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!

Very interesting cross post Lorelei!!!

thanks for the links Arfarfanarf

I can see that the concept of cultural appropriation involves a dominant culture vs a disadvantaged one.

I guess the appropriation must also be "unauthorised", for instance if you buy an Inca poncho in Peru from a Peruvian artisan that is willing to sell to tourists, surely that doesn't count. However, if I start producing Inca-style ponchos in London (and I am not Peruvian) that would be cultural appropriation. Is this right?

hackmum thanks for explaining. I'm all for The Guardian being accessible to new writers still learning their craft - otherwise how does anyone get better? I just thought it was shame to find such a gobsmackingly bad article on a very interesting/complex topic.

CompanyofCats "That whole 'let them see your face' thing gives me a full body cringe"

obviously I can hazard a guess at what this is but it's not something I've come across before - does it essentially mean "reveal all personal details in order for your work to be respected"?

I think the argument about writing in the first person 'as' someone who you are very definitely not is quite valid, especially if you are in the oppressor position to the person you are writing as. I like this quote from the article about white South African writers:

'The message to South African writers seems to be to write what they like, but to do it mindfully, to do their homework, and to accept that the critics will probably have a go at them for it anyway.'

I read lots of science fiction and fantasy, which is obviously all imaginative writing, but most use historical and current day societies and places as inspiration and the best authors (IMO) do lots of research, and also write interestingly about how they got their ideas and how they validated them through research and collaboration with experts (so you'll see lots of references to blacksmiths, riding experts, linguistics etc).

I do think it would be a bit arrogant to set a novel in a place you'd never really visited, or to use the experiences of someone you knew very little about. One of the biggest issues with the appropriation of First Nations culture (I'm in Canada and that's the chosen term used for the aboriginal peoples here) is a total lack of respect. So for example with headbands it's not just the use of knock off copies at festivals with no acknowledgement or payment, it's more that they are sacred objects, not to be used for a bit of dress up fun. A total lack of understanding or appreciation from the wearers who almost certainly don't know or care about the culture they are taking from. A culture that the Canadian government did their best to wipe out not even that long ago.

nooka "I do think it would be a bit arrogant to set a novel in a place you'd never really visited"

depends what you mean I guess. I live in a place which has a fascinating history - I mean just the 1/4 mile radius has some amazing stories - but there is nothing of it to really see here. So if someone wrote a novel about my area in the 17th century - or even the 19th in fact - and had never been here, I wouldn't mind at all.

and if they wanted to write about it as it is now, I still wouldn't mind because it is just a generic burb. I like it but if you've been to any London generic less well off burb, you might as well have been here.

Lorelei sorry, i've caused bit of confusion there by posting a few things in a short space of time! The 'let them see your face' bit was about the text that the article's author received whilst in the talk.

The cross post that I referred to with you was my post immediately before yours about shelving a project - we wrote near-identical posts at the same time

Isn't every culture a first nation culture though?
White European origin folk ? descended from somewhere else millions/ billions of years ago anyway also have cultures although we have all conquored each other and intermingled that much that it's a bit meaningless, but the same goes for many non white cultures. "Pure breeds" are thankfully reserved for dogs etc.
If someone who was born elsewhere moves to the UK and writes a book set in the UK, or even writes a book set in the UK never having lived here I don't really care.
Not sure what special UK/ European garments I'd get upset about if someone wore thenm from fancy dress.
It's a good job many of the folk writing these articles weren't kids in the 70s when we watched westerns on Saturday morning TV and then played cowboys and Indians in our dressing up costumes.
If someone elsewhere wants to wear a kilt they're welcome to. Should I get offended at See you Jimmy hats?
Aren't native American Indians and Aborigines allowed to modernise, intermarry and wear 21st century clothes? Are they expected to live in a time warp surrounded by "precious things"?
This view seems really patronising to me and to view people of non white European origin as primitives who "aren't like us".

2rebecca, it's not 'first nations' it's First Nations. This is the term that those groups of people use to describe themselves. The colonial government called them Indian Bands and tried to destroy their culture (and in many case indirectly or even directly wipe them out). As part of self determination they chose a new name which more accurately described them. Why would I use any other term unless I was being deliberately offensive?

