The debate over the US’s failures in Sudan, explained.
In 2019, Sudan briefly held out hope. After mass protests, the military arrested and overthrew Omar al-Bashir, who had brutally run Sudan for three decades. Though in the aftermath the military shakily shared power with civilian leaders, that ended two years later when military leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Sudanese armed forces launched a military coup. The US engaged with the new military government.
Now, al-Burhan is battling a rival military leader for control of Sudan.
Over the past month, conflict between al-Burhan’s Sudanese armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces, an irregular militia led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who goes by Hemedti, has displaced more than 730,000 people. More than 600 people have been confirmed killed and over 5,000 injured; the real numbers are likely much higher. Airstrikes and street fights in the capital of Khartoum continue, as the battling forces defy ceasefires. The conflict is “likely to be protracted as both sides believe that they can win militarily and have few incentives to come to the negotiating table,” national intelligence director Avril Haines told the Senate last week.
Now, as a humanitarian emergency looms over Sudan’s conflict, a debate has broken out as to whether the US could have handled the situation in Sudan differently — with significant implications for what comes next, and potentially big impact on US policy in Africa and the Middle East. Despite President Joe Biden’s campaign pledge to put human rights in the center of foreign policy, the Biden administration has struggled to articulate a rights-driven approach.
There are valid critiques of the US and international community’s role in Sudan since the 2019 change of power. Not enough punitive measures were taken against the generals when they massacred protesters in June 2019 or when they ousted the democratic government. The US froze $700 million of aid after the 2021 coup and worked with international partners to suspend development lending and debt relief to Sudan’s government, though the generals were not personally sanctioned.
“It was a real deep lack of imagination, and a real misunderstanding of democratic transitions in the context of Africa,” says Khalid Mustafa Medani, chair of the African studies program at McGill University. “That is not only naive in terms of how transitions work, but it’s also a misreading of the strength of civil society in Sudan.”
But it’s not clear whether the US could have done much to prevent a coup in Sudan that halted the grassroots democratic movement or ongoing violent conflict. There have been at least seven military coups, plus other coup attempts, in Africa in the past couple years. And the Sudanese generals’ crushing of protest is a mirror to the outcome in Arab states that had overthrown military leaders in the 2011 Arab Spring.
The series of events in Sudan reveals the limits of US influence. “The overall impression is this is a power struggle between Hemedti, Burhan, and their institutions that would have been very difficult for any country alone or in concert to prevent, when each sees the other as an existential threat,” says Jeffrey Feltman, who served as the US’s special envoy to the Horn of Africa from 2021 to 2022.
His successor as special envoy says that the US did everything it could have, and had only bad options, forced to make deals with a military known for its heinous crimes. “At the end of the day, we had to include the military in the dialogue,” David Satterfield, a career diplomat, told me. “And I would argue to you right now, if there is ever an opportunity to return to a path towards restoration of a civilian-led government, you’re going to have to talk to the military then as well.”
In effect, this was the argument that won the day in 2021 among the Biden administration and shapes its policies today.
“I don’t think the US played its hand really well. I also don’t think that if the US had played its hand really well, that it would have necessarily averted a disaster,” says Michael Wahid Hanna of the International Crisis Group. “It’s like nostalgia for a mythical past that never existed.”
What the US has been up to in Sudan
One of the strongest critiques of the Biden administration’s policy toward Sudan is that the country wasn’t a priority.
When the Biden administration convened a summit with African leaders in December, it did not invite Sudan, in part because of the country’s military takeover. The country’s future did not figure prominently into meetings and events at the summit, according to summaries published by the State Department. And Sudan was not a centerpiece of policy discussions during President Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia in July 2022, according to diplomatic readouts, despite the Middle East and Gulf countries in attendance at the Riyadh summit having sway in Sudan.
In December 2022, the US, United Nations, African Union, and regional groupings worked with the Sudanese military to compose a framework agreement to transition to civilian rule. The document itself, according to Crisis Group, wasn’t bad. But many of the grassroots protest groups were not involved. Critics noted how it did not offer mechanisms to hold the generals to account.
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Sudanese Presidency Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
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Sudanese Presidency Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
“We’re working incredibly hard in Sudan … with civil society to work toward a civilian transitional government,” Judd Devermont, Biden’s top Africa adviser, said in February.
But the conditions for civil war came into place during the previous US administration.
