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!

Cba to read through 5 pages but to the OP - I agree. The very notion of cultural appropriation is ridiculous and especially when you're talking about fiction. And, PS, I'm from an ethnic minority.

nolly The Post-Birthday World - it was so awful that I cringed all the way through the cockernee "Cor strike a light I nearly fell darn the apples and pears!"

That was it! Uber-cringe

Actually, thinking more about the "whose hurt feeling count most" issue, an even better example would be Behzti by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti - protesters from within the Sikh community got the play closed down after a couple of days, and it exploded into an argument about free speech versus whether the mainly peaceful protest had been coopted by a few violent protesters, whose existence then provided the media with a field day to let rip with "post-colonial stereotypes about ethnic minorities". So attention got neatly taken off the fact that the play was written by a Sikh woman. (And given what we know about, say, sexual abuse within the Catholic church, or Saville and the white media establishment, or Muslim men in Rochdale ... was it really such a far fetched plot line to set a rape in a Gudwara? Might the objections have been coming from relatively privileged male voices within the Sikh community? Who gets the final say on portraying that community? An individual woman writer, or male religious figures?)

It's complicated cases of intersectional interests like this - minority woman author versus authority figures within her own community versus media prepared to use protest and dissent within ethnic community groups to further their own negative narrative about ethnic minorities, versus media loveys leaping in to say their bit, versus academics getting in on the act to further a particular professional world view, versus... which means that there is no easy answer. But censorship is certainly the wrong answer.

I thought Shriver's speech was well-written but spiteful and ignorant. When someone begins by describing themselves as an "iconoclast", you know what to expect.

I'm also a fiction author. It's really not hard to avoid cultural appropriation, and the only writers I see whinging about it are the ones who want to write something woefully misguided and are annoyed that it won't be well-received.

Has anybody on the thread read or listened to Shriver's speech? I'd like to know what the people defending her have to say about her summary of Luella.

I really liked the post Birthday world. I agree the cockney was awful, there was also some medical stuff that didn't ring true, I think she had a GP doing a prostate biopsy or something similarly unlikely.
I loved the story though and liked the fact that the woman who left her husband didn't have a daily mail type ending for not being a good wife. It's a long time since I read it so I'm a bit hazy on the detail.
I'm struggling with the Mandibles at the moment. I feel it's more of an economics lesson than a story. I like economics though so will persist although find it quite depressing, mainly because the economic state of the world today is quite depressing.

richard bucket I'm not a fiction writer but I'm a huge reader and I like to read about a range of different characters in different things. I'm also increasingly fussy about the quality of the writing and I'm sure we'll agree that there aren't that many really good writers. If writers I liked avoided writing outside of their own culture, sex and sexual orientation then I'd be reading about the same character over and over. And telling varied stories can be hard and sometimes writers like Shriver fail at this but it's better than hearing the same narrative voice over and over. Overall I do like Shiver and I have read all her books and will continue to buy them.

Maybe it depends on your audience as well. A lot of so called 'chick-lit' has the same sort of main characters and a whole heap of the action thriller genre also has the same sort of male character - ex military, big and strong, only just the right side of the law. Stephen King - who I actually think tells a terrific story - seems to write with the same voice almost every single time, although he does do a reasonable job of the first person narrative as a child.

I said this up thread but imposing rules on what people are allowed to write about limits the ethnic minority writers. If the fictional Nigerian woman is the only person who can write about Nigerian women then she will become the voice of her people. Bad luck if she wants to write 18th century England historical fiction or science fiction.

Like the books or loathe them, the point is she's a fiction writer and so that's how she should be judged. Not as a white woman speaking on behalf of white women. Or bizarre cockney pool players. Or whatever. If she was inciting the masses to believe she was speaking as the representative of some inappropriate group, or claiming to, that would obviously be different. But she isn't. So it's only fair to judge her on the quality of her writing

richard I read it. I can see why people might offended by the character of Luella. Surely though that just shows that in that case Shriver couldn't "put one over on us" as she puts it. And maybe it illustrates her bias.
There is all kinds of offensive literature and bad fiction out there but that's fiction for you. We are critiquing the character of Luella and what that says about a white authors portrayal of black characters. To me that's an important conversation to have to raise awareness of the issues. If we shut down the topics authors want to write about because of "cultural appropriation" then we can't do that critiquing.
I am with her all the way about this. I think the current "safe space" thinking and people getting offended at "microaggressions" is actually really damaging because it prevents us having conversations and building awareness of issues.

And even on that, there's no consensus. Some people think she's great, others less so. Some loved Kevin (including me) while others think she missed the mark. Every well-read author will have characters that people hate and feel have been misrepresented. The same characters others will love.