I'm a recent arriver in Canada and it's interesting to go from being one of the dominant culture to being an 'other' (although not very other as I'm white English in a country that was largely funded by white English people). My culture isn't very different to the mainstream here, but I'd feel quite alienated if for example I was stopped from having a nice cup of tea on a frequent basis (hard to think about English cultural practices when they are so very much part of the mainstream).

Here not that long ago First Nations families were forced to send their children to far off boarding schools (at 5!) where the children were prevented from speaking their own languages and stripped of anything from home (oh and were many of them were abused physically and sexually as well). Not long before that their communities were forbidden from following their own cultural practices, even those as benign as potluck feasts.

My university is sensitive to our First Nations connections. We acknowledge that we are on native land and have local elders open our important events. We have rules in order to permit safe smudging and we are currently installing sweat lodges so that our aboriginal students away from home can continue with their cultural practices. Being connected to your culture is very important, for our students it is the difference between succeeding and failing.

Canada is starting to reconcile with it's past. That means much more teaching about First Nations at school and bringing aboriginal culture into the mainstream, but this needs to be done in partnership with the First Nations so that it's culturally sensitive (ie not taking artifacts and treating them in ways that are very alien like preserving totem poles that are designed to return to nature).

In the UK there isn't the same history of recent cultural invasion, although the Anglo-Saxons quite possibly felt that way after the Norman invasion.

Shriver did not speak to her brief and admitted it.

This has been huge on my FB, so many Indigenous authors were outraged and dismayed by her dismissal of their concerns.

The article was originally a blog post and it's not brilliantly written I would agree.

There's a video floating around of the right of reply event the Brisbane Writers Festival organised. It's worth a watch.

I thought the article was poorly written and melodramatic. I am very sympathetic to issues of cultural appropriation, but it seems the writer was more disturbed by an insensitive offhand remark Shriver made, unless I'm misunderstanding the article. It would have been helpful to me if her critique of Shriver had been short, clear, and concise. It did read like an exercise in millennial self-indulgence.

It did read like an exercise in millennial self-indulgence.

exactly that, alizondevice

What specifically did Lionel say that was offensive?!?

Floisme: "I just thought it was shame to find such a gobsmackingly bad article on a very interesting/complex topic."

I agree. I think the problem is exacerbated by people sharing this stuff, because it drives people to the Guardian site. How many people have been linking to the investigation the Guardian has just run on Hermes' working practices? Almost no-one. So, on the one hand the Guardian pays £100 to a not-very-good writer, and attracts thousands and thousands of clicks, and on the other, they invest a lot of money in funding proper investigative journalism that not enough people read. Of course, the hope is that the people who read the first kind of article will stay around for the second, but it's not a guarantee.

Yes, I read about about Hermes and their 'lifestyle couriers' It's regrettable how little old school investigative journalism seems to happen these days. Even the writers I like spend most of their columns going on about their lives, their friends, their opinions yada yada yada.

So maybe I shouldn't moan if stuff like this pulls in the clicks and helps fund the good writing!

Sweet Jesus.

Ok, can the fiction police set out the forms/criteria required to write a novel? And how we are to review a book. Or better, they could just do that for the rest of us, do you think? Or wait, what is that kind of society called?

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/lionel-shrivers-full-speech-i-hope-the-concept-of-cultural-appropriation-is-a-passing-fad

This was Shriver's actual speech. I think it's very good. The contrast between the quality of this and Abdel-Magied's piece is considerable, in my opinion. Maybe she was too busy texting her outrage during it to actually listen to it.

Yes, I liked Shriver's article.

I find it interesting to put it in the context of my own reaction to About Kevin. I think I was in an unusual space as a reader - I have someone I'm very close to whose son is a psychopath (not a mumsnet armchair diagnosis, this is the diagnosis of the crim. psych. on his offender management team) who has committed serious crimes (admittedly not mass murder). I could see what Shriver was trying to do, but for me it rang totally false. This was not how the real woman I knew reacted in the real circumstance. To that extent, for me it was an act of appropriation of someone else's life, and one which failed, but not one which I wish Shriver hadn't attempted to write. But (here's the thing) I think Shriver failed interestingly. As Shriver herself says, most will fail. The aim is to fail better!

