Novelist hopes militancy against "cultural appropriation" will pass

[Boneman]

Did Requires Hate respond...?

 

[TheDustyZebra]

What part of the word "fiction" are people not understanding?

 

[Ursa major]

I don't know... but some of them seem to focus on the last syllable: shun....

 

[Ursa major]

As an aside, here's a non-literary call of "cultural appropriation"....

There was a brief "occupation" of London City Airport (of a runway) by people claiming to be doing so as part of the Black Lives Matter campaign (which has a UK "offshoot", or at least campaign inspired by the US original).

This act of occupation, or rather, its participants' claim that the environmental impact of air travel was racist**, received the following response (reported in this Grauniad article):

[T]he anti-racism campaigner Stafford Scott and Lee Jasper, a former equality adviser to Ken Livingstone, were publicly critical of the protest, accusing white leftwing activists of hijacking the Black Lives Matter banner. “It’s cultural appropriation. Even our struggle [is] no longer our own,” Jasper said on Twitter.

It struck me that this description could also be applied to those folk who take offence on the behalf of others (others of a different cultural background, that is). And at first glance, it seemed to be an attractive, not to say deliciously ironic, idea. Sad to say, though, there are some occasions when those offended (or worse) are in no position to make their feelings known publicly, which either requires others to step in, or the offence to go unremarked.


** - To quote a previous Grauniad article about the incident:

The campaign said it carried out the protest to highlight the environmental impact of air travel on the lives of black people locally and globally.

 

[Brian G Turner]

The Guardian yesterday published comments from a range of authors, in effect in reply to Lionel Shriver's original comments. And there are some good nuggets of advice in there:
Whose life is it anyway? Novelists have their say on cultural appropriation

if you do start with an attitude that fails to understand that there are very powerful reasons for people to dispute your right to tell a story – reasons that stem from historical, political or social imbalances, you’ve already failed to understand the place and people who you purport to want to write about. That’s a pretty lousy beginning, and I wouldn’t want to read the fiction that comes out of it. Far better to understand the reasons, and perhaps even use those reasons as a way into character and story.

And this great line:

Don’t write what you know, write what you want to understand.

 

[Gonk the Insane]

Great article, and some great quotes. A few that really struck me:

Good writers transgress without transgressing, in part because they are humble about what they do not know.

Literature is an imaginative art. To suggest that a writer cannot depict characters unlike themself is patently absurd

Good writing can do whatever it feels like doing. Bad writing can’t do anything. A bad writer can’t tell you anything about his or her own culture, let alone anyone else’s.

 

[Justin Swanton]

I've got the answer: all white fiction writers should give up fiction immediately, leaving the field to cultural minority authors who, in the spirit of cultural redress and affirmative action, should be free to write about whoever they like. The white ex-fiction writers in the meantime can earn their living writing rave reviews about the works of the cultural minority authors. Everyone's happy! Wait, where'd everybody go?

 

[Ursa major]

if you do start with an attitude that fails to understand that there are very powerful reasons for people to dispute your right to tell a story – reasons that stem from historical, political or social imbalances, you’ve already failed to understand the place and people who you purport to want to write about.

I can't help feeling that this argument falls into the trap of stereotyping people, and doing so on the basis they think everyone with the same background** thinks alike (specifically, that those from the same background as them thinks like them). Not everyone from the same background has the same views***. Many people change their views over time, or after particular events in their lives.

Given this -- and given that those who want to dispute other people's right to tell a story seem to be rather small in number -- I think it's perfectly okay to right about people who don't have a desire to dispute other people's right to tell a story, unless one is writing about people who do dispute that.


So, to reword the quote:

If you do start with an attitude that fails to understand that many, if not most people, have very powerful reasons -- such as apathy, getting on with their own lives, ignoring the latest twitter storm or spat in academia -- for not caring about what other people write about in their fiction, you’ve already failed to understand the place and people who you purport to want to write about.​

** - That's assuming that they do; they may not (if only because the lives of people from the same background -- from the same family, even -- can diverge a great deal).

