Novelist hopes militancy against "cultural appropriation" will pass

[Ursa major]

there is a group that can claim ownership

As you've already pointed out:

I think with things like race those identities are too fluid to ever make clear rules about

Perhaps I can expand on this.

I said, in post#31 of this thread:

These rules are all about place and method, not specifically human culture: there is no requirement, as far as I can tell, that those involved in the production of a product protected in this way have to have any cultural or ethnic qualifications, simply that they use the prescribed method and do it in the designated area.

In particular, it's relatively easy to designate an area and a process and then see whether something meets the requirement of having been made in that area and by that process.

Once we talk about people, the issue then becomes one of defining just who is of a culture and who is not. Yes, there may be geographical aspects, such as: "Does it matter if they live away from the original location of the culture?" And there may be process aspects, such as: "Do they live their lives wholly by the precepts of the culture?" There may be more insidious questions, such as ones about parentage.

Who asks these questions, who sets the rules and who makes the decisions? And who does so for large cultural groups? Does it even mean anything when the groups are large (as they're highly likely to be internally diverse, in all sorts of ways)? Are even small groups free from such diversity?

It's all very well -- well, it isn't, but bear with me -- for this sort of thing to be used as a convenient stick with which to beat people with whom one disagrees (personally, politically, etc.), but it isn't really that easy to codify.

And the biggest question of all: Would life in a world dominated by this sort of thing not risk quickly becoming a nightmare (except, perhaps, for those deciding who has transgressed)?

 

[S Blake-Smy]

And the biggest question of all: Would life in a world dominated by this sort of thing not risk quickly becoming a nightmare (except, perhaps, for those deciding who has transgressed)?

Seems rather Orwellian to me, with its Thought police and newspeak.

 

[Clockworkbot]

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.

I agree that all of those things would be ridiculous. I'm not saying what I'm describing is right, just that it's a way of thinking that explains why some people feel that way.

And the biggest question of all: Would life in a world dominated by this sort of thing not risk quickly becoming a nightmare (except, perhaps, for those deciding who has transgressed)?

It would be pretty awful - however, this has pretty much been the case for most of human history, up until the recent past. Not in that there were laws about it (although sometimes there were), but it's generally been pretty unacceptable to adopt cultural practices outside of your native group. I should repeat I don't think that means it's right - just that the time we are living in is distinguished by the fluidity and tolerance of cultures.
I think part of that is the fact that we now live in much more individually-oriented societies, where fitting into a stable community or culture is less important than it has generally been.

 

[Ursa major]

I daresay those who'd volunteer to root out transgressions (well, transgressors) if they got the chance are already taking note of them.

In fact, some have already become judge, jury and, tragically, executioner.

 

[JunkMonkey]

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).

There's nothing wrong with leaning to the left but there is a point where you lean so far that you fall over. People who espouse this sort of thing are not left leaning. They've fallen over.

 

[TheDustyZebra]

There's nothing wrong with leaning to the left but there is a point where you lean so far that you fall over. People who espouse this sort of thing are not left leaning. They've fallen over.

That works if you lean right, too.

 

[JunkMonkey]

That works if you lean right, too.

But you don't have to lean so far over.

 

[Toby Frost]

Well, I managed to see the Newsnight interview and, having also read the speech, I think the writer who walked out of it overreacted. It seems like the sort of fairly reasonable, robust discussion one should expect on any topic. The response to the speech seems also to completely miss the distinction between writer and publisher, as if the writer has ultimate control of what appears in print. It seems entirely legitimate for a writer to reply “Take this up with the publishers, not me”.

As ever with these things, there isn’t any clear idea being put forward of what should be done. Could Shriver, being a white, middle-class American, ever get it right, even if she wrote books berating herself and her “people”, whoever they may be? I doubt it. In the absence of concrete suggestions, it’s not surprising that people deride this sort of thing as virtue-signalling. If the people making these claims want to be taken seriously, they need to make some actual suggestions about reforming the industry, which I doubt they will ever do.

A further point: if a “privileged” author of the first world writes a book about, say, life in Botswana, is this stealing opportunities from writers from Botswana? I am not convinced that it is. Yes, there is a chance that the publisher will say “We’ve got our Botswana book for this year now”, but there is also just as much chance that they will think “Let’s find the true native voice of Botswana and make some money from that” or “Let’s have some more books about and from this interesting place”. I am not sure that there is a fixed number of places for books about one topic and that first world authors are stealing them. The fact that local authors don’t get the coverage they deserve is, once again, not the problem of an individual writer. It is, to use a slightly naff phrase, the product of the system.

