E arlier this year, I finally got around to reading The Source of Self-Regard . “Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools,” Toni Morrison begins. “But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts.” Authoritarians regularly censor writers, Morrison continues, whether through control of media industries, incarceration, or murder. They prevent plays from being staged and films from being shown. If the threat is sustained and generalized enough, writers may never put pen to page, not even in private. Novels, poems, and more go unwritten. In Morrison’s account, this epistemic violence affects those under authoritarian rule and those residing in other countries, even if the degrees of violence are different. Neither group can know all the artwork that might have been made under other, less oppressive forms of government.…