling us: “Because of having
to stop and tie something onto my kick-sled, I heard the following.”17 By
informing us of this, she ensures that we do not question her role in the
story, nor the veracity of the dialogue. Martinson hears the dean’s wife
upbraiding the boy for “showing temper” in the shop—a disappointment
after all the times she has helped his family. She asks if they have received
their Christmas basket yet. Here Martinson uses the literary trope of relay-
ing the dialogue verbatim which adds to the intensity of the telling.
“Yes”, said the boy in a low voice.

“Well then, you will have a little for Christmas then?”
“Yeees”, said the boy equally quietly.
“You should say, ‘yes, thank you,’” said the dean’s wife, “and you should
raise your cap.”18
The words of the dean’s wife are too much for Martinson, who feels the
humiliation of the boy as if to her own family: “In a moment I had an
inner vision of one of my own little ones standing humbly in front of some
16
Helga.
17
Helga.
18
Helga.
‘fine’ haughty dean’s wife thanking her for alms.”19 The injustice of the
boy’s mortification is compounded by the fact that, as Martinson makes
clear, he is from the “respectable poor”—he was “thin and blue with cold,
but neat.”20 He comes from a large family, and “the dean’s wife knew as
well as I did, that unemployment had made the distress of the family
great.” Martinson is making sure that there can be no ambivalence in our
feelings for the boy. He is tidy despite his poverty, and due to the passive
voice in the scene’s description, unemployment can be viewed as a natural
disaster that has come upon his home, with no blame attached to his
parents.
As a writer of the everyday, Martinson’s position was unusual. She
chronicled a world that was close to her and consequently knew facts an
outside journalist would not. In this piece, she can therefore tell the reader
that although the dean’s wife implies that it is largely thanks to her that the
family has not starved, in reality she has not personally given them “one
penny, or one loaf of bread.”21 Martinson makes it clear the poor relief the
family has received has been that which they were entitled to from the
council, as opposed to being the gift of the dean’s wife. The knowledge of
this, Martinson writes, makes her “absolutely furious and as I mentioned
I wasn’t in the best of moods before.”22 Here, she establishes a connection
with the beginning of the article; the situation is put into context once
again and personalised. She storms up to the woman and shouts at her,
asking her if she realises how tactless and cruel she is being. “No, you
don’t do you?” Martinson asks rhetorically. “And you who are called edu-
cated and a dean’s wife. I am glad to be called uneducated, if your behav-
ior is educated.”23 Here, Martinson’s weaknesses become her strengths:
the shame she feels about her lack of schooling, which she expressed in an
article in 1942 as a sense of having been robbed,24 dissipates in a context
where experience and practical knowledge of the boy’s situation are more
important.
The reaction to Martinson’s tirade is nonverbal: “the dean’s wife waved
her hands to fend off the accusations and drew in her breath but did not
19
Helga.
20
Helga.
21
Helga.
22
Helga.
23
Helga.
24
Martinson, “…Oreserverade,” 16–17.
28 A. HOYLES
say anything. The boy looked terrified.”25 These are details we would not
find in a conventional newspaper article but are literary scene-setters. It is
also clear that the boy and Martinson are acting as separate entities. There
is no political idealisation of the situation; they have not united in the class
struggle against the dean’s wife, nor is the child grateful for Martinson’s
intervention. This does not prevent her becoming enraged.
I wound myself up more and more. All the shabby, petty charity I had seen
after the war, in a country where so much had been earned during the seven
years! All this rubbish about compassion in order to make the masses thank-
ful and soft, went to my head and made me hold a real doomsday sermon
[…] I’m glad you’re as tactless as you are. Remember that boy will become
a man and you may be sure that no matter how old the boy becomes he will
always remember that a dean’s wife two days before Christmas forced him
to thank her for the poor aid, which his parents were obliged to accept. This
memory will make him have no love for the church! Therefore, Madam
Dean, I am happy you behaved so boorishly.26
The indignity and shame caused by such charity were a reality to

Martinson, but she would also have been able to draw on the work of writ-
ers she admired for confirmation of her own experiences. These included
Engels and Oscar Wilde who both wrote of the systematic degradation
inflicted on the poor by charity.27 It is also a topic that remains pertinent
in social justice discourse today.28 Almost thirty years after the publication
of “The dean’s wife,” the sense of injustice remained fresh for Martinson,
as she made a similar point about charity to the Prime Minister in 1953.
She told him that “individual philanthropy where the delinquent has to
stand and thank strangers for a hamper, or a five kronor piece, is some-
thing I am totally against.”29 The Prime Minister felt that if people wanted,
and could afford, to give away money, that was their concern, but
Martinson was sterner. “I pointed out that it wasn’t good for a person’s
character to take charity (state welfare is never charity)”; instead she called
for a redistribution of resources.30
25
26
Helga.
27
Engels, Working Class, 276–277; Wilde, Letters and Essays, 336.
28
Garthwaite, “Stigma.”
29
Martinson, “Moas stugfönster.”
30
Martinson.
Following her outburst towards the dean’s wife, Martinson abruptly