*** - If they did, we wouldn't need to have expensive elections every few years; we could just ask the "representative" people from the however many thousand different groups there are whenever we want public assent for a particular course of action.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Great article, and some great quotes. A few that really struck me:

Literature is an imaginative art. To suggest that a writer cannot depict characters unlike themself is patently absurd.

Exactly.

Good writing can do whatever it feels like doing. Bad writing can’t do anything. A bad writer can’t tell you anything about his or her own culture, let alone anyone else’s.

Exactly 2.

 

[MWagner]

I can't help feeling that this argument falls into the trap of stereotyping people, and doing so on the basis they think everyone with the same background** thinks alike (specifically, that those from the same background as them thinks like them). Not everyone from the same background has the same views***. Many people change their views over time, or after particular events in their lives.

Given this -- and given that those who want to dispute other people's right to tell a story seem to be rather small in number -- I think it's perfectly okay to right about people who don't have a desire to dispute other people's right to tell a story, unless one is writing about people who do dispute that.

Excellent point.

I recently heard a CBC radio interview with a black woman who wrote a book about her racial identity. The interviewer was a native woman, and they both agreed that they didn't want Canada to be a colour-blind society, that their racial identity was a crucial element of their identity, and they wished that non-minority Canadians would realize and acknowledge that. But the problem is a lot of minorities do want to be regarded as individuals, and don't want their racial identity to be the first thing people think about when they meet them. So the takeaway is that when you meet someone, they may want to you see them through the lens or their racial heritage... or they may not.

And I think ultimately, while identity politics is seeing a temporary upsurge in profile and influence, it's never going to the mainstream social model its advocates want, because it's not close to being a default belief even among minorities. It's like the class-based identity politics of the 20th century, when many academics and political radicals saw every social issue through the lens of class, and championed a political model where the struggle of the proletariat vs the bourgeoisie trumped all other social considerations. That outlook never really took hold because most people in the West are still genuinely liberal, and want to be regarded and regard others as individuals. They don't want to raise their child as a class-conscious member of the proletariat or as an Asian-Canadian, but as a Canadian. It's also why fewer than a quarter of Canadian women self-identity as feminists - activists have attached so much political baggage to the term that it's simply not appealing even to most younger and educated women. Anyone who purports to speak for an entire group of people usually has a political agenda that isn't shared by most of the people in that group.

 

[JunkMonkey]

All those SF writers who imagined and wrote aliens are going to be in real trouble after First Contact. I can just see the scene in the CETI decoding room as the signal from Mount Arecibo is finally deciphered:

Scientist (Played by Jodie Foster): "Gasp! that looks like... like... it is...! It's a Cease and Desist Order!

 

[Toby Frost]

I suspect that future historians will find the defining feature of our society not to have been race/gender/sexuality but cold hard cash (as opposed to class, too). With a few exceptions, being wealthy trumps the vast majority of social issues you might face. Someone once said that the difference between "crazy" and "eccentric" was that the eccentric person was rich.

 

[Extollager]

The poor whom I worry about are not so much people living now but the future generations who are defenseless against us and whom we are robbing ruthlessly.

 

[DrMclony]

Thanks for the interesting and civil discussion! An interesting read. I fear that any push too far in the direction of a writer being forbidden to write of characters outside their own immediate, personal little box, is a dangerous thing indeed.

I also see it as closely aligned to the incredibly irritating and ridiculously vocal perspective that if a character says it, or does it, then that must be what the author believes in their heart of hearts. I find both to be aggravating and insulting.

I have a protagonist in one of my books who is a murderer, and a smuggler of artifacts. I would never smuggle artifacts, and I couldn't kill even to save myself. But the arguers on that second point would have you believe that everything that character says and does reflects my true intentions, and the former outraged ones would say I was appropriating the life of a murderer, who should be allowed to own that life. So what - a writer is only capable of writing a memoir and nothing else? Bullsquaddle.

Mind you, nobody has accused me of being a murderer because of that character, though my most popular female protagonist has caused many people to accuse me of being female. What's up with that?