 

[aThenian]

The whole Elena Ferrante storm that has just broken is interesting re this debate. I wonder if she wanted to be anonymous so as to be free to write without commentators crawling all over her life asking if she genuinely was in a position to write about growing up in a Neapolitan slum (the background of her Neapolitan novels). Or whether she wanted readers not to be asking themselves questions about authenticity and her background as they read novels which do very much feel like memoirs? If so, I feel sympathetic to her. A book should be able to stand without needing any biographical details about the person writing it.

Elena Ferrante: Journalist defends unmasking 'anonymous' author - BBC News - and loads of articles elsewhere.

 

[MWagner]

Well, I managed to see the Newsnight interview and, having also read the speech, I think the writer who walked out of it overreacted. It seems like the sort of fairly reasonable, robust discussion one should expect on any topic. The response to the speech seems also to completely miss the distinction between writer and publisher, as if the writer has ultimate control of what appears in print. It seems entirely legitimate for a writer to reply “Take this up with the publishers, not me”.

As ever with these things, there isn’t any clear idea being put forward of what should be done. Could Shriver, being a white, middle-class American, ever get it right, even if she wrote books berating herself and her “people”, whoever they may be? I doubt it. In the absence of concrete suggestions, it’s not surprising that people deride this sort of thing as virtue-signalling. If the people making these claims want to be taken seriously, they need to make some actual suggestions about reforming the industry, which I doubt they will ever do.

Yes, in many cases these complaints betray a misunderstanding of how the market works. They imply a world where rich white men put their feet up on desks and make arbitrary decisions about what to publish based on their egregious patriarchal biases. Activists are so obsessed with distress and the potential for distress - turned it almost into a kind of sanctified virtue - that they don't seem to give any thought to utilitarian concerns such as markets, costs, limited resources, and customer demand. Never mind the simple fact that only a tiny fraction of books submitted by all authors - white, black, Asian, male, female - are ever commercially published.

 

[Hex]

I'm not sure where I stand on this (or if I need to stand on it at all), but I did enjoy The Guardian's article, linked upthread, for the range of approaches to the question.

[Rant about bad writing on Scotland begins....]

I don't like books that take my culture and turn it into a backdrop for idiotic romance. It pisses me off fairly seriously. I resent it when idiots try to put my accent into text, when they've clearly never actually heard anyone like me speak, and they mix accents from different parts of my country and clearly never showed their work to anyone who knew anything about it. It rankles, partly because the internet is full of people who know how Scottish people speak -- many of them Scots -- so why is it OK for big publishing houses to publish works where "Och laddie, aye ye ken, Tammy?" is assumed to be the way Highland men relate to each other? It would take minutes to check -- if anyone made the effort. We even speak the same language FFS.

There's a lot of it about -- the fetishisation of hairy highlanders, the way authors dwell lovingly on plaid and scones and how rough, tough and brave highlanders are. It's a nice cliche, but it's a boring one now. I got about 6 pages into whatever the book version of Outlander is before I threw it on the floor and jumped on it. My Canadian friend loved it, but then she wasn't brought up in my culture.

And, yes. It is my culture. It's not just mine, but it's mine (and I was brought up in an enclave of highlanders stuck in the lowlands, so I'm not equating highland culture and Edinburgh culture).

I like it when people try. There are so many examples of people not trying that I won't bore on about them (Scooby Doo and the Loch Ness Monster is a good example -- no one on that seems to have heard a Scot speak, let alone thinking of employing a Scottish actor). But, for example, a company came to Edinburgh during the Fringe with a play about William Wallace. Most of the actors' accents were atrocious but one of them had taught himself some gaelic and used it, and I appreciated that he'd bothered.

So if you hear me say this, and your reaction is:

"Stop telling me what to write", it looks like our conversation is over and I will never bother buying your book.

If you hear me and you say: "Actually, I was going to write a historical romance about the highlands of Scotland. Would you check it over and make sure I don't make any horrific errors like calling a man 'Tammy'?" I would smile through my teeth and agree, because although I don't think the world needs yet another romance about highlanders written by someone whose only experience of Scotland is the odd piece of shortbread with their coffee, if that's what you want to do, I appreciate that you listened and you want to avoid the horrors.

People who have an ear for accents and the will to research are surprisingly rare, and publishers do not require accuracy in what is written about Scotland -- or elsewhere, I assume -- and as a result a whole heap of rubbish is published that is borderline offensive. Borderline offensive and &*&&&ing BORING. You might not see it, other Scots might not have a problem with it, but it makes me angry.

