ABSTRACT
This chapter explores theories of creativity as a mechanism of power, focusing on how defining ‘the creative’ in the literary industry has been foundational to projects of nationalism and capitalist dissemination during and after the Cold War. As Mark McGurl and Eric Bennett have argued, the MFA Writing Workshop as a media factory network has also operated as a form of unofficial propaganda for American empire, particularly during the Cold War, as well as a form of disciplinary control within academic institutions through its authoritative control over definitions of ‘creativity’ and ‘craft’. To understand these tensions within creative writing industries and their larger transnational impacts, this chapter traces debates of creativity through two discourses within the American academic institution, (1) the ‘programmatic’ forms of fiction writing manifest in the MFA Program, and (2) the ‘problematic’ inquiries of creative writing by authors in the critical humanities disciplines of critical race studies, queer theory, and ethnic studies. This chapter will also attend to the presumptions of creative writing through its formal techniques as a hybrid creative/critical essay. It begins and ends with reflections on the author’s experience as both a scholar of literature and a creative writer whose main audience comes from academic associations. The author re-purposes the title of his first novel, Stamped: An Anti-travel Novel, to insist that creative industries promote marginalized writers as ‘stamps’ that (1) authenticate the creative industry as liberal and multicultural; (2) flatten authors and their works; and (3) provide readers access across racial borders that seem natural, but have in fact been imposed by creative industries themselves.