After Bashir’s overthrow, in June 2019, the Sudanese military killed more than 120 protesters and seriously injured about 900. There has been no accountability, and the Trump administration did little in response to the massacre. One of the few arenas where Trump’s team meaningfully deployed leverage against Sudan was in urging the country to normalize relations with Israel as part of Trump’s Abraham Accords effort. In exchange, the US removed Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism in December 2020.
The US’s tendency to play footsie with the Sudanese military in those two years reinforced the conditions that sparked today’s fighting.
Then the Biden administration, according to analysts, failed to put pressure on the generals in October 2021 when they detained Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok. (Though they agreed to a deal a month later that reinstalled Hamdok as the head of a “technocratic government,” Hamdok resigned in January 2022, recognizing the failure of that deal.)
Activists say the US should have quickly implemented targeted sanctions against Sudan’s military in those months. The US was even reluctant to refer to al-Burhan’s military takeover of the country as a coup.
Feltman, now a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, says that measures against Sudan’s generals after the coup should have been a priority.
“The value would have been that the Sudanese civilians would have seen our actions match our words, in terms of trying to promote a civilian-led democratic transition,” he told me. “Refraining from imposing any punitive steps on generals bought time, but it didn’t buy us the type of goodwill from them to really promote a civilian transition.”
Still, it’s not clear whether sanctions would have deterred the generals. Sudanese civil society was organized and active, but continually repressed by the military. Despite US efforts, democratic transitions in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia have been elusive.
Another key moment of US policy relates to the failure to anticipate how security sector reform — consolidating Sudan’s military and militias under one centralized umbrella, including al-Burhan and Hemedti — would invariably lead to conflict.
Such reform was necessary for Sudan’s transition to democracy, but the timeline was rushed and the process unplanned. Medani says a fatal error was “the notion that security sector reform, accountability, issues of justice, and the dismantling of a deep state could occur and be agreed upon in one year.”
The US also outsourced much of its policy to the Gulf countries like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. But the future of Sudan was never a priority for those countries, where countering Iran’s influence, the war in Yemen, and other conflicts took precedence. But by ceding much to them, the US diminished its own agency.
“The incompetence and short-sightedness was ridiculous, and also the inability and unwillingness to use American power to influence the allies of Saudi Arabia and the UAE is an astronomical mistake,” Medani told me.
The debate around the US in Sudan, explained
Just three days after the two rival military leaders began warring in Sudan, Feltman published an essay for the Washington Post arguing that the United States and its partners got burned by putting too much faith in the generals.
It was a rare, scathing criticism from a recent alumnus of the Biden administration. That has crescendoed into a growing chorus of voices saying that the US screwed up. The “United States seems curiously mute or even absent,” columnist Lydia Polgreen wrote in the New York Times. “Washington and its allies in the West have prioritized the voices of those people with guns over the people in the civilian, civil society leadership of the country,” Cameron Hudson, a former CIA analyst affiliated with the CSIS think tank, told Deutsche Welle recently.
I asked the State Department how they respond to these criticisms.
A senior official said it’s “confusing when we’re told that we haven’t been pressing the generals” and described how the US “mobilized extraordinary economic pressure on the generals” against Burhan and Hemedti when they overthrew the democratic government in 2021. The senior official said they were part of a long line of “American officials from different agencies who have stood by the side of the Sudanese people and used US power and influence to press the generals to respond to the aspirations of the Sudanese people.”
Satterfield, who served as special envoy for the Horn of Africa last year, says that the Biden administration did the best it could. “We tried all the tools available to us that were practicable and legally possible,” he told me.
Though critics of the Biden administration are arguing that the US should have taken a stronger line against the generals, that might not have been doable. Much of Hemedti’s assets are non-traditional, notably in gold. He trades billions annually with the United Arab Emirates, which would be unlikely to implement sanctions against the Sudanese warlord. “The reach of sanctions would have been meaningless. You would have antagonized both of them at a time when they were indeed interlocutors for us, the international community, and achieved zero,” Satterfield, who is now at Rice University, told me.
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AFP via Getty Images
Satterfield said he talked “continuously” with Sudan’s grassroots activist groups, “with the aim of shaping them into a coherent force that could, through and with the UN, present a unified and reasonable position.”
That is not the consensus. “Americans missed an opportunity in the sense that they thought that their pragmatism was going to be the most effective,” says Medani. “They didn’t understand that, despite the divisions within civil society, it really was the only balancing act that could actually guarantee that kind of transition.”
