To think this is ridiculous? Re: Guardian opinion piece on cultural appropriation

[Feminazi]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/10/as-lionel-shriver-made-light-of-identity-i-had-no-choice-but-to-walk-out-on-her

This writer sounds like a spoilt child, unable to listen to anyone else's opinion!

Her own point is quite frankly ridiculous too! She claims that nobody should write about what they can't experience, it's cultural appropriation if they do!

Fiction is written for the audience. It is neither reality nor truth. Let's imagine for a minute that a homosexual Guarani boy wrote a book. Unless he had knowledge about the cultures he was writing for, chances are it would not be successful. That and the fact that fictional story books have no place in his culture.

So it's best if fictional books stick to only their cultural perspectives, the rest of the world is largely ignored and most people in the western world are quite ignorant about other cultures. It will stay like that too if people start restricting what can written about.

What if a white straight man invents a hero or character that opens people up to the idea of learning, researching and becoming intrested in another culture or lifestyle?

So this is now a bad thing and people can only write about their own cultural experiences, problem is that writing is itself part of very few cultures, restricting what they can write about will result in those cultures staying insular.

Oh and just to make this clear:

Cultural appropriation is NOT about writing what you know, it's about NOT WRITING WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW. These aren't fairy stories, THEY ARE NARRATIVES ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE'S LIVES WHO EXIST WHO DON'T GET TO TELL THEIR STORIES.

Also, these examples are so embarrassingly poor.

• Anna Karenina is an example of an author writing what he knew. He based EVERY CHARACTER off PEOPLE HE KNEW. That was his world*

• Harry Potter is an example of an author writing what she knows. It's all based off classic British boarding school tropes. Please read the comments Americans have made about her American wizards in the new books. They aren't as good because gasp JK Rowling doesn't know American narratives as well as she knows the UK

-GRRM is writing stories grounded in CLASSICAL HIGH FANTASY. Ffs, it's an inversion of Tolkien. It's completely what he knows. Can people even read?

• The Shakespeare one is just embarrassing. Do people understand about allegory and subtext? Shakespeare didn't go to Denmark dur dur dur.

The writer is super annoying and seriously overstating but the critiques on this thread seem to come from people who may pick up a book once a year in between Eastenders. I don't think you are the hero the English language is looking for!

Yes, but if a white straight man wrote a book about women, and portrayed them in a way that the mainstream view approved of/felt comfortable with, then it could project a FALSE view of women (or people of color) which is self-reinforcing and creates the illusion of opening awareness when really it just makes stereotypes stronger.

If that happened you could get false beliefs like women not really wanting sex, they have to be persuaded (Richard III, from Shakespeare), or childbirth being a cough and a sneeze (see just about all of TV & movies, but there's a recent thread on it) or cartoons where the Native Indian Americans say 'm' after everything and everyone's called great big chief little'm, or rape victims who just need a damn good shag by the right man to cure them (Dexter) of children who don't need hours and hours of care because they conveniently disappear when the plot requires it (all of TV & movies).

I could go on forever - because that list describes pretty much ALL of history.

Quite frankly, white people have been the dominant voice for long enough. We should just sit down and shut up and let someone else have a turn.

x-post - response to Calpora.

I heart All the Small Things (that book as well)

She may well have a point, but her melodramatic, teenage tantrum style of expressing it bored me to tears and I found it difficult to wade through the self-indulgence to get to it.

KickAss- you are silly. How boring, if black authors were not allowed to create characters of an Asian background, or women were not allowed to have male characters in their books. Where I live, if one was to write about what they knew it would involve people from all backgrounds- as my family, workmates and neighbours are.

She didn't have a point- it's typical of the awful, shoddy journalism that the Guardian is churning out these days- It has become byword for amateurish reporting in the printed word world, which is a shame.

I think she has a valid point.

From her article I believe she understands that fiction is 'fake' but her concerns were that Lionel Shriver was so blasé and dismissive of cultural appropriation. This attitude adds to the issue of racial inequality and that she and others do not understand privilege.

GRRM isn't just playing fictional games. A huge part of his interaction with Tolkein etc is his attempt to deal with what it's like to be a woman or a disabled person under a particularly oppressive patriarchy. I think he should be judged on his ability to do that well, and judged particularly by the standards of people who have that type of experience even though the particular society he's written is his own, but he should be able to give it a go.

Personally, I would rather hear from working class authors of all races- that is the real issue we face- an alarmingly middle class view of the world.

Shriver's just a bloody awful writer and thoroughly self obsessed. Reason enough to avoid the sodding lecture imho

I think she has a good point, made very badly. There are so many examples of non-white people being sidelined in their own stories to make it a narrative about a white saviour (Cry Freedom, Mississipi Burning, Last Samurai). There are so many examples of white authors accounts of African and Asian countries being published while the authors from those countries are marginalised.

