Cultural Appropriation and fandom vs authors & critics

[deborah]

I've just been catching up on a month of old ChildLit messages, and current context is making me notice something unpleasant. When there's an accusation of cultural appropriation in LJ fandom, fans immediately fall on the side of saying "How dare those of you with white privilege tell PoC their claims of having been harmed are false?" Whereas on ChildLit, accusations of cultural appropriation lead to a massive pileup on -- well, pretty much always on Debbie Reese. I don't always agree with Debbie, but the constant claims over there that her understanding of Native appropriation is wrong leave a vile taste in my mouth. Especially when contributors hit multiple bingo squares:

• You're telling us what we can't write!
• You're telling us what we can't read!
• It's just fiction.
• No, it's different when it's a non-Native [in this case Jewish] story that's mistold; that's BAD.
• Isn't it racist to say you need Native clearance to tell this story?
• But the author had anti-racist intentions!
• You say that the characters are portrayed unrealistically as members of their culture, which means you want a sterotypical portrayal, which is racist.

steepholm, diceytillerman, fjm, other ChildLitters, am I wrong? I know I'm a month out of date with my reading, but it really seems sketchy, how that conversation usually goes. And it happens again and again. Is fandom really that much more capable of seeing its own white privilege than ChildLit (which I know is not monolithically white any more than fandom is)?

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

You aren't wrong. I try to stand by Debbie but there is a limit to how many times I'm capable of doing so, in part because I do not agree with the absolutist argument coming from one section of the appropriation debate (and because I bitterly resent being labelled "white" by Americans who know sod all about the position of the UK Jewish community--and please don't use the example you do, it's so often used against me, also, pause and consider how many Jewish protagonists you can think of in children's literature, where the book isn't about being Jewish. I can think of one, and another book where the best friend is Jewish and the high point of her school term is playing an angel in the nativity play.)

The isssue I think is that most LJ ers in fandom, even if they are not "academically trained" are by nature critical readers: they veer towards close reading approaches and a demand for authenticity. Furthermore, sf and fantasy are intensely political genres--they often wear their politics on their sleeves--so they both attract and train political thinkers.

On childlit the range of approaches is much more diverse. In some cases it is so attuned to "do kids like it" that I can simply not hold a conversation (because it begins from the idea that all kids are the same and just like them). I landed on a panel like this at the Denver world con and wanted to crawl under the table from embarrassment. This basic position extends out to create all sorts of privilege beginning with white privilege, working through gender (girls are being privileged as readers), class, and on into privileging fiction, and oddly I think this last one is part of the problem, because if one constantly insists that "story" is why kids read, then "the stuff they find out from story" is less important and doesn't have to be checked. In the sf and fantasy world, "the stuff we find out from story" is at least as important as story, and for many readers, more so, so if an author gets it wrong, the reader feels betrayed (as I did with I, Coriander).

And I think I have actually just worked out for myself why we are discussing this so much in sf and fantasy: we aren't more liberal, we are just more "fact" oriented and we want to "know". It makes us more predisposed to listening, even if (with are white privilege) we sometimes balk and become the problem.

This isn't me patting ourselves on the back; a number of outsiders have commented on the way sf fans tend to say thank you if corrected in pronounciation or a matter of fact. We don't get embarrassed and don't see it is a humilation (which has protected me in more than one work context).

[deborah]

Interesting. I think you're right -- even from that corner of LJ fandom that gets very angry at what they think is "academic speak", there is a real tendency to read closely. And science fiction is definitely intensely political, although I'm not sure if I'd initially agree about fantasy. My instinct would be to say that fantasy has much more of a tendency to Born Saviors and Divine Right of Kings, and happily ignores the political ramifications of that in its narratives, while science fiction has such a tendency towards confronting current politics that it's created that young adult science fiction dystopia I know you've gotten completely sick of. (Although I'm thinking mostly in literature, and fandom is focused towards television and film, where the lines between science fiction and fantasy, and between politics and absence of politics, are much harder to see.)

When the ChildLit conversations go towards "do kids like it" I admit I often delete the thread's unread, because like you, I find them so icky in their essentializing of all children as being like the ones the poster knows, whether that group is privileged, white, middle-class girls, or whether it very much is not.