The lack of US leverage led the State Department to focus on engaging Sudan through partner countries and international organizations.
As for the criticism that the US paid too much attention to the generals: “Listen, if the generals don’t want there to be a transition, there’s no transition. They have the guns, they have the power,” Hanna of International Crisis Group explained.
What the US could do going forward
For now, a ceasefire is the most urgent priority. The rival factions have been negotiating in Saudi Arabia. “The two combatants still believe they can win,” Satterfield told me. “Until they have concluded that they can only lose, this is going to continue.”
On Thursday, the State Department announced it had helped broker an initial commitment between Burhan and Hemedti’s forces to allow for some humanitarian measures, like the delivery of aid, withdrawing troops from medical facilities, and allowing for burials.
“The negotiations were very tough” and a broader cessation of hostilities is “going to be a step-by-step process,” said a second senior State Department official. “We’ve also talked about steps that the civilian actors could take now to prepare to effectively participate in discussions when they go to that expanded format.”
The current Horn of Africa envoy, Mike Hammer, has been more focused on Ethiopia. This week, he travels to the West Coast to meet with leaders in the Ethiopian diaspora. Victoria Nuland, the top policy leader at the State Department, told a Senate hearing on Wednesday that the US ambassador to Sudan, John Godfrey, is “likely to play a stronger role in some of the regional diplomacy and global diplomacy that we need on Sudan.”
This division underestimates how easily Sudan could become a regional issue. “If you’ve restricted the special envoy for the Horn of Africa to just Ethiopia, you have undermined the purpose of having a special envoy that can look broadly, regionally,” Feltman told me.
In this melting pot of external interests, the concerns go far beyond Sudan and to the potential spillover effects, especially as thousands of refugees flee Sudan. As neighboring countries get involved and may pick their own winners, new regional dynamics will likely exacerbate the situation. If Egypt takes a stronger side, then Ethiopia is likely to take the opposite side, given their conflict over the new Nile dam.
Plus Hemedti may be able to reinforce his militia by drawing upon combatants from his own ethnic group across the continent and widening the conflict to the Sahel region. “So you could imagine a situation in which fighters are recruited from as far west as Mali,” political scientist Mai Hassan of the University of Michigan said. “Each new day brings us closer to these worst-case scenarios.”
Feltman says that even with the benefit of hindsight, it’s not clear whether different US policies could have changed the trajectory. “There’s an overestimation of the US role, and an underestimation of the agency of the local actors,” he told me.
But that doesn’t mean the US is powerless to influence change at this critical juncture for Sudan. “There has to be a graceful exit for these generals who have proven unable and unwilling to take the steps that would lead to fulfilling the aspiration of the Sudanese people for democratic, civilian-led government,” Feltman said. “That has to be a unified message, not from just the United States, but from neighbors.”
Could we ever really tell a new story about a very old mermaid?
Part of the issue Everything old is new again from The Highlight, Vox’s home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
“Originals,” of course, rarely are.
In 1989, a redheaded mermaid made her big-screen debut. She wanted to be part of the above-surface world, where people walk around on (what do you call ‘em?) feet, to wander free on the sand in the sunshine. She fell in love with a handsome, kind prince. After some terrifying obstacles and a near-miss, they married. Ariel got her feet.
For Disney, The Little Mermaid was a big hit, the start of a new era for the studio’s animated entertainment. She launched a hot streak that would continue through the 1990s: Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Mulan (1998), and Tarzan (1999). They were hits then, the early films in particular, and form a foundational plank in billions of lives. A tremendous percentage of people walking around on the planet can sing snatches of “Part of Your World” or “A Whole New World” or “Circle of Life” at the drop of a hat.
Yet 30 years after these films defined an era, Disney seems determined to make sure its most beloved movies — including The Little Mermaid — feel like the emblem of a world that’s run out of ideas. One by one, they’re all being remade into “live-action” versions (a misnomer, unless you believe the Lion King’s magicians taught a bunch of wildlife to talk) that are in many ways identical to the originals, except not animated. The songs are re-recorded, the parts re-cast, some new bits are added. In the new Little Mermaid, Ariel is played by the young Black actress Halle Bailey, an innovation that’s both a welcome iteration on a story and a tacit acknowledgement of the overwhelming whiteness of most of Disney’s history.