takes her sled and leaves, feeling “a little embarrassed […] but with a cer-
tain satisfaction nonetheless.”31 She finishes this section of the article with
humour, saying: “The dean’s wife must have called down the wrath of
God upon me.”32 Martinson explains that on the way home from the shop
she takes a shortcut across the frozen lake, forgetting that the rain has
caused a thaw she falls through a hole in the ice. However, she manages to
climb out and her sled with all the Christmas packages is safe, “so perhaps
God was fed up with silly prayers from conceited, Christian ladies.”33 This
should be the end of the story. With her political point, as an activist writer
made, Martinson’s humorous anecdote provides a rounded finish that
places the piece of writing, with its use of narrative, dialogue and subjec-
tive voice, within the category of literary journalism. This, however, is
only half the article.
The remaining section is a description of an oral exam at the village
school the following summer, where both Martinson and the dean’s wife
are present. After describing the classroom, the teacher’s pedagogy and
the children, Martinson quotes three verses of a poem by Carl Snoilsky,
recited by a little girl at the event. In “The serving brother,” the poet
emphasises the wealthy’s dependence on the working class for their quality
of life.34 He recommends that they help the poor, not by putting coins in
their hands but by seeing them as brothers. The anecdote of the school-
room allows Martinson to introduce Snoilsky as an authority who then
presents the anarchist argument of mutual aid. This was a concept formu-
lated by Kropotkin, who posited that cooperation and not competition is
the driving force in evolution. Providing reciprocal practical support for
each other is part of the natural order of things, to the extent that it
becomes a right. He contrasts this “mutual aid which every savage consid-
ers as due to his kinsman” with the injustice of philanthropy, which under
the influence of the church “implies a certain superiority of the giver upon
the receiver.”35 Martinson had read Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread at the
age of eighteen and this had a lifelong influence on her. Snoilsky’s work,
therefore, reinforces and legitimises Martinson’s own response to charity.
31
32
Helga.
33
Helga.
34
Snoilsky, Samlade Dikter, 268–270.
35
Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 222.
30 A. HOYLES
The poem also provides a denouement to the story. Addressing the

little girl, Martinson asserts that her declamation affected everyone in the
classroom; above all, however, “you had achieved redress for a little, poor,
frozen boy, for I saw big tears roll down Madam Dean’s cheeks.”36
Martinson here not only draws attention to the injustices caused by pov-
erty and the arguments against charity but also applies one of the basic
techniques of literary journalism as defined by Walt Harrington, to the
article. She “posits a problem, dilemma or tension that will be resolved or
relieved by the end of the story, with a resultant change—in our main
subject or subjects.”37 Martinson provides the boy with (moral) redress
through the dean’s wife’s tears and allows the latter redemption. In doing
so she prioritises the narrative at the cost of diluting her own politi-
cal point.
“The Dean’s Wife” highlights Martinson’s fondness for a satisfying
narrative structure, but it also provides an insight into several of Martinson’s
objections to charity. Firstly, there is the humiliation of the receiver, which
she feels on a deeply personal level—the boy reminds her of her own chil-
dren. Secondly, there are political connotations—“All this rubbish about
compassion in order to make the masses thankful and soft.”38 Thirdly,
there is the effect on the giver—the dean’s wife humiliates the boy and yet
feels she has done something requiring thanks and repayment.
Co-opting the Poor

