Novelist hopes militancy against "cultural appropriation" will pass

[AnyaKimlin]

Sorry you don't feel that my point was useful.

I was trying to get the idea across that we know all sorts about Scots (and in fact most of the silly representations of them are perpetrated by Scots -- it's a bit different when someone else mocks us),.

It's a bit difficult when everything else gets edited out.

 

[Hex]

I worry that you don't give enough credence to the impact fiction has on people. Yes, I think we're intelligent human beings, but fiction is supposed to aim for truth of some kind -- an emotional truth if not an actual reality. The settings we use and the characters we have are supposed to be representations of something real in some way, even if they're monsters or aliens.

If you had a Glaswegian speaking with a Morningside accent I would probably assume you were too lazy to distinguish (well, I wouldn't with you, but if you were a novelist I didn't know), but I expect that such a person would every so often encounter people who were surprised at his speaking like he does, and would comment on it. I would, therefore, expect a novelist who actually knew the context he was writing about to put in one of those encounters, or something like it, to indicate that the strange accent of his Glaswegian character was not simply accidental.

Similarly, I know a south american woman who is very attractive and vivacious and flirty but I would think twice before I put her into a story because I am aware that this is a bit of a cliche. I wouldn't necessarily not do it, but I'd consider it carefully before I did.

Ultimately, we may feel one way about an issue but it's not unreasonable to assume that other people might feel very differently. We can't dismiss centuries of slavery or colonialism -- we did not experience them. If we are experiencing the aftermath, it's as our ongoing wealth and the advantages accrued from ruling big bits of the world for a long time. If people tell us their experience and we dismiss it because it's not our experience, we impoverish ourselves not only as writers but as readers as well.

EDIT: but you're as Scottish as I am, Anya, if you choose to be.

 

[MWagner]

That is why the creation and scapegoating of out-groups, carried out so painfully just now in the UK and the US, is so dangerous and permits such hatred -- people who condone the death of refugees genuinely do not recognise them as equally human.

We see it in every corner of the planet, and always have. Google South Africa immigrants murder. Or Indonesia Chinese riots. Or how people in the UK or North America can be deeply emotionally invested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and regard one side as valiant defenders and the other as murderous villains.

I admire what we see of Canada.

We do a better job than most of welcoming and integrating new immigrants (though you wouldn't know it from reading the endless opinion pieces in the media about endemic racism and oppression). However, my sense is a big reason we haven't seen the kind of populist uprising we're witnessing in the UK and the U.S. right now is because the Canadian counterparts of the under-educated and insecure rural types who are leading the uprising in those countries have enjoyed good jobs and a high standard of living in the Canadian energy industry over the last 10-15 years. With the steep decline in the price of oil, and steep rise in unemployment as a consequence, I expect we'll see an upsurge in anti-establishment nativism in Canada.

You've given a confusing picture here I think - on the one hand we're violent primates, on the other we're social animals. The two are separated by a massive gulf, imo. Malice and everything like it comes from our psychologies, not from our animal instincts, of which, in adults, virtually none are left - again, imo.

I agree with this, but, again, there's a conflation of sophisticated and primitive. Personally, I don't think it helps the debate to pretend we're still primitive, instinct-driven primates. It is good though to see past bog-standard good vs. evil.

If you believe evolutionary psychology (as I do), our minds are still deeply rooted in primitive instincts that we acquired over millennia of evolution. Everything from sexual impulses to status seeking behaviour to our eating habits are derived from the needs of our primitive ancestors. We can make headway against those instincts (civilisation itself is evidence of that), but we need to recognise that it is our innate desires that we're struggling against, and not some peculiar defect of some cultures.

For instance, we know that our natural appetites lead us to eat more sugar and fat than is good for us. Commercial interest may exploit those natural appetites, but it doesn't summon them up out of the ether. So just as it's not enough to restrict advertising for fast food (though that probably helps), it's not enough to reform social institutions that perpetrate tribal identity. Just as we ultimately need to recognise that a healthy diet means each individual must discipline themselves to resist those natural appetites, a healthy society means each individual must resist other natural instincts regarding groups and identity.

This is one of the things that make me conflicted as a writer, especially one who is writing genre fiction. The purpose of popular fiction is to give people an emotional catharsis, typically by presenting two conflicting moral codes and showing the ideal code triumph. To achieve that, we craft dramatic narratives that evoke our natural desire for a simple emotional truths about heroes and villains, us and them. Those simple emotional truths are often a crutch, and a delusion. It's no surprise that when confronted with a distressing situation in the real world, people often look for who the villain of the story is, and if none is immediately at hand they assign the role to someone. This is rarely useful in addressing complex issues.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

EDIT: but you're as Scottish as I am, Anya, if you choose to be.

I'm not Scottish but I've lived in Scotland longer than I've lived anywhere else. And when I've worked its been in the museums or the pubs I'm actually in the process of moving Black's Nest properly up North.

