From The Literary Hub:
I won’t rehash all the recent debates about cultural appropriation in literature. (A quick flashback montage would show a YA author stripped of her Kirkus star after backlash to a perceived “white savior narrative”; Francine Prose holding aloft an old racist children’s book; Lionel Shriver donning an ill-advised sombrero.) If you haven’t followed the noise, suffice it to say: Representation of the other, when done poorly, upsets many people. Other people see that upset as censorship.
These arguments put me in a constant flop sweat as I finished a novel, The Great Believers, that extends well beyond my lived experience. It’s about gay men; I’m a straight woman. It’s about HIV/AIDS; I don’t have it. The story begins in 1985 Chicago; while I’m a lifelong Chicagoan, I was born in 1978 and spent 1985 reading about dinosaurs.
I’m sympathetic to arguments that artists need to stay in their lanes. I also believe preemptive judgment of work based on its premise, not its merits, is ridiculous. I don’t need to apologize for writing across difference; I need to apologize if I get it wrong.
. . . .
1) It made me clarify what I was doing, and why.
In order to write this, I had to satisfactorily answer two questions: Was I reinforcing stereotypes, or combatting them? And was I stealing attention from first-hand narratives, or shedding light on them? The first question was a matter of good writing—something I had control over. The second was stickier.
There’s shockingly little in book or film form about AIDS in Chicago. This meant when I interviewed survivors and activists, they were often speaking for the first time in years about certain memories. I was honored by their trust, heartened by how many spoke about wanting now to write down their own thoughts. With the novel out, I’m in a position to guide readers to direct accounts of that time, or art by those who lived through it.
. . . .
2) It made me do the legwork.
Back to that question of good writing: I was terrified of getting things wrong. Setting out to write about a real time and a real place, I knew empathy wouldn’t be enough. I couldn’t good-person myself into good writing.
In addition to hours of in-person interviews, I read every back issue of Chicago’s LGBTQ weekly Windy City Times from 1985 to 1992. I went to surviving gay bars from the era (okay, this wasn’t a hardship), I watched footage of ACT UP protests, I walked the city carrying business maps from 30 years ago. Along the way, I encountered my own ignorance.
. . . .
4) It made me tell a broader story than I would have.
I was a hundred pages into my first draft when the appropriation issue stopped me cold. At this point, my narrative was solely about the 1980s, solely from the viewpoint of one character, a gay man named Yale Tishman. The more I stewed, the more it did feel like speaking for someone else—telling stories from a life not my own. While it wasn’t a first person narrative, it still felt like an attempt at ventriloquism.
Link to the rest at The Literary Hub
PG says cultural appropriation has always sounded to him like a Marxist-style technique for silencing people whose opinions you don’t like.
Nobody owns a culture. An outsider to a culture can often comment on it with more insight and understanding precisely because he/she is not immersed in the culture, its premises and accepted truths.
What about the segregationist South during the 1930’s and 40’s? Were Northern writers guilty of some great wrong by writing critically about living conditions under such culture and the adverse impact of the culture on both African-Americans and white Americans?
Is there anyone alive who experienced the Holocaust and is able to write about it? If the answer is negative, does that means no one can write about the Holocaust anymore?
If all accounts of the Holocaust written today are second-hand, does someone who grew up in a Jewish household in which no one talked about the Holocaust (like several of PG’s college friends) better situated to write about this event and its impact than a non-Jew who has spent years studying this terrible time and reading the accounts of those immersed in it?
Because one person writes a book or story on her observations and reaction to a particular culture of which she is not a member doesn’t mean another person can’t also write about the same culture from the same point of view or a different one?
Again accusations of cultural appropriation strike PG like one of many methods of controlling the conversation about a particular topic rather than a morally-repugnant behavior of someone writing about a group different than the one to which the accusers assume he/she belongs and about which the accusers may know little.
“I’m sympathetic to arguments that artists need to stay in their lanes.”
I’m not.
When non-Christian authors stop writing “Christian” characters (almost always negative stereotypes), maybe I’ll be more open to people telling me I shouldn’t write people who fit into some classification I don’t. Until then, I’ll continue to ignore them.
As a race, humans are all about cultural appropriation. We’ve all done it for all of human history. Telling us to stop is not only stupid, it’s futile.
I’m an American. “Cultural appropriation” *is* my culture!
I guess the problem is when one group of people does something and they are vilified for it, but when another group does the same thing, theyre praised for it.
As for me, I don’t particularly care.
Where is many sombreros as you like, celebrate the day of the dead festival if you want to and eat the Eucharist.
Heh. I spotted that Foner glitch, too.
But it happens to the best of us… I suddenly realized just the other day that I had completely fouled up a protagonist’s name – Portuguese derived, and I have the father’s family surname first. Sigh. It’s all through everything in the current WIP.