In “The Dean’s Wife,” Martinson refers to the poverty that existed fol-
lowing the Great War and the petty charity and talk of compassion that she
felt was being used as a sop to keep the masses quiet. That charity was used
in this way was a common complaint within the labour movement. In The
Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels accuse philanthropists of giving
“in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society” while
thirty years earlier William Cobbett, one of Marx’s influences, warned
against the “consolation” of the poor through charitable and other
works.39 Charity was thus primarily a method in which social injustice was
36
37
Harrington, Intimate Journalism, xxi.
38
39
Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 46; Cobbett cited in Williams, Culture and
Society, 34.
made palatable to the poor and a way of preventing social change. Cobbett
argued that such a system also “necessarily implies interference on one
side, and dependence on the other.”40
Cobbett’s argument was one Martinson employed when she continued
a thread started by the editor of Arbetaren’s woman’s page, Elise Ottesen-
Jensen (Ottar) in 1923. Ottar had written an article titled “Some
Confirmation Reflections” (“Några konfirmations betraktelser”) where
she vehemently questioned why working-class mothers confirmed their
children into the church.41 In doing so, she contended, they were not only
spending a considerable amount of money that they could not afford but
also voluntarily bestowing power on the church—an institution they were
otherwise, at best, indifferent to. Ottar consequently suggested to her
readers that “[Y]ou stop this religious hypocrisy, that at least those of you
who are not yourselves religious, assign to your children. Show them that
you make use of the freedoms that already exist for the people. Show that
you are not monkeys, but independently thinking and acting humans!”42
As an upper-middle-class vicar’s daughter, Ottar risked alienating her
readers by making somewhat highhanded assumptions. In her reply to the
editor, Martinson admonishes the readers less while making similar
points.43 She describes working-class agricultural life with which she is
familiar. She explains that in the countryside, it is generally the vicar’s wife
who sees to it that the children of the poor become confirmed “and the
worker’s wife thanks her, curtseys and accepts, overwhelmed by the
kindness.”44 This very limited beneficence, “alms” or a “discarded rag,”
combined with the “honor” of being visited by a “fine” lady or gentle-
man, Martinson claims in a humorous, slightly mocking voice, quite goes
to the recipient’s head: “Yes, and a worker’s wife or two has felt herself so
exalted, after being spoken to in a familiar way by the grand lady (whose
husband would love to pay his workers more, if only times weren’t so
bad!), that she has almost thought of breaking off her acquaintanceship
with her common neighbors.”45
Tinne Vammen argues that the semi-familial attitude of middle-class
women towards their servants, and the women outside their homes on
40
Cobbett cited in Williams
41
Ottar, “Betraktelser.”
42
Ottar.
43
Helga. “Flera.”
44
Helga.
45
Helga.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
espero sino de la muerte que
dellos fue la causa. Y por tanto no
te deues fatigar en dar consejo a
quien no puedes dar socorro. E
no quieras ver más de mi daño,
sino que en sola la muerte está su
remedio. Verdad es que tu
intencion fue sana, mas tu
parecer es falso, pensando que
con hazer mayor tu mal que el
mio, me ponias en él algun
consuelo, y es al contrario; antes
me le quitas viendo que siendo el
tuyo tan pequeño te tenga tan
cegado que no conozcas la clara
differencia que hay del vno al
otro. Quieres tú hazer yguales tus
desseos e sospiros que de sola
passion de bien querer con tus
quexas nacen, con mis lagrimas
que la muerte de aquella por
quien yo alegre biuia lo causa.
¡Qué engaño recibes tan grande
queriendo ygualar con las
angustias mortales los
pensamientos ó congoxas
veniales! Por mi amor, que pues
bien me quieres, mal no me trates
tornando á enojarme con otra
semejante embaxada que tales
razones la acompañen. En
especial queriéndome dar a
entender que mis lastimas con el
tienpo y la razon se harán
menores, pues que es por el
contrario, que ante la razon, como
es razon, las hará siempre
mayores y el tiempo quanto mas
se alargará mas las hará alargar.
Porque quantos mas mis dias
fuesen pues que en todos y en
cada vno he de contino de sentir
nuevos e muchos dolores del bien
que he perdido, más seran las
penas que en ellos sentire. De
manera que quanto mas presto mi
vida se acabe tanto mas presto mi
mal se acabará, e quanto más
durare por el contrario. E si
quieres saber más claras razones
por do conozcas quanto mi
desuentura es mayor que la tuya,
escriueme las causas della e yo
te mostraré las de mi daño e assi
vernás en el verdadero
conocimiento de todo; y porque
conozcas della parte, glosa este
villancico y verlo has.
Si el remedio de mis males

es morir,
¿que vida me es el biuir?
Si en el mal de mi querella
no hay remedio sin la muerte,
claro está que desta suerte
la vicia es ocasion della,
pues si está el bien en
perdella
con morir,
todo el daño está en biuir.
LO QUE FLAMIANO HIZO