My dominant heritage is Scouse with a Liverpool Irish (Prodestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish because those things were important to the older generation when I was a kid) background, and I'm proud of it, because although my Dad was from Yorkshire I didn't really know his family. And my grandfather was Liverpool Scots but he blended into the background as did the Welsh great-uncle and the English one. That's the family I grew up with. Which is probably why I find Mrs Brown's Boys as funny as anything (although that was produced in Scotland).

 

[Dave]

But we're talking about fiction, though. By definition, made up. I'm not sure how 'misrepresentations' in fiction can be 'serious'. Serious in what way?

I partly agree with you Boneman, but I do think that you are speaking from the point of view of an educated person, knowledgeable about history and geography. Not everyone is so well educated, so I'm tending to agree with the others. Many people get all of their knowledge about such things from dramas on TV and from films. They don't critically examine Wolf Hall or Poldark or I Claudius or The Jewel in the Crown (all based upon novels.) To those people they watch/read a re-creation of fact, not fiction or 'faction.' If we believed what we watched in Hollywood film, then the USA took part in the Battle of Britain, obtained an Enigma machine, and single-handedly invaded the Normandy beaches.

 

[Ursa major]

Yes, I think we're intelligent human beings, but fiction is supposed to aim for truth of some kind -- an emotional truth if not an actual reality. The settings we use and the characters we have are supposed to be representations of something real in some way, even if they're monsters or aliens.

No-one here is disagreeing with this. the problem is a small number of people saying that no-one should even bother attempting to do a good job, because they shouldn't be doing the job at all.

As for being wary of perpetuating stereotypes.... of course we should. And we should also be wary of any straight copying of reality into fiction as it doesn't necessarily work: some of it is far too dull and some parts of reality aren't believable enough to be used as fiction.


By the way, the example I gave from Shriver's speech was about a character in one of her novels who was grossly obese (based on her brother, who died as a result of his weight problems) and so had nothing at all to do with colonialism or slavery. This is what happens in an environment where random people feel that they are allowed to censor others: anyone can do it.

I'd like to think that calls of this type from the furthest fringes would always fall on empty ears (meaning that that there would be no real-world consequences for those they wish to censor), but the last few years have demonstrated that campaigns based in misconceptions, lies and/or over-heated emotions -- whether formal or "just" FacePalm-/Twitter-storms -- are, sadly, not guaranteed to fail.

I do think that you are speaking from the point of view of an educated person, knowledgeable about history and geography

My first impressions -- through fictional representations -- of quite a few nationalities were gained when I was far from educated in anything much at all: I was either too young to have been to school at the time, or was at Infant school.

 

[Hex]

No, indeed. The world is full of idiots.

However, by picking on the guy who told her not to write something without reading it, I wonder if it's easy to ignore people who do have a genuine grievance, which is a point you made above and one I thought was really important. I think it's a good idea to try to hear the genuine and not get distracted by the flashy idiots or twitter storms.

I am aware that sensible, rational and thoughtful human beings who actually have experience in the relevant areas feel this debate is not as straightforward as it seems from Shriver's perspective, and I'd like them to have space to speak (whether they choose to take it or not) without being shouted down and silenced.

 

[WaylanderToo]

and on the subject of (possible) idiots...

Musical 'Aida' cancelled at Bristol University amid race row over 'cultural appropriation'


might one imagine that there are not a surfit of Egyptian students at Bristol Uni? One might further hypothesise that of those that are there'd be an even smaller number of students that were

a: interested in acting
b: female (and interested in acting)
c: talented enough (and female and interested in acting)

Welcome 1984 - truthspeak is upon us

 

[AnyaKimlin]

might one imagine that there are not a surfit of Egyptian students at Bristol Uni?

There were a handful there back in the early 1990s, but maybe universities are less diverse now. Bristol was a good university with a number of specialisms that attracted people from around the world.

 

[Ursa major]

However, by picking on the guy who told her not to write something without reading it, I wonder if it's easy to ignore people who do have a genuine grievance

I don't think the one follows the other. The person complaining -- the "guy" was a woman -- did not have a genuine grievance but a "political" position, that the thin Shriver should not have written a book about the less-than-thin.

And Shriver didn't pick on her. I have no idea who the person was: Shriver said nothing about her other than mentioning her gender. If you read the speech (printed in the Grauniad), Shriver tried to engage with her:

Especially in the US, fat is now one of those issues where you either have to be one of us, or you’re the enemy. I verified this when I had a long email correspondence with a “Healthy at Any Size” activist, who was incensed by the novel, which she hadn’t even read. Which she refused to read. No amount of explaining that the novel was on her side, that it was a book that was terribly pained by the way heavy people are treated and how unfairly they are judged, could overcome the scrawny author’s photo on the flap.

 

[Boneman]

That the "stereotypes" and "gross misrepresentations of reality" don't simply continue, but reinforce real-life attitudes towards other people to their detriment.

At some point we in the West decided that certain racial depictions were abhorrent - Fu Manchu villains and "primitive" African barbarians come immediately to mind as staple enemies of good white civilised heroes of the early 20th century, that are no long tolerated.