I was following on from Nolly, obviously.

But I agree with Fela - if you don't like how a character is portrayed then have a conversation about it.

This will be the last need to get us all out the door for the day.

If the author of the original piece had initiated a conversation with Shriver about why she hated the speech surely that would have been better than the outcome? Her "walkout" would have been interpreted as a trip to the toilet by most at the festival - I'm sure Shriver wasn't perturbed - and then her peice for the guardian was completely ridiculed by the readers. Not to mention that the writing was awful and pretty much everyone pointed that out.

Heads up , lionel shriver on newsnight in a few mins defending Cultural Appropriation , time to put t'kettle on ... Apologies , not from up north...

Can someone summarise for me?

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.

The problem is that we almost exclusively get the white male perspective when it comes to the really popular, well-known literature. And that sometimes, this white male perspective is disguised as female perspective, etc.

And then we believe that we know what the world looks like from other people's perspective, but actually don't.

I'm not in principle opposed to white men writing about black women, but I know that many men cannot write women well, and imagine this might be true for white people writing about PoC, too.

There's two kinds of men not being able to write women. One is ignoring patriarchy and writing women as if they're men, which is okay to read. Women like to pretend we're not oppressed from time to time. It's relaxing.

And then there's writing women as sex objects that see themselves through the male gaze and happen to like and want exactly what the surrounding males need them to like and want. That's horrid.

I suppose when writing about cultures, this gets more diverse and there's more ways in which to write bullshit.

Writers ought to do their research and at least choose the less offensive way to do it wrong.

So just don't read the really popular, well-known literature. Tell people why you think it's shit (I agree that it is) and read something else.

nooka, thank you for your posts on Canadian First Nation people, really informative!

I didn't fully read the article... But I wouldn't want anyone to just stick to their own cultural experience. Trying out other cultures, genders etc in fiction, in music, in our imagination - is at its best a way we can reach across divides. Share cultures. Don't tell others it's not their place. Critique yes, forbid, no.

I grew up in an area where I was the minority culture, and I feel part of both.

Publishing and the media can be fustratingly narrow sure, but it is better than it was. An actor with a disability could play someone without and vice versa, why not?

I watched the newsnight broadcast - it's at the end of it on iplayer. I think having Lionel in America with a time delay and Kirsty Walk not actually letting Yassmin and Lionel talk directly to each other but "interpreting" what each had said impaired the discussion.
It was probably a bit baffling to anyone who hadn't been following the debate.

Maybe one day books will be published with no author's name.
Wasn't there once a book about an American election by 'Anonymous'?
I can't remember if the author was ever discovered.
The reason for that anonymity was because all sorts of personal details were revealed about the candidate and his team and obviously the author, an insider, would never be trusted again.
I don't think cultural appropriation was considered such an issue then.

VestalVirgin: that's a fair point about the way men write about women. It can be an odd experience reading, say, Howard Jacobson, who writes female characters who are like no women I have ever met. (I still like him as a writer, though, because I find his way of looking at the world interesting, even if I don't agree with it.) Some men are better than others - I think Ian McEwan isn't too bad most of the time, whereas Kingsley Amis is dreadful. And Nick Hornby has become pretty good at creating female characters, I think.

But not sure I'd agree that we "almost exclusively get the white male perspective" in popular literature. Writers I enjoy include Margaret Atwood, Alison Lurie, Sarah Perry, Anne Tyler, Helen Simpson, to name but a few. They all seem to have done/are doing quite well for themselves.

Isn't some of white western people preferring literature by and about white western people just people largely wanting to read stories about people like them who they can easily identify with?
Japanese people largely read stories by and about Japanese people.
Someone living in Nigeria may struggle to get much of an audience here but I would presume people in Nigeria read far more stuff by African authors than European ones (but have never been to Nigeria so don't know that).
The idea that there is only one "popular literature" is nonsense. Each country has a different list of popular books. Of course British authors (or authors from countries like Britain) are more popular in Britain. British pop bands are popular in Britain as well.
Most people write about what they know because if you write about something you aren't familiar with you're more likely to get it wrong and write a poor book. I think novelists should be free to try though.

2rebecca, you make a really obvious point there. However, we've all become so tied up in knots over this sort of thing that your very obvious point has never occurred to me! It's become so convoluted.

The comments on The Guardian are really interesting. You would think that people leaving comments on The Graun would be broadly sympathetic to such identity politics but the whole thread on there reads like one big frowning sigh of exasperation.

Most people write about what they know because if you write about something you aren't familiar with you're more likely to get it wrong and write a poor book. I think novelists should be free to try though.

2rebecca - that is very true! If I were to write a novel based in, say, a medical school, however much careful research I did I'd be rumbled pretty quickly.