DESPUES DE HAUER OYDO Á
FELISEL E LEIDA LA CARTA
Muy atentamente Flamiano
escuchó todas las cosas que
Felisel le contó y no podia menos
hazer de no derramar infinitas
lagrimas acompañadas de
muchos sospiros, e despues de
hauerle oydo començo a leer la
carta, e leyda como dicho es,
estuvo una pieça callando sin
ninguna cosa dezir; e passado un
poco espacio tornó a preguntar a
Felisel muchas cosas por menudo
particularmente, de las quales
cosas siendo muy bien de todas
informado, publicando lo mucho
que los males de Basquiran le
dolian, començo assi á dezir:
¡Por quantas vias e maneras en
esta misera vida los pesares e
desuenturas á los humanos
saltean de impensadas congoxas,
e aquellos más de perder estan
seguros que menos tienen que
perder puedan y en aquellos
menos los muy lastimados golpes
de la manzilla lastiman que más
gruesso o rudo el entendimiento
para sentirlo tienen! De manera
que en esta vida trabajosa no se
puede reposar ninguno del miedo
del perder sino con el misero
defeto de la pobreza, nin se
puede alcançar de carecer de no
doler sino con la mengua del
saber, e assi los que no tienen
fatigas con la pena del dessear,
los que algo posseen
atormentados del temor de
perder, los de agudo ingenio
lastimados con las vexaciones de
los acontecimientos desastrados,
los rusticos o grosseros
aborrecidos por su defecto, a los
vnos e a los otros nunca jamas
les falta lugar por do el mal entre.
De manera que biuir no se puede
por ninguna via sin penar. Al fin
todos desseamos alcançar las
prosperas vanidades desta que
llamamos fortuna e con este
desseo cegamos nuestro
entendimiento; ella con lo que nos
da turba nuestro juyzio; en
conclusion, quien menos della
alcança más sin remedio bive.
Pues quien no teme no pena,
quien pena no siente contento se
halla, quien contento viue siempre
está alegre, pues do está alegria
no hay tristeza, e quien no está
triste siempre con el plazer rie e
no llora. Como por el contrario
agora este sin ventura Vasquiran
e yo hazemos. El con lo que ha
perdido sin remedio de cobrarlo,
yo con lo que desseo sin
esperança de alcançarlo,
nuestros dias siempre en lagrimas
veremos consumir assi como
hazemos.
Acabado su razonamiento se
voluio a Felisel e dixole: Por mi
amor, que no ayas en fatiga tornar
a ver a tu amigo e mi hermano
Vasquiran, y lleuarle has vna carta
mia, porque aunque con las
razones della enojo reciba, más
vale que mi enojo le ocupe el
tiempo que no que el
pensamiento del suyo le trastorne
el juyzio con su dolor, como
podria acontecer, e aun a mí el
mio.
E ante que mi carta le des le dirás
de parte mia que aunque mis
embaxadas e cartas alguna
importunidad le den, más pesar e
fatiga siento yo de la de la que el
dolor a él le da, e que me parece
vna cosa que le deue a él
contecer assi como a mí, que el
platicar en las cosas de mi
passion tantas passiones me trae
a la memoria que de allí dan en el
pensamiento; del pensamiento
dan en el coraçon, llegados alli la
calor de su fuego haze destilar en
lagrimas por los ojos el pesar y en
sospiros por la boca las
congoxas. E assi andando de la
vna a la otra parte no dexan a sus
ponçoñas que en las entrañas se
reparen porque de tristeza las
ahogan, porque como sabe, dulce
compañia es á los atribulados
estas dos cosas, y que juzgue de
mi voluntad lo que deue y no lo
que le parece, e que ya sabe que
el buen marinero en la mayor
fortuna en medio del golfo busca
saluacion y en la tierra el mayor
peligro. E que assi yo en el golfo
de sus fortunas y en el de las
mias mejor podremos saluarnos
nauegando que no surgendo
sobre las ancoras de la
desesperacion en el puerto de los
agenos plazeres con nuestras
tristezas.
Pues recebida la carta Felisel y
todo su razonamiento bien
entendido, otro dia se partio. E
llegado á Felernisa halló que ya
Vasquiran a la ciudad era tornado,
el qual con mucho amor aunque
con poca alegria lo recibio.
Apeado que fue començaron
passeandose por vnos corredores
que sobre la huerta salian, a
hablar de muchas cosas entre las
quales Felisel le contó todo lo que
en las justas passadas hauia
passado. E despues de mucho
hauer los dos razonado a cenar
se retraxeron. E otro dia de
mañana hauiendo oydo missa
Vasquiran caualgó e Felisel con él
e salidos fuera de la ciudad
tornaron de nueuo al mesmo
razonamiento, en el qual le contó