New, the films are not, mostly to their detriment: the songs are the same, the story beats maintained, because who wants to see their childhood messed with too much? Strangely, their existence could imply that the originals are unwatchable today — which, of course, is both ridiculous and vaguely insulting, and everybody knows it. They’re obviously unnecessary. Which doesn’t keep audiences from seeing them. Search the internet for “why is Disney remaking all of their films,” and the answer you get, most often, is “because they make a lot of money.”
To call the originals “originals,” though, is wrong, sort of. Each followed a familiar Disney template: an old fairy tale or folk tale with some disturbing undercurrents gets scrubbed up a bit, made suitable for children but enjoyable for adults, draped in some of the catchiest tunes you’ve ever heard and capped with an inevitable happy ending. Each is an adaptation of an older, much-told story. Beauty and the Beast draws from an 18th-century French fairy tale, and also quotes a 1946 Jean Cocteau film. Aladdin comes from One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Arabic folk tales framed by Scheherazade’s desperate attempt to stay alive. The Lion King is mostly Hamlet, but with sprinklings of the Bible and a bit of Bambi. The stories come from novels and history, mythology and pulp. They are adaptations, new iterations of old stories. Plenty about them innovates on their source material, but they aren’t “new,” not really.
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DeAgostini/Getty Images
Ariel, too, preexisted Disney, though she didn’t have a name. Back then, she was the protagonist of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 story “Den lille Havfrue,” an unnamed young mermaid who longs to be human. She wants an eternal soul, which she can only get by marrying a human. When mermaids die, they turn to sea foam, with no persisting soul. So she turns her eyes to the world above the waves, where she finds an indifferent prince who jerks her around a lot. He marries someone else, and she goes to his bed to kill him, but instead sacrifices herself, jumping into water and turning to sea foam. Her sacrifice, however, is rewarded by the spirits of the air, who give her the chance to earn her soul through performing a few centuries of good works.
It’s a far less happy tale than in Disney’s telling, its unnamed protagonist given what she wants but only through great labor. Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” is neither morality tale nor heroic romance. In fact, scholars agree it was probably Andersen’s expression of anger and longing for Edvard Collin, the son of his patron, upon the occasion of Collin’s marriage to a young woman.
Andersen said that his story had no model. That wasn’t strictly — or even kind of — true. Beings that were half-woman and half-fish had been part of Nordic ballads and folklore as early as the medieval era, when they turned up in songs and stories, sometimes as helpers to sailors. Furthermore, a few years before “The Little Mermaid,” Andersen had written another story entitled “Agnete go Havmanden” (or “Agent and the Merman”), which also turned on the matter of its subject’s immortal soul. That story, in turn, was based on a Danish folk ballad handed down across generations.
Even the idea of a mermaid is far from unique to the chillier regions of Europe. Human culture seems to have a distinct attraction to the idea of a water-dwelling spirit that’s partly woman, partly fish, often mystical or divine, frequently associated with fertility. Scholars have chronicled mentions of mermaid-like creatures in ancient written records as far back as the third century BCE. The Syriac fertility goddess Atargatis was described in the first century BCE as having “the face of a woman, and otherwise the entire body of a fish.”
Whether or not Andersen was aware, there’s a whole bevy of mermaid-adjacent creatures throughout the world’s cultures. There are the sirens of the Odyssey, who are actually half-bird, half-woman, and lure sailors to their deaths. Centuries after Homer wrote about them, they became conflated with mermaids, and are frequently depicted as having fish tails. Or there’s Mami Wata, the water goddess pervasive throughout African folklore, who brings fertility and wealth and is tied to lust. From Iran to Indonesia, fertility and prosperity are embodied in spirits and goddesses, usually with feminine attributes, that live in water.
There’s a more murderous variation, too, who seems to lurk in the background of Andersen’s story. (We might properly think of her as a very, very distant antecedent of the antagonistic mermaids in Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken.) The 16th-century physician, alchemist, and philosopher Paracelsus proposed the existence of a creature called an “undine,” one of the four elemental beings, a spirit inhabiting water. The idea gripped European imaginations. An undine can gain an immortal soul if a man falls in love with her. If he leaves her, however, she has to kill him, and she may die too. Paracelsus’s conception wasn’t invented from whole cloth; he seems to have melded the European folklore figure of Melusina, a woman who is a fish from the waist down, with a 14th-century High German novella entitled Peter von Staufenberg, in which a magical woman kills her human lover when he marries another woman. Undine is a remix.
