Writers and Boycotts

Last July, Andrea Skinner, the youngest daughter of the late short-story writer Alice Munro, published an account in a major Canadian newspaper of having been sexually abused by her stepfather from the age of nine. This was more than another tragic story of child sexual abuse. For millions of readers, the real story was that Munro had known about the abuse and had stayed silent about it for decades, remaining married to the abuser while Skinner became estranged from her family. Skinner’s story became public just two months after her mother’s death in May 2024. Posthumous accolades soon soured into condemnation and confusion about what Munro’s complicity in the cover-up meant for the legacy of Canada’s only Nobel laureate in Literature.

While critics scanned Munro’s short stories for signs that the allusions to the abuse had made it – like many other aspects of the author’s life – into her fiction, many asked what all this meant for “our” relationship to the grande dame of CanLit and her oeuvre. Should we still read her stories? Would libraries and bookstores continue to stock her books? And how would her work now be taught to students of Canadian literature – of women’s literature, no less? For her part, Skinner has said that she published her account in order for “this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother”. A number of critics have taken this to heart, stating that this information will inform new readings and interpretations of Munro’s work. Others have taken a more militant stand, declaring they will never read the work again.

We’ve been here before, with the films of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, the philosophy of Louis Althusser, now the books of Neil Gaiman. Debates are had, the works continue to circulate and be consumed, perhaps differently in light of the damaging accusations, maybe with a nagging sense of guilt. In the case of Munro, beyond a principled expression of moral outrage, it’s unclear what a boycott of her writing would do. She was dead by the time her daughter’s story emerged, so a boycott can’t lead to an apology. The public fury and fuss is meant to signal our collective horror at child abuse. But not reading Munro’s stories won’t stop the sexual abuse of other children. As much as anything, it’s a symptom of a society that treats best-selling authors as celebrities. “We” thought we “knew” Munro through her works. How foolish we were.

More recently, Canadians have been talking about a different kind of boycott: a refusal to buy American products in retaliation for President Trump’s implementation of steep tariffs on Canadian exports to the US. When the planned tariffs were announced in January, liquor stores in some provinces removed American brands from their shelves. “Snowbirds” cancelled their annual trips to sunny Florida. Supermarkets have replaced cherished American brands with novel Canadian products. Coca Cola is being nudged off the shelf by sparkling maple water. Media outlets report a surge in patriotism driving a campaign to “buy Canadian”. At least one best-selling Canadian author has announced that she will not go to the United States as long as Trump’s “trade war” is in place.

As the tariffs expand beyond Canada and Mexico to China and Europe, the calls to boycott US-made products grow louder. The Boycott USA movement is as thrilling as it is daunting. The American economy is huge and complex. As an article in the Canadian magazine The Walrus pointed out, in a globalised economy, buying “national” is a complicated endeavour. But the urge to boycott goes beyond the practical. Canadians and Mexicans, and now it seems Europeans and others, are pissed off at the American president and are expressing their anger by refusing to buy American-made goods. The aim is to send a message: until Trump reverses the tariffs, the rest of the world will leave the US out in the cold.

While this may have a vindicative ring to it, it’s nothing new. All boycotts have moral and emotional as well as political and economic elements. According to historians Nathalie Rothman and Andrew Zimmerman, although organised boycotts as we understand them today came into being in the modern period, with the spread of European empires in the eighteenth century, the “premodern contexts of boycott avant la lettre underscore its fundamental role in policing the boundaries of a community” through the shunning, banishment or excommunication “of those who fail to uphold the ethical standards of a collectivity”.

The English word “boycott” comes from the late-nineteenth-century campaign by Irish tenant farmers against rent increases and land evictions. When the British army captain Charles Boycott tried to evict tenants for not paying their rent, he was cut off by the farmers. Boycotts have been defined as forms of organised ostracism. They help to define the parameters of a community by excluding those whose behaviour is deemed oppressive – as well as those who are understood to be complicit with the oppressor.