todo lo que de palabra su amo le
hauia encomendado, y en el fin le
dió su carta, la qual assi dezia.
CARTA DE FLAMIANO Á
VASQUIRAN EN RESPUESTA
DE LA SUYA
Basquiran, recebida que houe tu
carta e leyda, considerando el
amor que te tengo y la pena que
en ti conozco, aunque mi passion
me tiene atribulado vine en
conocimiento del engaño que con
el pesar recibes, de manera que
me ha sido forçado vsar contigo
tres cosas en mi carta. La primera
será consolarte de tu mal. La
segunda sanamente como amigo,
de tu demasiado sentimiento
reprehenderte e de los estremos
que con él hazes. La otra será
desengañarte del engaño que
recibes de ti mesmo en lo que
sientes, no conociendo la ventaja
que le haze lo que siento. E pues
eres discreto juzga mi intencion
que es sin malicia, y conoceras tu
yra ser demasiada. E has de
saber que a darte consuelo,
piedad me mueue; a reprehender
tu flaqueza, amistad me obliga; a
contradezirte me combida e aun
me costriñe la razon. Una cosa te
ruego, que no te desuies con la
passion de la verdad, porque más
presto vengas en conocimiento
della. E assi digo que para tu
consuelo deues mirar lo primero,
como todos somos más obligados
a loar lo que Dios haze que no a
querer lo que nuestra voluntad
dessea, e que quien esto no haze
como sabes, grauemente yerra
como hazes, en especial en estas
cosas de la muerte y de la vida
cuyos terminos estan en sola su
mano y secreto determinados, ni
como vees ninguno de los
mortales puede escusarse de no
pasar por este trance. Y querrias
agora tú repunar lo que no es
possible, e assi yerras todo lo
possible. A lo que he dicho que
quiero reprehender tu demasiado
quexarte, digo que semejantes
autos a los feminiles coraçones
son atribuydos e aun assi lo
demasiado parece feo, y en los
varones, en especial como tú, son
feamente reprouados. Mucho
llorar es de niños, poco suffrir es
de hembra. Bien sé que si a otro
lo viesses hazer, lo mismo e mas
le dirias, e libre que te haya
dexado la passion en ti lo
conoceras; pues corrige por Dios
con discrecion lo que los que
como yo no te aman te afearán
con razon e algunos con malicia
te juzgarán con menoscabo de tu
honrra, que ya sabes quanto mas
que la vida e todas las otras
cosas te deue ser cara. Lo tercero
que dixe que desengañarte queria
y contradezir, por tantas partes lo
puedo hazer que no sé por qual
començar. Te quexas porque
gozauas la cosa que en el mundo
mas amauas y que la has perdido
posseyendola; ninguna cosa se
possee segura, mas pareceme a
mi que pues que gozaste no
perdiste, sino que se acabó tu
gozo. Todas las cosas han de
hauer cabo, e aun a ti del gozo te
queda la vanagloria de lo que
alcançaste y la gloria de lo que
has gozado. Por la menor cosa de
las que tú has hauido que el
encendido fuego de mi deseo
alcançasse, sola vna hora, no
pediria más bien ni temeria más
mal e daria mill vidas en cambio,
e con tal morir me contaria más
glorioso que con biuir como biuo.
Bien sabes tú quanto más cara es
la cosa desseada mayor gloria es
alcançalla, e no hay más bien en
el desseo de complirlo e complido
ningun recelo queda dél; pues
¿qué te quedaua que pedir, ni qué
tienes de que quexarte si todo lo
que dessear se pudo alcançaste y
gozaste? Quissieras que no
houiera cabo? Aqui está tu yerro;
querer lo que no puede ser,
hauiendo gozado lo que puede
ser. Yo te ruego que te acuerdes
quál cosa te daua mas pena en el
tiempo que penando amauas; el
desseo de ver el fin de tu desseo
no teniendo esperança o agora el
dolor de la memoria del plazer
pasado. Sola vna cosa te
condena a que nunca deuieras
ser triste; esta fue el dia que
alcançaste lo que agora plañes,
porque claro manifiestas en el
dolor que muestras de lo que has
perdido el gran bien de lo que
ganaste en ganarlo, porque no
pudo menos ser el plazer que es
el pesar sino ante mas. Sin
ventura yo que todos los males sé
y padezco e para ninguno de
ningun bien tengo esperança. A ti
tu ventura te endereçó a lugar
donde el sobrado plazer plañes; a
mi mi desuentura me guió a parte
donde todas las esperanças e
razones no solo de gloria me
despiden, mas aun donde con mi
pena no me dexan viuir contento.
Assi que tú plañes hauer visto de
tu bien el cabo, yo desespero de
nunca verlo en mi mal. Tú plañes
agena muerte, yo desseo la mia
como esta cancion lo muestra.
Quien viue sin esperança