Forgive me the rant but if all the highland romance gets under my skin, I can see why other people get cross when their culture is used as a poorly understood backdrop for The Adventures of the American (or Englishwoman or... etc etc), and I wouldn't be surprised if people who have fairly recently been treated badly by the cultures of those producing these works of fiction might find it harder than I do. And it's worse that these are the cultures that dominate publishing. I'm OK -- there's a lot of good Scottish writing (not all of it by Scots) and my culture has a lot to represent it, partly because it's part of the dominant culture itself.

[rant about Scotland ends]

I don't think we need to sit back and say: "OK then. I won't write about anything I don't know" but I do think we need to *listen* when people make these points and have the humility to recognise that just because the way in which the point is made is angry or incoherent or mis-spelt or whatever else, it doesn't necessarily invalidate the point itself. In The Guardian article a lot of people were being very polite and gentle -- far more polite and gentle than Shriver or most of the other opponents of the "cultural appropriation" idea have bothered to be (and why, one wonders, did they feel the need to be so careful about what they said?), but their message is: "Listen and be careful."

In our history we have silenced all sorts of voices. Do you think we might still be doing that?

We have always made some people's voices more important than others and it is frustrating to be turned into a cartoon or a cliche -- witness the huge fuss about that YA film where the disabled guy just wants to die.

People get angry when they're frustrated, and they shout, but I think we're doing ourselves no favours if all we can do with their pain and anger is get defensive and find reasons to ignore it. We're writers, aren't we? Do we really need to close down any form of thought on this without exploring it?

Is there anything you can see in this debate that seems worth considering? Is there any chance we can write characters more sympathetically, more thoughtfully, more effectively by listening to what people are telling us and giving it space in our heads?

 

[AnyaKimlin]

I do understand cultural appropriation but there are times when I think it becomes segregation "you can't wear braids because you're not black." But I also understand the roots of it and the frustration.

However, whilst at the BBC I was asked to more than once to write a piece with a Scottish flavour. So I wrote the Scotland I know - NE Scotland. But the first things to always get removed from my scripts by the English/Glaswegian team were the NE Scots elements. (I'm not talking difficult to follow language). Anything that rooted the stories North of Glasgow were dismissed.

They also at the time produced this travesty:

I was asked for my opinion so not liking it I started to ask other people so I could give a more balanced view. The general opinion was that it was offensive. Partly because it's a mountain rescue team and I live in the town where the RAF team was based until recently. The mountain rescue teams in Scotland are pretty damn amazing and are more Bluestone 42 than Last of the Summer Wine when it comes to comedy material. It was a Glaswegian's day out in the Highlands and had paid no attention to the culture of the area. It was stuck back in the late 80s/early 90s. I also didn't understand why the language was more Scouse than Scots/Doric/Gaelic

When I broached this at a meeting my views were dismissed as "touchy". I worked at a couple of pubs during that time and Jimmy the MC does not work as a Highland outdoors man. The village idiot type character he was supposed to represent wouldn't have needed SatNav to get around (which was portrayed) but there's no way they wouldn't know where the bloody river was as they used it to help themselves to their tea on a regular basis. There was no North of Scotland culture in it. I then sat and listened to the producer tell me how important culture was in comedy!

I get why people do get offended. I've seen how culture is misrepresented and diluted by a major broadcaster.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

I'm not sure where I stand on this (or if I need to stand on it at all), but I did enjoy The Guardian's article, linked upthread, for the range of approaches to the question.

[Rant about bad writing on Scotland begins....]

Snort - I think I owe you a soda lol

 

[Ursa major]

far more polite and gentle than Shriver

I suspect that Shriver has had a lot of experience of people telling her that she isn't entitled to write what she does. She gave an example of this in her speech in Queensland, where she was attacked** by someone for writing a novel based on the experiences of her own brother (a book that the person attacking her had not, and would never, read).

The problem is -- and I don't know if this can be attributed mainly to the media or mainly to those who see a career in being a spokesperson for the downtrodden (which they themselves rarely seem to be) -- that:

1. there is, as you (and Anya) have described, a lot of ignorant trampling on people's sensibilities, and people are right to complain when stereotypical behaviour is applied to this or that group (particularly where the stereotype has absolutely no foundation on anything in real life);
2. there are people who seem so sensitive that they'd complain at perfection if it was produced by the wrong sort of person (note that this a game that all*** can play);
3. there are those intent on building a reputation (and, perhaps, a career) by jumping on the nearest convenient bandwagon.