For me, as a bad writer (of fanfic - hence arguably guilty of appropriation twice over!) the issue of characters serving plot and wider ideology is also interesting. There's an old adage in the newspaper business: "Dog bites man isn't news. Man bites dog is". Fiction is a bit like this - it's the extreme, the unusual, the different which catches our imagination, both as writers and readers. Should, for instance, a writer who identifies as feminist never write a book about female on male domestic violence simply because statistically it is rarer than male on female (or indeed male on male) DV? I'd say no. Any topic is up for grabs. And fiction, at the level of individual books, deals in the specific. It's the opposite of "feminist class analysis." But at the same time, class analysis of genres - collections of books, types of writing, does have its place. I'd want the space open to critique, say, crime fiction as a genre for disproportionately focusing on rape and sexual violence against women (often written with the intention of eliciting a sexual frisson, which I find unforgivable), or pointing out the number of times the author lazily reaches for the cookie-cutter character backstory of "violent rape murder committed by man who turns out to have had sexually repressed refrigerator mother/sexually abusive mother". (No, really? Again? Have I ever seen this in actual reporting of criminal cases in real life? Erm, no. So why does a group of authors collectively keep peddling this horse shit?)

So I guess for me the answer is critique the author - brutally if needs be. Sometimes people deserve a good drubbing in the review columns for writing crap which promulgates stereotypes. (But you should always have taken the time to read the whole book, or listened to the whole speech, not flounced part way). The thing that should be utterly and totally resisted is going down the line of censorship (or of creating a cultural climate where self-censorship starts to take over).

So I guess for me the answer is critique the author - brutally if needs be

I agree and Shriver made that point well. i also think that good fiction should be challenging and sometimes disturbing. The late David Foster Wallace talked of how his writing teacher said that, "The job of good fiction is to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed".

If I want to read someone's factual account then I'll read an autobiography but a good story, to me, does not involve the same characters all doing the same things.

excellent speech. how pathetic to walk out. so childish and anti free speech.

If she walked out, how are we (or the writer) going to know whether Lionel Shriver completed her ponderings on the issue?

Yes maybe she should have been the first in the queue to ask questions? Then she should have made her point directly to the author.

I think the problem is that some writers (and other people) feel free to just lift something from another culture without any research or understanding eg the feathered headbands at festivals.

I think that is different to exploring something in a work of fiction. I've just read a Jodi Picoult, one of the characters had survived the Warsaw Ghetto and a concentration camp. JP can't have experienced that but it read as though she had researched it, as in it read to me to be similar to true accounts from survivors.

Well I guess if you are fine with your literature being filtered through a white gaze, you'll be all OK with Shriver.

Me, I'm supporting the outrage and pain of Indigenous authors such as Melissa Lucas.

I don't think anyone's saying "just read Shriver, she'll tell you all you need to know about the world viewed from any imaginary perspective." In fact I just explained why for me, We need to talk about Kevin was such a failure. And surely the thing should be to read a wide range of books. (There is a massive issue with publishing houses and reviewers in the broadsheets, and whose voice they allow us to hear and whose they simply relegate, unread, to the slush pile.)

And it's definitely the case that you can't please all people all the time -even if you yourself come from a certain background. There are all sorts of issues of intersectionality that crop up too - Monica Ali, for instance, is Bangladeshi, born in Dhaka. Her novel, Brick Lane, upset some in the Bangladeshi community because they felt she was too middle class, too assimilated into UK culture (PPE at Oxford?) to write authentically about working class Bangladeshi life. Once you start policing who's allowed to comment on or write about what, where do you draw the line? Whose offence trumps other people's experience of the world?

I agree with you Mostly. As John Irving would say, judge the work, not the life. For me she fails as a writer - all her stuff reads like creative writing class exercises to me, especially that terrible book which rips off sliding doors- I forget the name but it's got the worst fake cockney since dear old Dick von Dyke. Her journalism ditto- she wrote a piece a few years back in her family complaining about her using them in her public writings. She obviously didn't hear the irony klaxon going off

"Well I guess if you are fine with your literature being filtered through a white gaze, you'll be all OK with Shriver."

But why wouldn't we be? I read books by black writers, white writers, men, women, gay people, straight people...it's all a way of finding out what the world looks like from other people's perspectives.

For example, I've read, and enjoyed, two novels by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She writes about the black African experience and some of her characters are white. I learnt a lot from reading her. But then, I also learnt a lot as a child from reading Louisa May Alcott - a white woman whose experience of life was very different from my own.