(Definitely I agree with you about American views of what defines "white"; one of the things I have really appreciated about the race discussions in LJ fandom over the last year is that many of the fans of color see Judaism as an Othered position in society and fiction. One of the reasons I got so angry when I was reading over the recent ChildLit posts, though, is that people started playing "my past torment is more important than your past torment", claiming that the Holocaust needed to be respected because it was -- bigger? more bad? -- then the Vermont eugenics project, and just, no. Responsible adults don't play the "my victim of racist history was worse than your victim of racist history" game, or say "the last acceptable prejudice", and when I see Jews doing those things I just want to yell get off my side.)

[diceytillerman.livejournal.com]

I'm not in fandom, so i can't make a comparison, but I do agree with you about child_lit and what-all is placed on Debbie's shoulders. She's not 100% alone either onlist (Jean Mendoza and Beverlet Slapin at the very least are vocally supportive) or offlist (I've emailed her offlist in support more than once, and I only mention that because if I'm doing it, someone else must be too).

But overall, as a general trend, there's certainly a whole lot more protestations in the form of bingo squares than there is support. When I say support, I mean not just answering DR's posts and agreeing or taking it further, but original initiations of posts on the same topics. I can think of several possible reasons, but I don't know which one or ones are the real ones, and I don't quite feel comfy listing my potential reasons right here at the moment. I'll think on that, and maybe come back.

THanks for bringing it up. It's a critical question. Even for me who's just looking at the child_lit side and not the comparison with fandom: still valuable.

[diceytillerman.livejournal.com]

Also a specific thank you for your decision to post about it. I don't know if that decision was hard or easy, but I've been thinking about this exact issue for months now, and I've gotten nowhere near having enough [redacted] to make my own post about it.

[deborah]

Heh. It was hard, but I don't think it was all that brave. Notice I didn't make the post to ChildLit, I made it in my own blog, where I have a fairly small and friendly readership. Also, even I know Debbie is reading LJ now, she's not reading here, so I'm not bringing her into the discussion (not that I mind if she shows up in the discussion, but I wasn't reaching out to her). Mostly there's nothing like catching up on two months of pileup to make me feel incredibly uncomfortable.

[deborah]

The more I think about it, the more it's the bingo square nature of the protestations against Debbie that gets me mad. People don't have to agree with her. Hell, I don't always agree with her. But Bingo, people.

[cnoocy]

I think there is an incorrect belief among many white Americans, which is reinforced by the standard cultural education in the U.S., that Native stories are "ours", particularly in contrast to the local cultural legacy that belongs to Europeans. So Americans may react more strongly to critiques of Native appropriation. Since I'm not a ChildLitter, I don't know if that's going on on ChildLit, but it seems possible.

[deborah]

Huh, I never thought of that. I have to think about that one some more. Thank you for giving me something to ponder.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'm more ambivalent about this. I've very seldom read the books that are being argued about, but I can't agree with Debbie when it turns out (as it did in the latest bust-up) that she hasn't either. That tends to undermine any other argument she makes about authenticity.

On the more general issue - well, I talked about all this at some length in Four British Fantasists and won't go over that ground again here, but one thing I only got to touch on in that book is that these arguments are often at cross purposes. Debbie's attitude towards story, culture, and indeed subjectivity is far more communally grounded than the dominant western model. She comes from a tradition where authenticity is in the gift of the community rather than an existential stance taken by an individual. Hence, presumably (to take a fairly peripheral example), the fact that she puts (Nambe Pueblo) after her signature. Were I to sign myself Steepholm (Anglo-Celtic) it would look like an affectation, but in her case I take it to be indicative of where her sense of self begins and ends. My suspicion is that this difference is where a lot of the child_lit disagreements stem from, and that when they and Debbie argue about autonomy, authenticity, responsibility, individuals, etc, they actually mean rather different things.

[deborah]

Heh, I completely forgot that you weren't already over here. Oops.

I don't always agree with Debbie, and when it turned out that she hadn't read the book, that was certainly one of the times I agreed with her less. Certainly I think that she's in the way of a review editor, and part of a review editor's job is to stand by the reviews written by her staff. But in that particular case she should have just said "I can't speak to the details until I've read the book, but I completely trust my reviewers." Still, I don't think it undermines any other argument she makes about authenticity, especially when she goes on to read the book, or is making arguments about authenticity with books she has read.