These three types -- there are probably more -- get mixed up with each other. On the one hand, this allows the easy dismissal of valid complaints. On the other, it allows too much credence to be given to a load of flimsy, and self-advancing, nonsense.


** - If a self-appointed "guardian of the truth that only they can guard" told me that I shouldn't have written a book about someone with a condition endured by a very close relative of mine, but not by me personally, I'd be tempted to be a damned sight less polite about it than Shriver was in her speech.

*** - The complaint that "authentic" people never get their stories in print could easily be seen as an attack on publishers**** preferring their authors to be just like them.

**** - One wonders what would happen if publishers declared themselves to be a culture apart from all others, so that only they were allowed to publish anything. I can almost hear the CEO of one of the big publishing houses declaring, "Self-publishers are appropriating our culture. They are giving our noble arts of editing, proof reading, copy-editing, etc., a bad name with the public, a public deluged with badly written, poorly edited, self-published garbage that gives the impression that what they're doing is proper publishing. I demand that they stop doing this now!"

 

[MWagner]

I don't think we need to sit back and say: "OK then. I won't write about anything I don't know" but I do think we need to *listen* when people make these points and have the humility to recognise that just because the way in which the point is made is angry or incoherent or mis-spelt or whatever else, it doesn't necessarily invalidate the point itself. In The Guardian article a lot of people were being very polite and gentle -- far more polite and gentle than Shriver or most of the other opponents of the "cultural appropriation" idea have bothered to be (and why, one wonders, did they feel the need to be so careful about what they said?), but their message is: "Listen and be careful."

But do people write with any more nuance or authenticity about their own culture? From what I see of pop culture - no. If you want commercial success you employ cliches, because most people enjoy cliches and don't want to be challenged. This has nothing to do with cultural appropriation - it's just as common when people create mainstream entertainment about their own culture. Hard-bitten private investigators with drinking problems. Snobby WASPS who belong to country clubs. Empty-headed Californians who talk like surfers. Matronly Italian mothers heaping food on the table.

Cliches are bad insofar as they're lazy writing. They're also almost unavoidable in commercial books and movies. Genres come with expectations, and few genre readers want to be challenged to step outside their comfort zone. Criticize the authenticity of a popular novel and watch the fanboys and fangirls leap down your throat and tell you to stop being so negative and just enjoy the story. So I'm all for writers striving for greater authenticity. But we shouldn't be under any illusions about the impact it usually has on popular appeal.

And when it comes to identity politics, the most ardent activists don't seem to make any distinction between authentic and in-authentic depictions of different people - they're against it full stop. They don't want a fluid exchange of cultures because they're essentially neo-segregationists.

 

[Extollager]

Hex's remarks in #71 above remind me of a speech prof where I teach. He's a good ol' academic liberal so far as I know, producing The Vagina Monologues and so on. But... it seems when he wants to convey the idea of a stupid person, he affects an "Okie" or "Southern" accent.

In the US, for all the rattle and buzz about diversity, it seems it's quite okay to invoke stereotypes of Appalachian Protestants etc. as villains or fools.

 

[MWagner]

Hex's remarks in #71 above remind me of a speech prof where I teach. He's a good ol' academic liberal so far as I know, producing The Vagina Monologues and so on. But... it seems when he wants to convey the idea of a stupid person, he affects an "Okie" or "Southern" accent.

In the US, for all the rattle and buzz about diversity, it seems it's quite okay to invoke stereotypes of Appalachian Protestants etc. as villains or fools.

Sadly, we seem hard-wired to need to regard groups of people as buffoons (who we can look down on to build up our own esteem) or villains (who we fear and resent). Even those who are most passionate about combating stereotypes have their own prejudices and blind spots. Hillbillies. Trailer trash. The wealthy. 'The media.' etc. Who it's acceptable to vilify depends entirely on your social tribe.

 

[Toby Frost]

Look on the bright side, Scots. In your stereotype, you're honest, noble workers. You're Celtic, which means you get super-strength, berserker rage and you're good at dancing. And whisky! It's like being a nice Viking.

The English, on the other hand... we're halfwits, snobs and cowards. We didn't even show up for WW2, except when we were being Nazi officers. We even built the Titanic just so we could drown all the pixie folk in steerage class. I saw it in a James Cameron film so it's obviously true. We're the worst people in the world!

Ah, Hollywood. Where would we be without you?

[Insert "It was a joke" smiley, just in case ]

 

[Extollager]

Here's a commentary on the situation that started the controversy reported by this thread.

Who Speaks for a Culture?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Celtic cultural appropriation. You all want to try being Oirish. They get appropriated everywhere....