de ver cabo en su querella,
¿que puede esperar enella
pues remedio no se alcança?
¿Que vida puede viuir
quien viue desesperado?
pues no espera en su cuydado
mas remedio de morir,
con el qual esta en balança
de la vida por perdella
viendo que de su querella
ningun remedio se alcança.
RESPUESTA DE VASQUIRAN Á
FELISEL
Acabada de leer Vasquiran la
carta, hauiendo yo oydo el
razonamiento de Felisel se boluió
a el e dixole: Verdaderamente,
Felisel, más descanso siento
contigo que consuelo con las
cartas que me traes, porque tu
buena criança y el amor que me
tienes, e la voluntad que te tengo,
dan causa para lo vno; lo poco
que las cartas me aprouechan
quitan el aparejo á lo otro; e assi
huelgo más de verte a ti que de
responder a quien te embia,
porque tu buen seso, mi mucho
mal, tu reposo y buena razon con
mi fatigado e lastimado hablar, tu
mucha criança con mi poca
paciencia, mejor cierto las vnas
cosas con las otras se templan
que no hazen las ansias de
Flamiano con las mias. Las suyas
baylan e cantan, las mias gimen e
lloran; al templezillo sonarán
juntas. ¡Qué ensalada se hará de
su morado y encarnado e blanco
con mi pardillo e negro e amarillo!
El entre canciones, yo tras
lamentaciones, él haciendo
cimeras para justar, yo
inuenciones para sepulturas; casi
juntos andamos, el vno cantando,
el otro llorando e los dos
sospirando; de ti me pesa que
padeces sin merecello, porque él
con su porfia de embiarte te da
trabajo, yo con mi poca alegria te
do tristeza, de manera que los
dos te damos fatiga. A la verdad
porque tú me vengas a ver so
contento de responder a él, y assi
te ruego que aunque algo lo
sientas graue, que por mi amor lo
sufras e no dexes de venir
muchas vezes con la
importunidad de sus vanidades a
ver la de mis lástimas. E por esta
vez de palabra de mi parte no le
dirás ninguna cosa, porque vna
carta que le lleuarás le dirá lo que
no querra hauer oydo quando la
aya leydo.
Pues otro dia de mañana ante
que Felisel se leuantase vino a él
el camarero de Vasquiran el qual
le dixo como dos horas antes del
dia su señor se era partido para
aquella heredad donde la primera
vez lo hauia hallado, e diole la
letra que para Flamiano hauia de
lleuar, e con ella vna ropa suya
forrada en armiños de raso
carmesí, vn sayo de terciopelo
morado con vnas faxas de raso
blanco bordadas encima dellas de
oro e de grana vnas madexas,
con vna letra que dezia:
No m'a dexado alegria