Unlike Foner, though, I can kind of get away with it by dancing really, really fast – the world I’ve built has this Portuguese derived culture extremely disrupted in the past, to the point where they “reconstructed” it. So they decided to switch things around. That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it!
This is a complicated issue. On one hand, I agree with PG: sometimes the problems and solutions are clearer for an outsider than for someone who lives within a culture. But it is a slippery slope, and I have a negative personal experience with it as a reader.
I grew up in Russia, although I’ve been living in Canada for over 2 decades. I noticed that many English-speaking writers include something vaguely Russian in their stories. A Russian woman. A Russian folk tale. A Russian food. It’s exotic and alluring and different, but most writers do it wrong.
They try to give phonetic spelling of the Russian words, but more often than not, they mangle the words. They try to incorporate the Russian naming convention (very different from the English), but they make the names sound funny or strange instead of authentic. And every time I read a butchered Russian name in a piece of English prose, it irritates me, makes me doubt that writer’s veracity.
If a writer wants to write about a culture different than her own, she should do comprehensive research first.
OK. Suppose some writer gets things wrong? So what?
When I lived in Saudi, I had to laugh at all the various Arabic spellings of my name. All the expats did. So did the Saudis.
If a writer wants to write about a culture different than her own, she should do comprehensive research first.
To me this is true of fiction in general: Do the research. I was thrown out of a novel where a doctor advises that type O blood is rare, and is the universal receiver, and type AB is common and is the universal donor. It’s exactly the other way around. The situation in the story was contrived enough, but that moment had me outright rolling my eyes.
A culture error I spotted happened in the EarthCent series by EM Foner. I adore it as popcorn reading, but I got whiplash when the Aisha character appeared. The character is supposed to be Hindu, but she has the name of Muhammed’s wife. When I was child I could not get Hindu and Muslim friends to play together — we were children! — and I’ve read no news out of India/Pakistan that leads me to believe that Hindu parents would name their daughter Aisha. Aja, Aishwarya, Arundhati — yep. Aisha? Khadijah? Noooooo. The timeline Foner gives for Earth being discovered by friendly AI who introduce us to aliens doesn’t make the necessary culture shift plausible either.
What you say underscores the point that writers should know what we’re talking about. I could totally get behind that.
They try to give phonetic spelling of the Russian words
A quick question about that: I thought Russia has another alphabet that the Latin one, so it must be transliterated? And in that case there is no “standard” spelling, only spellings standard to specific transliteration protocols. That’s how we end up with Qadaffi, Kadafi, Gaddafi for the Libyan dictator.
In other words, I’m not sure if the other authors are actually being careless on that point. And trad publishers often have style guides that mention their preferred transliteration, so it may not even be the writers’ fault. I could still see how it would jar you out of the story, though.
Olga, I very much agree that writers should do their research and get these things right. However, this is not really what is being demanded by proponents of cultural appropriation who seem to care more about who writes than what they write.
Writers though do get away with deficient research on many occasions simply because very few of their readers know anything about the subject. I pick up on problems in the representation of the Napoleonic Wars in Recency Romances – indeed I once had the temerity to criticise Mrs PG in a review – but I do not delude myself and believe that other readers are worried.
Commercially-aspiring novelists are encouraged to be “different” in their takes on things. So it seems pretty stupid to then bash them for being different.
I am a POC, an immigrant, female, and I abhor the constant labels of cultural appropriation. I do find it a power play–a silencing technique, as you put it. It doesn’t help. I know more than a dozen “white” writers who are actually AFRAID to add diverse characters because they might be called out as appropriators or of getting it wrong. Are we going to tell POC-authors to stop writing white folks, or they are appropriating? Gimme a break.
I never thought of it as a power play before, more a matter of self-aggrandizement. Which they call virtue signaling nowadays. But as I think about, I believe you (and PG) are correct: it is a power move. And I will cheerfully mock it as often as necessary.
Small sample size: there are several people in an online writing group who (based on their pictures) are white. But they have no problem writing protagonists who are black, or American Indian, etc.*** This suggests to me that normal writers aren’t worrying about “cultural appropriation.” Which is good.
***If I could just convince one of them to write less passive characters (of any race) that would be awesome. I do not get the fascination with inert protagonists. They have to protag!
I think you are right to be converted to the “power play” view. It’s just another attempt to set up as gatekeepers to control the conversation.
I thought a bit about this when it first started getting significant attention and ended up concluding that “cultural appropriation” is both intellectually and philosophically vacuous. Reading some supporters of the concept has left me feeling that they’ve never managed to rationally consider what they are proposing.
I quite like this essay on the subject:
https://artreview.com/features/ar_december_2017_feature_cultural_appropriation_kenan_malik/
This quote from this essay pretty much sums up my views on the subject: “What is really being appropriated, in other words, is not culture but the right to police cultures and experiences, a right appropriated by those who license themselves to be arbiters of the correct forms cultural borrowing.”
Ooh, good find. Lots of good points in there.