That word "authenticity" is a very loaded one. In the threads on ChildLit, people keep accusing her of saying that only Native authors can write about Native issues, although she has explicitly disclaimed that any number of times. While she may well come from a tradition where authenticity is in the gift of the community, she is not making any claims that, say, I couldn't write an authentic Nambe Pueblo story, and I am a first-generation Ashkenaz Jew who couldn't even make fatuous claims to having a Cherokee princess in my ancestry. What Debbie asks for is authentic story, no matter who writes it. Yes, she does point to the Native or non-Native identity of the authors of books she dislikes, but often she does that as a way of pointing out the ways in which those non-Native authors themselves made some fatuous claim to authenticity: I cleared this with my Native friend, my great great great grandmother was a Cherokee princess, these stories felt so real to me it's as if they came out of The Great Dream Buffalo in the Sky and spoke to me.

In other words, I think I agree with you that when people on the list are arguing with Debbie about authenticity and responsibility, they are often speaking about different things. That is to say, Debbie is saying "could you make the story an authentic representation of the culture you claim to be representing" and many ChildLitters hear her to be saying "you don't have a right to be talking about this because you aren't authentically from a community that grants you the right to talk about it". Though I suppose there is also something in the idea that a lot of ChildLitters might have issues with the very notion of authenticity as a legitimate means in story. A lot of the arguments about Kanell's book said that because it is fiction, the story could do whatever it needed to do to create the best narrative. Which is ideologically a stance I find troubling; I don't think fiction can stand outside of the world in which it exists, using art as a justification for potential harm.

(I got too wordy, continued in next comment)

[deborah]

That being said, I think there is also something to what cnoocy says above about the American relationship with Native stories. In romantic American mythology, there aren't real Indians, and they certainly don't exist now. There are historical romantic Indians, all in the past, all mixed together into one giant mishmash of romantic noble savage, culminating in the clusterfuck of Brother Eagle Sister Sky. When Debbie comes in to say "actually, we are real people, we are still here, we are still being hurt by the fact that in the very recent past our parents and grandparents had our hair cut and our families taken away and were beaten for practicing our religion or speaking our own language but we are the primary occupants of pretty much every county on the list of poorest counties in the United States because of this crap, so could you please stop romanticizing us as victims or girl warriors or speakers-to-bears or whatever without doing a little bit of research first", I think a lot of people get very upset. Because somehow we've pushed Chief Seattle into the same box of romantic historical figures we can draw from as Cúchulainn and Lancelot. Whereas the reasons you can't really do that to me are threefold: (1) Chief Seattle was real, and (2) part of very recent and very painful history, to (3) people who are still extremely marginalized in their own country (thus one of the differences between signing yourself Nambe Pueblo or Anglo-Celtic besides the community versus into individualistic stance of the cultures in question).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

But in that particular case she should have just said "I can't speak to the details until I've read the book, but I completely trust my reviewers." Still, I don't think it undermines any other argument she makes about authenticity, especially when she goes on to read the book, or is making arguments about authenticity with books she has read.

If she’d taken the line you suggest I’d have no argument. Just to be clear about the scope of what I was saying, my reference to arguments about authenticity being undermined was intended to refer only to books that she hadn’t read, not to any argument she might make about authenticity ever.

What Debbie asks for is authentic story, no matter who writes it.

I think it’s more complicated than that. Granted, there are plenty of examples of the type you mention, where people rummage around for some Cherokee ancestry in order to be able to label their story “authentic”, and it’s fair enough to slap them down. (Have you read this article (”https://www.msu.edu/user/singere/fakelore.html”) on the subject, by the way? Old now, but interesting.) But this is far from being the only context in which Debbie emphasizes authors’ Native American ancestry or lack of it. That’s not necessarily a criticism, by the way. Last month on her blog, for example, she recommended two reading lists on Native American experience developed in conjunction with PBS. The key part of her recommendation was (and the emphasis is hers) that “Every writer on both lists is Native. Selecting only books by Native writers is a great decision. It thematically supports the title of the PBS series (We Shall Remain). In effect, it says, We Write, We are Still Here, and We Shall Remain.”

Personally I’ve no quarrel with this, but this (I hope) uncontroversial example makes the point that the ancestry of the writer can be an important political statement. With Debbie it frequently is, whether that writer be a critic or a novelist.