que dexe su compañia.
Diole vn jubon de brocado que
con aquel atauio Vasquiran se
hauia vestido vn dia poco ante de
la muerte de su señora
acompañandola a vnas fiestas de
las bodas del conde de Camarlina
que cerca de la ciudad de
Felernisa se heran hechas, a las
quales ella fué combidada e
nunca quiso yr sin él; e diole vna
hacanea en que él hauia
caualgado aquel dia con vna
guarnicion de terciopelo morado,
con vnas franjas de hilo de plata e
bordada con la mesma bordadura
e dixole:
Esto te ha mandado dar mi señor
para en satisffacion de alguna
parte del trabajo que passas en
venirle á ver e para en señal del
amor que te tiene e aun por
respecto de quitar el
inconueniente de ver estas ropas
porque no le traya a la memoria el
dia que se las vestio que fue el
ultimo de sus plazeres y
contentamiento. E hauiendolo
todo Felisel recebido con la carta
de Vasquiran se partio para
donde su señor estaua. Llegado a
Noplesano donde le halló,
despues de muchos
razonamientos passados le
mostró todo lo que el camarero de
Basquiran de su parte hauia
dado, e diole su carta la qual
Flamiano començo luego a leer, e
dezia en esta manera:
CARTA DE VASQUIRAN A
FLAMIANO
Si ansi como te puedo responder
e condenar tu razon pudiesse,
Flamiano, conortarme e dar
remedio á mi mal, quan presto los
dos seriamos satisffechos! A tus
consolaciones no quiero
responder pues que no me dan
consuelo; a tus reproches e
castigo, aunque á mi proposito
hazen poco, digo que no desseo
ni reprueuo lo que Dios haze e
ordena, ante por ello le doy
alabanças, pero esto no me
escusa a mi que no pueda plañir
lo que su juyzio me lastima con el
dolor que siento de lo que pierdo,
lo que si no hiziesse mostraria
menospreciar lo que él haze, o
seria juzgado por irracional. Dizes
que es fragilidad o poquedad casi
de niño o de hembra semejante
estremo. Mayor estremo seria
semejante crueldad que la que
dizes, porque si miras el estremo
de mi pérdida poco estremo es el
de mi lloro. Temes que no sea
juzgado por lo que hago, mas
temeria serlo si esso hiziesse, en
especial que ya tú me embias á
dezir que lagrimas y sospiros son
descanso de los males. Pues
¿cómo me consejas vna cosa en
tu razon y escriuesme otra
contraria en tu carta? Bien
muestras en lo que hazes lo que
dizes, que tu passion te tiene tan
desatinado que no sabes de ti
parte e quieresla saber de mi. A lo
tercero te respondo que dizes que
no perdi sino que se te figura que
se me acabó mi bien; pues tú lo
dizes ¿qué quieres que
responda? si te parece que es
pequeño mal acabarse el bien, tú
lo juzga pues que sabes que a
esta razon el Dante respondió:
Quien ha perdido el bien...
Dizes que me deue bastar la
vanagloria de lo que alcancé e la
gloria de que gozé; dizes verdad
que estas me bastan para sentir
lo que yo siento e mucho más,
porque si quanto la gloria de lo
ganado fue grande y el dolor de
hauerlo perdido fuesse ygual, no
bastaria mi juyzio a sofrirlo como
el tuyo no basta a entenderlo.
Dizes que por la menor cosa de
las que yo gozé que tu
alcançasses, contento darias mill
vidas, tú darias mill por hauerlo
¿e no quieres que pierda yo vna
por perderlo? Dizes que no hay
más bien en el desseo de
complirlo; dizes verdad; mas
tampoco no hay mayor mal en el
bien que perderlo; dizes que
alcancé todo lo que se pudo
dessear, también perdi todo lo
que se pudo recelar; e dizes que
gozé de lo possible, tambien peno
lo possible. Dizes que me
acuerde del tiempo que penando
desseaua sin esperança; ¿no te
parece que peno agora con
menos esperança? pues si
entonce me penaua la poca
esperança del desseo, ¿no me
dará más pena agora la
desesperación de no cobrar lo
que he perdido? Quexaste que
penas sin esperança e que
desesperas della; si no esperas lo
que ganar se puede no recelarás
perderlo como yo hize; no deuio
ser tuya la letra que dixo: todo es
poco la possible. Pones por
dificultad los merecimientos e
virtudes e noblezas de Belisena,
que son las cosas que
contentamiento te deuen dar. Esto
es querer con el defecto de tus
flaquezas dar culpa á tus virtudes.
E señalaslo en vna cosa que
dizes: que por sola vna hora que
gozasses darias mill vidas; más
razon seria ofrecerlas porque ella
viuiesse mill años como es razon.
No te oya nadie tal razon; que
parece que desseas poco, o
mereces poco, o tienes tu desseo
en menos, porque la cosa cara
ante de hauerse dessea
alcançarse, despues de hauida
dessease posseer, de manera
que nunca el deseo pierde su
oficio. Pluguiera a Dios que sin
alcançar lo que he perdido,
perdiera yo la vida, porque ella
viniera e yo no gozara, porque
agora no plañera, o que de nueuo
pudiesse con la que me queda
conprar la que ella perdio, que
con esto seria mas contento que
con viuir como viuo, como esta
cancion mia te mostrará.
Yo no hallo a mi passion
comienço, cabo ni medio,
ni descanso, ni razon,
ni esperança, ni remedio
Es tanta mi desuentura,
tan cruel, tan sin medida,
qu'en la muerte ni'n la vida
no s'acaba mi tristura,
ni el seso ni la razon
no le pueden hallar medio,
ni tiene consolacion
ni esperança ni remedio.
FLAMIANO A FELISEL
Leyda que houo Flamiano la letra
mandó llamar a Felisel e dixole.
Pareceme que segun Vasquiran e
yo con nuestras passiones te
tratamos que con mas razon te
podras tu quexar de nosotros que
nosotros de nuestras quexas, o
mejor será que te consolemos de
la fatiga que te damos que no tú a
nosotros de lo que sentimos. Esto
te digo porque agora que hauias
menester descansar con algun
reposo del trabajo que has
passado en estos caminos que
has hecho, te tengo aparejado de
nueuo otro trabajo en que
descanses. Esto es que yo he
sabido que la señora duquesa va
a caça la semana que viene con
otras muchas señoras e damas
que para ello tiene combidadas;
ya vees qué jornada es para mi,
pues que mi señora Belisena va
allá. Es menester que tomes por
descanso esta fatiga; da recaudo
a mi necessidad con tu diligencia,
e mañana daras orden como se
haga para mi vn sayo e una capa,
e librea para estos moços e pajes
de las colores que te dare en vn
memorial, e que hagas adereçar
vn par de camas de campo e mis
tiendas e algunas confituras e
todas las cosas que te pareceran
que son necesarias para tal
menester, porque su señoria
estara allá toda la semana y es
necessario que para estos
galanes que alla yran vayas bien
proueydo, en especial de cosas
de colacion; por causa de las
damas te prouee sobre todo. Assi
que reposa esta noche y de
mañana sey comigo e acabarte
he de dar la informacion de lo que
has de hazer.
AQUI EL AUCTOR CUENTA LO
QUE FELISEL OTRO DIA
PUSO EN ORDEN, E TODOS
LOS ATAUIOS DE LAS
DAMAS E CAUALLEROS
QUE A LA CAÇA FUERON, E
ALGUNAS COSAS QUE EN
ELLAS SE SIGUIERON
Otro dia de mañana venido a la