 

[WaylanderToo]

It's ludicrous - where will it stop? Can't were a suit as "my culture" didn't invent it? Shirts, shoes, clogs, hats? Can't use umbrellas, cars, aircraft, electricity? Soon even watching Highlander, Roots, Shogun, The Last Emperor will be frowned upon. I know I'm dealing in hyperbole but it's no less stupid than half of what is being argued on.

I think that people need to pull their heads out of their fundiments and get on with being well rounded people

 

[WaylanderToo]

It's ludicrous - where will it stop? Can't WEAR (!!!)a suit as "my culture" didn't invent it? Shirts, shoes, clogs, hats? Can't use umbrellas, cars, aircraft, electricity? Soon even watching Highlander, Roots, Shogun, The Last Emperor will be frowned upon. I know I'm dealing in hyperbole but it's no less stupid than half of what is being argued on.

I think that people need to pull their heads out of their fundiments and get on with being well rounded people

 

[Clockworkbot]

Interesting to reflect on the difference between culture (organically created by ill-defined groups) and intellectual property (deliberately created by specific groups of individuals). If someone uses your IP, whether or not they want to make money, you can take them to court in most of the developed world. Using and making money using someone else's culture though, is pretty much fair game (although sometimes there is a grey area, as per this case involving lego from a while ago.

The reasons for protecting the two are pretty similar, it seems; essentially protecting the brand. If rich white kids wear dreadlocks or listen to rap music, there is an argument that they are 'devaluing' the 'brand purity' of these forms of cultural expression - although no one person invented them, there is a group that can claim ownership. In a way the European system of protected food names is a kind of half-way house between the two, using geographical areas as a proxy for the ownership question.

The protected names system guarantees quality to a large extent; but a lot of the most creative and imaginative work on the internet is fan-fiction that violates intellectual property.
So it seems like there is a compromise to be made between allowing creativity on the one hand and respecting the integrity of certain cultural ideas and identities on the other...although I think with things like race those identities are too fluid to ever make clear rules about.

Not an easy one, and no shortage of knee-jerk responses on both sides (not on here necessarily but on the internet in general)!

 

[MWagner]

Interesting to reflect on the difference between culture (organically created by ill-defined groups) and intellectual property (deliberately created by specific groups of individuals). If someone uses your IP, whether or not they want to make money, you can take them to court in most of the developed world. Using and making money using someone else's culture though, is pretty much fair game (although sometimes there is a grey area, as per this case involving lego from a while ago.

The reasons for protecting the two are pretty similar, it seems; essentially protecting the brand. If rich white kids wear dreadlocks or listen to rap music, there is an argument that they are 'devaluing' the 'brand purity' of these forms of cultural expression - although no one person invented them, there is a group that can claim ownership.

IMHO, culture is too subtle and organic for that sort pigeon-holing. Then you have the question of whether European culture should be protected from non-Europeans. Is a black athlete with a celtic tattoo devaluing European culture? How about an Asian kid playing Bach on the piano? Enforcing those kinds of cultural boundaries can lead us to some dark places.

 

[S Blake-Smy]

The problem that I have noticed is that people who speak for, or are activists on behalf of minority groups, often shout out that "we are not a monolith!", but then go on to claim that something (possibly unintended) is offensive to all within that particular group.

When you actually speak to a number of individuals within that group you will get a variety of views as to how offensive that particular 'thing' may be. and I believe cultural appropriation is -- in most cases -- victim to this aswell.

My worry is that this surge in shouting about identity politics is infact muddying the water and detracting from the few real cases that do warrant action.

 

[S Blake-Smy]

Another thing that occurs to me... surely, you can't claim to want a 'multicultural' society, then moan when cultures merge and evolve through mutual contact and sharing.

If you want cultures to remain distinct and seperate you must therefore advocate people staying within there own groups and ethnic boundaries? isn't this what we had with 'non-multicultural' and segregated countries with borders (nationalism, in a sense) ? or are they saying they want a ghetto-like situation?

I just don't get the majority of these leftwing-wing motivations (I always thought of myself as left leaning in the past -- I doubt that I am these days, it seems).