IMO the argument against "cultural appropriation" is simply that lesser extremes are also unwelcome. Some may not see their harm, but other people do.

Stereotypes exist. It's generally accepted that when we use that word, we're referring to an oversimplified idea of a particular type of person, or thing, a fixed view of it. All barmen have beer bellies, all alcoholics are down-and-outs, all drug addicts live in seedy hovels and use crime to feed their habit, all motorcyclists in black leathers are bad guys, and so on. The truth is, some barmen have beer bellies, some alcoholics are down-and-out etc etc.

But it's when the stereotype has a negative connotation that its use becomes lazy, unintelligent, and from what's been said, detrimental to whomever we are stereotyping. As I pointed out with the French example this was actually used in the 60s in comics I read, and in early books at that time they always reeked of garlic and smoked Gauloises. That stereotype has disappeared. It's actually pretty insulting, and could well have reinforced real-life attitudes that some people may have held. It wasn't true, it was the attitude people held - their own belief system, nothing more. It didn't disappear because there was a massive outcry by the French, it disappeared because it was patently untrue. (Even though it was possible to find a Frenchman who reeked of garlic and gauloises...) Now, however, it seems that those stereotypes that are perceived as negative by some people must be rooted out, wherever they are found. Couldn't agree more, but if they're untrue, will they not disappear in the fullness of time - ie naturally, when the truth becomes generally accepted? Why are we blaming fiction for this?

If some see no harm in lesser extremes and others do, which of those two groups is right? Both are belief systems. Should one group be allowed to impose their wishes on the other? Or should each individual be allowed to make up their own minds, based on their own beliefs? If fiction is influencing those beliefs, I'd a) like to see the evidence and b) say that if you can be influenced by fiction into believing it's real, then you can be influenced by anything, and sanitizing fiction will make no difference to those people.

 

[Toby Frost]

This is one of the things that make me conflicted as a writer, especially one who is writing genre fiction. The purpose of popular fiction is to give people an emotional catharsis, typically by presenting two conflicting moral codes and showing the ideal code triumph.

Well, yes and no. Firstly, while there certainly are a lot of books in which the main question is “How will the good guys defeat the bad guys?”, I think there’s also a lot of room for “The search for morals in an chaotic setting”. I’d say that a lot of noir novels fit that description, where the solving of the crime isn’t so much the state (the good guys) defeating the criminal, but the detective struggling to impose some small amount of rightness on a world that fundamentally isn’t right, for his own good as much as anyone else’s. Even some books in which there are clear goodies and baddies (Memory, Sorrow and Thorn springs to mind), the characters struggle to understand how the world went wrong.

Secondly, what if we say that the enemy is not so much the bad guys as the mentality that creates them? It seems to me that virtually all evil committed on behalf of a doctrine is driven by a sort of totalitarian mentality, the belief that the believer is no longer subject to normal morality because they are absolutely correct. This explains virtually everything from the Thirty Years’ War to the person who lobbed a brick into his MP’s office a while ago: once you are on the side of the righteous, you can no longer do wrong, no matter what you do. Did you ever see The Ascent of Man? Professor Bronowski said that the end result of thinking that you could not be wrong was that you committed murder. So that sense of villainy is still there, but the sense of good thrashing bad is made more subtle by the knowledge that it is only a temporary victory (cue cheesy speech about what evil lies in the hearts of men, probably accompanied by crude-but-true Kipling quote).

 

[Stephen Palmer]

If you believe evolutionary psychology (as I do)

Very much not!

 

[JunkMonkey]

Also, villains are often English men. Why is that? Charles Dance has SO much to answer for. And he's ginger.

The English Villain became such a cultural stereotype in Hollywood that when Alien Nation was made in 1988

Quarter of a million aliens are processed through immigration and learn English with remarkable speed - the alien half of our hero partners (a demihero?) tells the human half he learned English in three months - they landed in America, they live in America. They have assimilated to American culture incredibly well in three years. Why then is the bad guy alien the only person in the whole movie who doesn't have an American accent - in fact he has a British accent? Answer: Because he is played by Terrence Stamp. And he's the villain.

 

[Dave]

This is way off topic, but I'm sure we can trace the rise of British villains in American movies much earlier than that. What about Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter to start off?

 

[Toby Frost]

Silence of the Lambs is the early 90s, isn't it? Really, any WW2 film made after 1950 or so should do the job.

 

[Nick B]

I think I read somewhere that george lucas cast most imperial officers with english actors bebause he was anti-english. That was 1970s of course.

 

[Ursa major]

I think I read somewhere that george lucas cast most imperial officers with english actors bebause he was anti-english.

On the other hand, the voice actors playing Darth Vader have all been Americans, the actors playing Anakin have all been from North America and the two actors playing Obi Wan Kenobi have been from the UK (using English accents).

 

[MWagner]

I think I read somewhere that george lucas cast most imperial officers with english actors bebause he was anti-english. That was 1970s of course.

Most of the non-Tatooine scenes were shot in a studio outside London. Makes sense Lucas would use local actors for the small parts.

 

[Brian G Turner]

British villains

Since 1773.