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LMPC via Getty Images
In 1811, Baron Friederich de la Motte Fouqué made of Paracelsus’s undine a wildly popular novella, entitled Undine, the story of a water spirit who marries a knight in order to gain an immortal soul. Fouqué mixed the undine with some occult philosophy derived from Paracelsus’s other work, and also maybe an opera entitled Das Donauweibchen, or “Danube mermaid.”
Undine was such a success that it spawned dozens of derivations. Here are just a few: E.T.A. Hoffmann and Albert Lortzing both wrote librettos based on Fouqué’s novella, in 1816 and 1845, respectively — decades before, and then after, Andersen’s little mermaid entered the world. Composers flocked to the tale, with figures as eminent as Tchaikovsky taking a crack at it; he composed his own Undina opera in 1869. In 1892, Maurice Maeterlinck wrote the play Pelléas et Mélisande based partly on Undine, and Maeterlinck’s play in turn was adapted into a 1902 opera with music by Claude Debussy. A 1916 silent film explored the story. In 1958, the eminent choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton premiered a ballet entitled Ondine, based also on Fouqué, with legendary ballerina Margot Fonteyn in the lead role.
The undine — who is soft and yielding until deserted, and then dangerous beyond belief — is both sister to and antithesis of Andersen’s little mermaid, and thus a forerunner of Ariel. Yet by the time Disney’s mermaid swam on screen, the danger had been stripped away from her, handed to the sea-witch Ursula. There’s no moment when you fear that Ariel will murder Prince Eric. That won’t happen in the remake, either.
So decide for yourself. Was Andersen’s mermaid without model? Or was it a new idea? Was it a tired remix and reboot of what came before? Or is she part of a natural process, a progression borne out through time?
Furthermore, if this is simply the way of things, why does Disney’s seemingly bottomless drive to make “live-action” remakes of its animated “originals” feel so creatively bankrupt?
Do they make you, too, feel like we’re living in a culture that’s just run out of ideas?
“Every piece of art is made with reference — overt or not, conscious or not — to the traditions, practices, and possibilities of its genre, and so is in dialogue with other work,” A.O. Scott points out to me. Until recently the New York Times’s film critic, Scott has watched, and reviewed, more remixes and reboots than most people will see in a lifetime. He makes the case in his book Better Living Through Criticism that all art is, in a sense, criticism — a work that builds and comments upon other works of art — and that criticism in this sense is itself art.
“This isn’t to say that a reboot or imitation can’t be an original or critical work,” he says. The history of art is, after all, a history of remakes and reboots, paintings that take styles and symbols from the past and interpret them, sometimes in profoundly original ways. “But in those cases it’s the assertion of an individual style, the imposition of a personal will, on the material that makes the difference.”
So when Andersen uses folklore, legends, and the writings of a 16th-century alchemist to tell the story of a little mermaid, he isn’t being new. But he is being original. His personal will — in this case, thwarted desire for a man who would never love him back — is imposed on the material, shaping it into something related to but different from the stories told by Fouqué or medieval ballad singers or Homer or people in Africa and Indonesia.
Spend enough time around human stories, and you start to realize that all of culture seems suspiciously like variations on the same few ideas, archetypes, and arcs that we have, since our earliest ancestors, relied upon to make meaning from the world. Andersen is doing the same. So is Disney.
Art, however, is more than its ideas, its “content.” There’s something more than just content that attracts us to art, to stories. In the most enduring works, we are drawn to the evidence of a human’s sensibilities and proclivities and obsessions and passions exerted on the material. Yes, William Shakespeare based most of his plays on stories and histories that predated him. But the hook to see Shakespeare’s Richard III wasn’t (and still isn’t) that you want to see the familiar events of Richard’s life played out in front of you once again so you can remember them. It’s the language and the rhythm, the way the tale unspools, the themes and their interpretation. What we see on stage is a creative intelligence — that of the writer, and of the director, too. It’s the source of the old axiom: art isn’t just what it’s about, but how it’s about it.
Of course, we haven’t come to the end of new ideas. Humans are inexorably creative, coming up with new ways of looking at the world, new ways of reinventing old human obsessions, of making meaning of our lives, all the time. We are creatures who remix and invert and mash up and imagine. As a wise man once said, there is nothing new under the sun.
