The Tortured Postcolonial Studies Department
An old essay for a new school year about Taylor Swift, the student movement for Palestine, and the canon
When I heard the opening lines of “But Daddy I Love Him”, my jaw dropped. Taylor Swift sings:
I forget how the West was won
I forget if this was ever fun
I just learned these people only raise you
To cage you
Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best
Clutchin' their pearls, sighing, "What a mess"
I just learned these people try and save you
'Cause they hate you
Was Taylor finally taking on her Evangelical fanbase…addressing the trope of Manifest Destiny and westward expansionism in country music…speaking up against purity culture in a post-Roe America wherein white supremacist patriarchy has infiltrated the mainstream in the form of bread-baking-Tik-tok tradwives and, more relevantly, the Senate floor?
Well, no, because the song continues and is about the speaker’s situationship who her family, friends, and onlooking town gossips all hate. “But Daddy I Love Him” is widely understood to be about Taylor’s love affair with naughty little provocateur Matty Healey. Many fans were horrified when Taylor appeared to be dating him last year, primarily because he went on a podcast to inexplicably call Ice Spice an “Inuit spice girl” and a “chubby Chinese lady” and talk about watching degrading anti-Black videos. (Something I wonder about time and time again is why these kinds of men talk to each other on the public record in the first place.)
I’m usually averse to reading an artist’s work as autobiographical unless it’s explicitly presented that way. One could read this song as a more general reflection on vampiric parasociality, fame, how scandal fortifies love. But given how much TTPD is based on insider knowledge of Swift’s life, from references to her friends and places in London and pretty obvious visual cues to identify Healy, I think it’s fair to assume she knew people would interpret this song to be about the fan reaction to her relationship with him.
BDILH wiggled its way into my brain, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. But with each listen, I felt increasingly frustrated, itchy in my own skin–like I was complicit in something I didn’t want to be associated with. I was struck by the sensation that I’d heard some version of this before.
The song continues this extended repressed-preacher’s-daughter-in-a-cornfield metaphor, playing with the burden of fame and parasocial relationships. To be clear, Swift’s fan base is known to cross the line into the obsessive–the energy that some fans put into writing an open letter about her relationship, for example, was a little bonkers and could have been better spent writing to, like, a congressperson. But Swift isn’t mad at Matty at all . She’s angry at the public for being “sanctimonious” “judgmental creeps” “saboteurs” and “vipers dressed in empath’s clothing” because of their reaction to her relationship. They are not invited to the wedding, and she’s sick of their bitching and moaning.
I realized what bothered me so much about all of this wasn’t Taylor or Matty Healy or the album itself so much as the discursive technique Taylor uses to strike back at her critics–the same discursive technique used to attack the student movement for solidarity with Palestine.
Here, Taylor imagines her critics as white women–the “Sarahs and Hannahs” line, the reference to “wine moms.” The thing is, the people who were the most disappointed by Taylor entertaining Matty Healey were not “Sarahs and Hannahs.” It was her fans of color who were the most betrayed by her aligning herself with someone outspokenly racist, and who, generally speaking, might know a thing or two about undue scrutiny and objectification.
Taylor is not in fact writing a Postcolonial Studies dissertation here after all, but she is intentionally referencing a particular history, and placing herself in opposition to it. Apparently the opening line about the “West being won” has something to do with Travis Kelce and football, but it also conjures the history of westward expansionism. “I forget how the West was won” reads to me as an invocation of America’s colonizing past as a metaphor for an evangelical moralizing campaign. Swift has positioned herself as the victim of the contemporary echoes of this past–interesting, given that the real victims of this time period were the Indigenous people brutally displaced from their land. The speaker in this song doesn’t really address why people don’t like her paramour. The real crux of the matter is that it’s her name to disgrace, her own life to ruin. The issue at hand comes down to choice and individual liberty. Taylor is basically calling the “judgmental creeps” puritanical zealots, trading the gospel for gossip under the guise of concern.
Swift’s repainting of critics as unempathetic because they’re too morally righteous immediately registers as reminiscent of right-wing rhetoric about the “intolerant” left, the SJWs on their high horses who are soooo accepting of everyone except conservatives. Normally I wouldn’t have made much of that connection. But given the context in which the album was released, this framing felt sinister because of the way this rightwing “gotcha” mentality has pervaded the coverage of the student protest movement for Palestine.
While morally courageous young people have put their bodies on the line to take a stand against genocide, defenders of the status quo have been busy putting their snouts to the ground, searching like truffle pigs for leftist hypocrisy. Beyond allegations that the movement is inherently Anti-Semitic, which I don’t feel like dignifying here, many of these criticisms come down to: Actually, these kids are rich. Actually, they’re drinking iced lattes. Actually, some of them have nice clothes. Actually, these kids have no idea what they’re talking about and are trying to be cool...but actually, they’re all radical jihadists. Actually, (according to one NYU professor in a Daily Mail article I won’t link) the real problem is these kids aren’t having enough sex.
These arguments don’t have a leg to stand on–the encampments have been incredibly diverse, and being rich and/or white does not in fact preclude you from being opposed to genocide. Most students at the encampments are exceptionally well-informed. Many of them are Jewish themselves, and have both been educated in Zionist institutions and taken it upon themselves to challenge these narratives. Moreover, many people at the encampments have been directly impacted by the ongoing genocide–some have lost dozens of family members in Gaza.
The people baselessly slandering students refuse to engage with the very pressing issues at hand. They do not acknowledge the ongoing slaughter in Palestine, the United States’ illegal complicity, nor their own. Like in BDILH, attention to the actual moral issue at hand is thrown to the wayside. In the defensive tactic of deflection/projection that both Swift and these detractors mobilize, the focus becomes rewriting the identities of the critics–positioning them as far removed from the issue at hand, arguing that the empathy they are displaying is only performative and there is something perverse beneath it.