This bit’s more speculative: but I believe it’s generally true (and I’m thinking here also of Australian Aboriginal people) that cultures without a traditional written literature tend for reasons of preservation to be more protective of stories - who gets to tell them, who gets to hear them – especially when those stories have some ritual or religious function. It strikes me that this might easily spill over into a cultural mistrust of outsiders making use of those stories, a mistrust that might seem excessive to people coming from a culture with a longstanding tradition of written literature and its attendant plurality of forms. Whether that’s an element of what’s going on here I don’t know, but I wonder.

As for romanticization - romanticization (or demonization) of other cultures goes on all the time, of course. (Think of the continual romanticization of the Irish in America, for a toe-curlingly blatant example.) I don’t think the problem is so much that Chief Seattle was real, or recent, compared to Cuchulain (Owain Glyndwr might be a nearer parallel?) as that he has only been allowed to speak through the voice of Ted Perry. It’s primarily a question of power relations, in other words, and that’s exacerbated when an oral culture bumps up against a literate one, because the literate culture always gets to tell the story. But you’re also right, of course, that one effect of romanticization is to deny people a place in history by viewing them solely in mythic terms. And then, for example, you can get to dismiss present-day Native Americans as not being “the real thing” because they wear jeans and drive pick-ups.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Hmm, the link to that article didn't work for some reason. Here it is in its uncooked state: https://www.msu.edu/user/singere/fakelore.html

[deborah]

(That fakelore article is fascinating, thank you!)

Point taken. I was definitely simplifying down to this particular argument, where she has specifically said several times that she's not talking about authenticity of authorship but only of good research. But you are right that in the past she has pointed to an author's ethnicity is itself an important part of the political statement of the book. And I agree with you that that in and of itself is not problematic, but does mean I should step back from my assertion about what Debbie is asking for them. In the larger context of what people are used to seeing from Debbie when she posts on the list, authorial authenticity is definitely something she does ask for, even though she wasn't asking for it in the Kanell threads I was reading.

Last summer I was reading a fair amount of Native American literary criticism (for adult fiction and nonfiction), and I saw a fair amount in that area is being more protective of who has the right to tell those stories, in a way that I haven't seen that much of in Debbie's posts to the list or on Oyate (although there is a little bit of it in A Broken Flute). I don't know anything about Australian Aboriginal literature, so I don't know if the situation parallels. But I think the mistrust that might seem excessive to people coming from another culture is not just because the other culture comes from the long-standing tradition of written literature, I think there also is a huge element of white privilege there. Yes, there is definitely an oral versus written component, but there is also a huge component of who is allowed to succeed in society. Who is allowed to be portrayed as a contemporary person in the media and in literature. Whose stories get shelved in the religion section and whose get shelved in myth. Who has to have the ACLU sue the school system in federal court so that a five-year-old doesn't get educated alone in a separated classroom because he is wearing long hair according to his parents' religious beliefs. White privilege says we don't need to think about these things -- because that's what privilege is.

In other words, I agree with you that it's primarily a question of power relations, but while I think that an oral culture bumping up against illiterate one has a huge part of it, race is bigger.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

But I think the mistrust that might seem excessive to people coming from another culture is not just because the other culture comes from the long-standing tradition of written literature, I think there also is a huge element of white privilege there.

Oh yes, that too! I don't mean that it's just an oral/literacy thing, or even an individual/communal thing, but I mentioned those aspects because I hadn't seen them widely addressed. And I do think that the latter, for example, is relevant in some in earlier child_lit rows, about for example whether books should be criticized for showing a black child from a poor family in the 1930s jumping on the sofa, or a young Native American woman speaking disrespectfully to her grandmother (my memory of both examples may be off, by the way, so don't quote me). In each case it boiled down to one set of people saying that this would not happen in the culture concerned, and another set saying (a la your bingo card) "You say that the characters are portrayed unrealistically as members of their culture, which means you want a stereotypical portrayal".

One relevant way of reading this is indeed as the operation of privilege. People to whom it doesn't occur to imagine a situation where a sofa might be such an expensive item that the children's jumping on it would be as unthinkable as, say, tossing the kids a Van Gogh to cut up for their craft project, are exercising a privilege of some kind (maybe of class or wealth as much as of race in this case). But it also has to do with self-definition and the role of one's community in supplying, conferring and legitimizing that. Hence, as I read it, Debbie's repeated insistence on her tribally enrolled status. Generally, I think one of the more persistent and less remarked ways in which people from western culture universalize what is in fact a culturally-specific perspective is in their (our) tendency to privilege individual autonomy over group identity.