So why do things feel different now? Why do I expect so little from Disney’s live-action remakes? Or the latest reboot of a sitcom from the ’90s? Or the millionth installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Why does it feel like the kind of movies we were watching and celebrating in 1967 and in 1999 would be plainly impossible to make today?
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Disney
In my professional career as a critic, I’ve seen plenty of shifts in the art on offer. I’m not naive enough to adopt an end of history attitude; the market goes in cycles, and I hope the independent-film heyday of the late aughts will return some day.
That said, it’s hard to deny that the kind of movies we were watching and celebrating 30 years ago feel markedly different from the glut of familiar entertainment now. The culprit, I think, is simple: the “new” entertainment we’re offered by corporations today is filtered through an assertion of ownership over the ideas therein. We live in an entertainment culture dominated by movies and TV and video games, and who knows what else, drawn from “existing IP” by risk-averse companies. Ideas with a built-in audience and a proven market value are favored over the risk of a remix that has a different ending, a daring take, a complex or frightening element that’s not in its source material. Now, ideas are owned by a company, which gets to dictate who can do the remixing and reinventing, and along which lines, and who can sue if the fence gets jumped.
“IP is an artifact of the marketplace,” Scott says. “IP is about who has the right to exploit material, and that person is never an artist, but always a corporate entity looking to extend its brand and limit what can be done with certain images and stories, and who can do it.”
Certainly, intellectual property laws exist for a reason. They can, at their best, encourage creativity and the sharing of new ideas by allowing creators to benefit from their work. In a market-driven world, trademarks and copyrights protect creativity.
But increasingly, the new stories on our screens don’t, and can’t, become part of our commons, fertilizing a field for us to plow and plant with our own versions molded by our own creative intelligences — or at least, not if we fear a lawsuit (or fan outrage). Yes, film and television have been dominated by adaptations of stories owned by corporations since the dawn of the moving image. But there’s axiomatically more of it now than ever before. And in a world where the simple tools for creativity are easily accessible to ordinary people, not just studios who can afford expensive equipment, the lockdown on stories, and the insistence on constant regurgitation of the same stuff with the same predictable outcome, feels particularly egregious. Particularly stale. Particularly like we’ve stifled our culture into stasis.
Is it really new ideas we’re looking for? Or do we yearn for the ability to be surprised, to fall in love with new versions of old stories that speak to our time?
Human nature doesn’t change, but the world in which humans live does. And our world presents us with particular challenges and fears. Fragmentation and alienation from one another. Technological advancements that challenge what it means to be human. New ways to conceive of our identities. A looming sense that nature is not within our control.
What we’re looking and longing for when we complain of stagnancy in the culture isn’t some wholly new idea. Instead, I think, something within us wants to hear the old stories told in new ways — not just converted from hand-drawn animation to more realistic computerized versions with the same story beats and songs, but with something to say to our age.
Art like this can be scary and threatening and makes people complain when it challenges their comfort, and that’s why companies don’t do it. Don’t look to Disney for that kind of innovation, that kind of meaning-making; they seem to have abandoned it decades ago.
The art that endures out of our age, I think, will be made by people who sense how to harness the old romances and myths and figures that frighten us — the water-spirits, the partly-human, partly-something-else creatures that lurk around the edges of our species’ subconscious — and make them speak to our new world, and the world our children will live in, too. Art makes meaning from chaos, the same as it always has. There are artists with fresh imaginations who break through the fence. It’s incumbent on us to be ready.
Is it possible to be truly original anymore — in your own life, in commerce, in art?
We’re in a cultural moment where it feels like so much is being rehashed, repackaged, and resold to a captive audience. This is certainly the case in entertainment, where the Hollywood reboot machine is the driving force behind what makes it to our screens; even “original” programming is frequently built from familiar storytelling tropes and formats. The same kind of recycling — sorry, remixing — holds true in pop music.
This carries over into matters of business and politics with just as much resonance. And when it comes to lifestyle topics like dieting, parenting, and even sex, we wind up circling the drain and repackaging old trends and ideas as hot new fads, too.
What makes newness, or novelty, or originality, so important in the first place, particularly in a society that heavily prioritizes individual comfort and choices? Are we in a uniquely not-new moment, or has it actually always felt this way?
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Cristina Spanò for Vox
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