Of course, it isn’t just the media slandering these student protestors. It’s their college administrators and trustees as well. There’s a Swiftian parallel here, too.
“You know how to ball/I know Aristotle” is a wild way for Swift to call Travis Kelce a himbo. But she’s also calling herself a classicist, a claim bolstered by several other Aristotle references scattered through her discography. The rest of the album is conspicuously referential, with allusions to the ‘highbrow’–Emily Dickinson, Cassandra of Greek mythology, Coleridge, Dylan Thomas.
But what does it really mean to know Aristotle? Taylor Swift is famous for her songwriting prowess, but here she is claiming authority because she is a reader. These references position Swift as an intellectual, a sophisticated thinker. She is self-styling as a woman at a salon of the past discussing the avant-garde of another time. The lack of textual engagement with new ideas (except for Charlie Puth?) and the blinding whiteness of the thinkers Swift does engage with, in combination with her famous unwillingness to speak about current events or take political stances, makes these references look less like a true love for literature and more like a kind of imperial nostalgia.
The reason this all bothers me so much is probably because I went to a college where our library looked like this despite being built in 1934:
The names on the Butler Library frieze have been the source of protests for years; in 1989, five students were arrested after covering the library with a banner listing names of female intellectuals. Beyond the valid criticism of only memorializing white European men, I always just felt like there was something kind of embarrassing about erecting a Neoclassical building in Harlem and covering it with names that were all canonical but kind of random–like someone had flipped through a textbook and randomly selected Demosthenes and Goethe and St. Augustine.
This year, under the ghostly invocation of these random dead intellectuals, Columbia college administrators invited police and white supremacist leaders, and threatened to bring in the National Guard while soliloquizing about freedom of speech, student safety, and religious freedom. With each remark about ‘open discourse’ and the ‘role of the university’ from detractors from the student movement, I hear references to antiquity. I see a conjuring up of a long-gone polis, and a plea to keep polishing the Roman columns of a morally empty institution.
Everyone can read the classics and arrive at different conclusions. For one thing, the “canon” is not so much a unified, authoritative block of prominent thinkers as the site of fierce debates itself. In their own time, the writers memorialized in marble were dissidents and objectors: Socrates, for one, was executed for corrupting the youth of Athens and “"failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges.” The latter charge resonates today, when rejecting the false idol of Zionism or imperialism or more locally the NYPD is treated as desertion. Summoning the power of the police state under the engraved legacies of past philosophers in order to preserve the university as a site of learning is obviously foolish; it’s all the more frustrating when this legacy is mobilized to protect the sanctity of similar institutions.
Like Swift’s haphazard literary allusions, Columbia’s reference to these ancients feels like a corporate landlord staging an apartment with shelves of well-curated but unopened books. In both cases, pop stars and institutions have turned into corporations primarily interested in protecting their bottom line while appealing to hallowed traditions and a general, diffuse air of intellectualism to justify their monopoly on our collective imaginations. Unlike the thinkers they lionize, they refuse to take a stance in the present, referring only to battles that have already been resolved.
I’m not using the Taylor Swift lens to make light of the police brutality and repression happening in this context, rather to show how widespread certain narratives are. The most prestigious universities and most powerful celebrities both reflect and engineer ‘Western Values’ alongside politicians and, increasingly, corporate lobbyists. The Palestinian solidarity movement in the States has been catastrophized as a decline in these values, prompting moral panics about jihadis and Communists.
These protests are in fact contrary to Western values, and good for them. They reject the foundational notion that the US has a monopoly on violence, that the American elite’s economic interests justify the slaughter of people abroad. They reject the myth of America as a benevolent superpower, that our hair-thin spectrum of political debate amounts to a functional democracy, that the US is truly interested in women’s rights or gay rights or equal opportunity.
And these protests reject Western values discursively. Despite our missionizing past, the worst thing you can be in American politics is preachy, moralizing, damning. The American public is, by and large, allergic to shame, incapable of facing the sobering truth of our country’s history and present.
Western values mean slithering around judgment, reversing criticism onto ones detractors, hiding behind the canon, resorting to name calling and invoking some imaginary golden age of proper debate, celebrating an imaginary centrism. The passive voice is a Western value. Displacing violence semiotically is a Western value. Shirking responsibility and appealing to an ivoried sense of nostalgia instead, too.
Willful historical amnesia and defensiveness is certainly not a uniquely American problem. But there is something relatively new and crazy-making about our current iteration of this defensive position, wherein people weaponize the language of human rights and democracy and some loose definition of fairness while abetting a genocide. Empires of the past committed atrocities and said, “yeah, we killed all those people, what about it?” whereas we are sitting here bombing refugee camps and talking about where women can and can’t wear bikinis, where this or isn’t a Pride march, hurt feelings, the future of open dialogue.
Something I haven’t seen people talking about is how the reaction to campus protests intersects with the SCOTUS ruling to end affirmative action, and book bans/banning discussions of not only history but people of color and queer people themselves in schools. Maybe universities have been so quick to brutalize and sanction their students of color because, on some level, they feel they no longer need them. At my own university where I am receiving my MA, the student encampment has been evicted from our campus by court order, and is now being maintained by a few very brave students on a square of concrete next to a falafel stand. There are new turnstiles at the entrance to the library, and a team of private security officers guard the fading patch of grass that once held vigils and teach-ins. I suspect that in fifty years time, the university will lionize the student protesters and teach classes about the genocide, and I wonder if by then we will have really learned anything at all.