Minge

GRRM isn't just playing fictional games. A huge part of his interaction with Tolkein etc is his attempt to deal with what it's like to be a woman or a disabled person under a particularly oppressive patriarchy. I think he should be judged on his ability to do that well, and judged particularly by the standards of people who have that type of experience even though the particular society he's written is his own, but he should be able to give it a go.

Who has said GRRM is culturally appropriating?

Hmmm. I don't think fiction can be culturally appropriating, because it's fiction. As a reader we can decide whether we think e.g. Mma Ramotswe is a believable black African woman detective. Fiction would be very limited if people only wrote about their own experience (and not fiction, by definition).
The dominance of white male authors I think is down to ingrained patriarchal and racist society. There is a tendency to dismiss women's writing as "chick lit". And non-white authors are quite rare. I don't know how we tackle it though.
I agree with the PPs who said the writing in the article was terrible. I can't believe she actually wrote "cultural appropriation is a thing" in an article. Yuck.

If she walked out, how are we (or the writer) going to know whether Lionel Shriver completed her ponderings on the issue? And whether there was a true reason for a flounce?!

The writer clearly likes to add a bit of drama. It's all a bit overblown. Like a Kate Bush song in person.

There is a point there, it's worth discussing about fiction vs appropriation- but not via this article which is pish.

I'm not entirely sure what point the writer was making about Shriver's speech, as she was, by her own account not in the room for the whole of it. She does not engage with what Shriver apparently said, just records her own outraged reactions.

Shockingly bad as an attempt at putting forward any argument/analysis.

As for the purple prose....I'm a lifelong Guardian reader and even when not agreeing with what some of their journalists say, have no quarrel with their written expression, but this was utter utter shite.

so anna karenina is ok cos the author was writing about people he knew but ladies detective agency isnt ok cos ....?

There is a point there, it's worth discussing about fiction vs appropriation- but not via this article which is pish.

VeryPunny- RE: Ghost in the shell. A lot of my Japanese friends say that she is the epitome of what the character should be.

She may well have a point, but her melodramatic, teenage tantrum style of expressing it bored me to tears and I found it difficult to wade through the self-indulgence to get to it.

Me too, unfortunately. There's a really interesting and engaging article to be written on the subject, but this one isn't it.

The writer of the article is slightly hysterical but does have a point. She is entitled to write about her feelings.

Yes fiction is fake, and there is something to be said about the role of a man writing from a pretend women's perspective being potentially insightful. But there are a huge number of tropes perpetuated by rich priviledged white men that do need to be challenged. Manic pixie dream girls anyone?!

And they aren't challenged. I love Shakespeare and have learned a huge amount about life, love and death from the insight in his plays, but it still annoys me that Othello is ever considered anything other than a steaming pile of misogynistic horse shite, for example.

Lionel Shriver leaves a bad taste in the mouth speaking as a rich white woman defending her own freedom of opinion and speech but denying it of others.

Ian McEwan has also been given air time recently to smugly and sneeringly dismiss identity politics. Well he would wouldn't he?

Because Ian McEwan. Is. A. Twat.

Why is Ian McEwan a teat? I like his books. Well the ones I've read anyway.

Lionel Shriver leaves a bad taste in the mouth speaking as a rich white woman defending her own freedom of opinion and speech but denying it of others.

How exactly does Shriver deny others their freedom of opinion?

Lena Dunham was strongly criticised by some black feminists for not including black characters in Girls. Now we're told white people should avoid writing about black people because it's cultural appropriation. So which is it?

We need to fix the problem from the bottom up, and this solution is a top-down one.

What I mean is, the lack of non-white, non-straight, non-male, non-working class, non-Western, etc. authors is a problem but the only way it can be addressed is by publishing more women, more non-white, more working class, queer, non-Western authors.

Banning straight middle class white men from writing about anything other than straight middle class white men would do absolutely nothing except increase the number of books written about straight middle-class white men. The media industry for the most part don't actually care. If white men stopped writing WoC, they wouldn't go "OMG get me some WoC authors asap, we can't live without WoC characters!" I know plenty of publishers and production companies who are run by men with zero interest in stories other than ones about middle-class straight white men. You have to work like hell to get something with a female lead (other than rom-com/chicklit) or something with a non-white lead commissioned. It's genuinely terrifying, the active resistance to it.

Alexander McCall Smith probably had to climb a mountain to convince a publisher to take a chance on a book with a black African female lead character. And this absolutely sucks, but if McCall Smith had been an African woman he'd probably have never got within 50 feet of that publisher in the first place. If those books hadn't been published, they wouldn't have gone out and published a book actually written by by an African woman instead. They'd have published yet another Will Self wannabe or something.

The only solution really is for those of us who care about diversity to try to keep plugging away, getting our own work out there, and doing what we can to help others do likewise. And wait for the old white man brigade to die off I guess?