The problem is not that boycotts have a moral dimension. The problem comes when the policing takes precedence over the political aims. We see this too often in cases of spontaneous denunciations of individual authors on social media. In a world where most people spend more time online than they do on the picket line, language has become more than another terrain of struggle. It’s often the terrain. It’s easier to “call out” a particular writer for an offensive post, or to call on others to stop reading an author’s writing, than to organise collectively to make systemic change.

Let’s return to the example of Alice Munro. Beyond the shock of the author’s silence is a bigger story about the network of complicity of those who knew that Munro’s husband had sexually abused her daughter but chose not to ask questions and not to make the story public. This group includes Munro’s biographer and a number of editors, journalists and publishers. To address the real scandal of the Munro affair would require grappling with the publishing industry itself – its power not just to make star writers, but to ensure that potentially damaging stories are kept under wraps in the interests of protecting its prize profit-generating commodities.

Writers, journalists and academics have a vested interest in stressing the importance of language in shaping the word; it’s the currency we trade in, after all. The way we talk about, or fail to talk about child sexual abuse, the way a fiction writer writes about sexual violence, the words we use to describe violence in the home (a “family matter” or “family secret”) or to analyse wars, name perpetrators and victims, matter. Language is a site of power. It’s important to identify and critique oppressive language, to explain why and how words cause harm. But it’s a mistake for writers to spend more time debating the words of other writers than identifying and challenging the institutional and systemic forces that determine what gets written, published and read in the first place.

Freedom of speech and expression are not just threatened by direct forms of censorship. They are also under attack by an economic and political system that actively devalues public culture – whether through cutbacks to education, the closure of public libraries, the collapse of independent media, the shutting down of community centres – or the consolidation of publishing and books sales in the hands of billionaire-owned monopolies.

Yes, I’m taking about the about the A-word.

The savvy reader may already be forming a counterargument: I’m just another wannabe cop, patrolling the borders of the community of writers, seeking the company of morally pure comrades while plotting to expel the baddies to the outlands of the Internet. Nice try. Even before the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign listed Amazon among its pressure targets for 2025, campaigners had been highlighting the company’s exploitative practices, from racial harassment and union busting to environmental destruction and tax avoidance. More recently, US campaigners have called on consumers to stop buying at the online retailer in response to it scaling back Diversity, Equality and Inclusion policies following Trump’s election.

When I talk to other writers about boycotting Amazon, I’m often treated to a barrage of excuses, as if no one had written, published, purchased or read a book before 1994. But no one’s asking us to travel through time. Boycotts ask us to think and act critically in the present, within what’s possible. It might be difficult to prevent our books from being sold on Amazon. But no one is forcing us to throw money at the company, or to provide free labour for it by posting links to the platform or writing book reviews there.

Of course there are many other companies that are just as bad. This is capitalism, after all. But not all companies are targets of organised political campaigns. That’s what a boycott is. It’s not about how consumers feel about a company or product. It’s not about one-by-one decisions regarding “ethical” consumerism. It’s about banding together to put pressure on corporations, institutions and governments to change (or, better yet, to bring them down) in order to protect our rights and/or express solidarity with communities who have called for our support.

As Rothman and Zimmerman write, “Boycotts ask us to think about ourselves and the commodities we consume as fundamentally social.” They assume that even in the face of climate change, capitalism and mass violence we have some agency. What’s exciting about this moment when the most powerful country on earth is faced by boycotts from all sides as well as from inside, is that more and more people are talking and writing about what it means to join forces to effect serious economic and political change.

Writers do have a part to play in all this. We can use our words to encourage others to get politically engaged. We can be chroniclers, bearing witness to both the horror and the hope. But mostly we have a role because this is the moment of history we’re living in. And it’s this moment that we have to act in.

Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. If you like what you read, you can get a paid subscription or leave me a tip.

Thanks for reading.