camara de Flamiano Felisel,
Flamiano le mandó que para el le
hiziesse hazer vn sayo de
terciopelo encarnado con vnas
faxas de raso blanco e vnos
vasariscos[286] de oro bordados
en ellas, con vna letra que
dixesse.
Lo que este liaze hazeys

a quantos veys.
E dixole mas. Harásme hazer vna

capa de paño amarillo con vnas
tiras de raso blanco y encarnado
antorchadas vnas con otras de
tres en tres tiras, guarnecida toda
la capa con vna letra que diga.
Son de vuestra condicion

porque s'espere de vos
la color do van las dos.
Harás más para los pajes ropetas

de paño encarnado guarnecidas
de raso blanco, y a los moços de
espuelas vnos capotines
encarnados e la manga yzquierda
blanca; las calças la derecha
blanca y encarnada, la yzquierda
amarilla, e harás para todos
jubones de raso amarillo e en las
mangas derechas vna letra
bordada que diga.
¿Qué se puede esperar

dellas
sino lo que va con ellas?
Acabado de darle la informacion

de lo que hauia de hazer, con
mucha diligencia Felisel dio en
todo complido recaudo.
Assimesmo todas las damas e
muchos caualleros que a la caça
hauian de yr se atauiaron de la
manera que adelante vereys; e
fue assi concierto entre todas las
damas que no pudiessen
atauiarse para esta jornada sin
que cada vna llevase en las ropas
o guarniciones sus dos colores
principales, las quales en las
inuenciones se señalarán. Sabido
esto los caualleros todos se
vistieron de los colores de las
damas que seruian con alguna
otra color que les hazia al
proposito de la letra, como arriba
haueys oydo que Flamiano
añadio lo amarillo a las dos
colores de la señora Belisena.

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Literary Journalism and Social Justice

ISBN 978-3-030-89419-1 ISBN 978-3-030-89420-7 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Val Blokowski / EyeEm / Getty Images

Carolyn, William, Madeleine, and Mango

faithful companions who shared their suddenly shrunken world of 2020

Part I Approach: An Appetite for Justice 19

Part II Encounter: Engaging Subjects 67

Part III Representation: Strategies for Change 155

Part IV Response: Changing Attitudes and Prompting

Robert Alexander is Associate Professor of English at Brock University.

William E. Dow is Professor of American Literature at the Université

Anna Hoyles holds a PhD in “The Literary Journalism of Moa Martinson

Kate McQueen is a writer and a lecturer in the Writing Program at

Director of the Language School. As a research fellow at CAPP and GEA,

Table 16.1 Literary journalistic stories analyzed 247

Introduction: Literary Journalism

Robert Alexander and Willa McDonald

I have never seen a conflict between journalism and activism. As a journalist,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Literary journalism combines reportorial rigour with the sort of com-

1. Approach: the critical attitude which motivates literary journalists in

A focus on these aspects of the genre offers a framework for thinking

Part One: Approach: An Appetite for Justice

of a “realization-focused approach,” one that takes into account the

Part Two: Encounter: Engaging Subjects

were to reflect on their role in the production of these mediated represen-

feelings at the discomfort of her reluctant subject as she haltingly but

Baxter’s book-length investigative account of the 50-year battle waged

Part Three: Representation: Strategies for Change

to communicate with outside audiences to increase their awareness of

hard fact with human interest (pioneered, as Palau-Sampio notes in the

Part IV: Response: Changing Attitudes

As a number of contributors to this volume observe, the literary journal-

Approach: An Appetite for Justice

“Throw the Rich Woman’s Castoffs Back

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

charity appears in at least sixteen of Martinson’s articles.3 A number of the

Literary Journalism on the Side of the Oppressed

Charity’s Humiliation of the Poor

The paragraph is subjective, full of personal facts and written in an idio-

“Yes”, said the boy in a low voice.

The indignity and shame caused by such charity were a reality to

Following her outburst towards the dean’s wife, Martinson abruptly

The poem also provides a denouement to the story. Addressing the

Co-opting the Poor

Si el remedio de mis males

LO QUE FLAMIANO HIZO

Quien viue sin esperança

No m'a dexado alegria

Otro dia de mañana venido a la

Lo que este liaze hazeys

E dixole mas. Harásme hazer vna

Son de vuestra condicion

Harás más para los pajes ropetas

¿Qué se puede esperar

Acabado de darle la informacion

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Part I Approach: An Appetite for Justice 19

Part II Encounter: Engaging Subjects 67

Part III Representation: Strategies for Change 155

Part IV Response: Changing Attitudes and Prompting

Table 16.1 Literary journalistic stories analyzed 247