[temvald.livejournal.com]

Huh. What are the differences and similarities between remix culture and cultural appropriation? Could internalization of the values of the first affect discussions about the second?

[deborah]

Interesting. I never thought of that, but it's quite possible. Remix culture is by definition always reading against the text, and pushes people to look for canonical elements that can be brought forward and examined more closely, as in Luminosity's 300 and Woman's Work vids. Arguably, literary theorist should be doing the same thing, but certainly the lenses are different. Not all literary theorists are reading against the text, for one thing.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I skipped most of it, but the entire row started when clueless people decided to "defend" someone who didn't need or want defending, by trying to dismiss a very perceptive and thoughtful critique from someone who is a *fan* of the writer under discussion, as niaive. From there is got nastier and nastier. For much of the time, the FoC's were being attacked in ways that pretty much forced them to get absolutist. Very unpleasant.

[deborah]

That really was the saddest part of it. If the original poster's friends had stayed out of it, it never would have degenerated into the nastiness it did.

[writinghood.livejournal.com]

This is NOT encouraging me to catch up on *my* ginormous backlog of unread child_lit digests.

So, speaking from a position of ignorance of the current child_lit dust-up (but familiarity with past ones) as well as pretty much total ignorance of the incidents in fandom you're thinking of, and to make a vast generalization... could it have something to do with age? Not that there aren't plenty of young people on child_lit and plenty of mature people in fandom, but the general impression is that the former would be an older community than the latter, on average. I'm trying not to be ageist (ugh, a phrase that usually precedes someone doing exactly that), but the longer you've had certain habits of thought, the harder it is to overcome them...? I wouldn't try very hard to defend it, but the thought did occur to me.

[deborah]

When you catch up, basically skip any post with the subject line "darkness across the water" or "Kanell". And there are plenty of them.

As for age, I don't know. Certainly the people I've met personally on ChildLit who were on the less attractive side of the dustup over there are people I know have been in academia for quite a long time. I'm not sure they are necessarily older than some of the fans, but they have certainly been thinking in the ways they been thinking for longer.

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

Not to burst your bubble or anything, but part of the reason the reaction is different here is because the fan cultures involved (and make no mistake, there are at at least two different fan cultures here, that of media fandom and traditional science fiction fandom [with a lot of people crossing over with comics fandom, and some other people working with general anti-racist issues]) is that this sort of discussion has been recurrent and part of the discussion has been dissection of why Bingo discussions are illegitimate.

I also find it curious (and I have no experience with the child-lit ml outside of the context of Kaplan's book, so I may have a totally inacurate picture) that there is a single person who serves point on the issue in childlit. In the fandoms, there are groups of people who speak to these (as well as related issues of feminism, queerness, genderqueerness, Judaism, and, increasingly, ablism and American cultural supremacy.) I think that helps us with burn out, but it also means there are (a) a wider variety of viewpoints on these issues and (b) it helps it to be less a question of a single person's personality. I mean, from the way you describe it, if Debbie's writing and way of explaining things doesn't work, you won't be learning about these things on child-lit. And I have to wonder if Debbie even tries to address these issues with non-Native cultures. (This is not me saying that she should be responsible for doing so, but if she's not, and she's the only person starting discussions about cultural appropriation, then most of the problematic stuff is sailing by the list unchallenged (unless there is way more child-lit published about Natives than I think there is, which is entirely possible.)

[deborah]

Ugh, you are right. Sure, it seems like most of the participants on the media fandom side are seeing the white privilege issues in this particular go-round, but in a lot of ways that is hard-won education showing, through multiple rounds of race dustup, through Kristallnacht RPG and characters of color turned into cats, with one community slowly learning through trial and effort and the seemingly endless hard work of FoC and allies.

I think you got a fairly accurate perspective of what's going on on the mailing list from this one particular dustup, as well. Debbie does have supporters over there, both in this individual argument and in general, but for the most part, she is the only person who brings up those issues with regards to race on that list, and pretty much always about Native issues. A lot of problematic stuff does sail by the list unchallenged. It's a very well-meaning group about diversity, in that particular white privilege way in which Elizabeth Bear's original post was well-meaning: how best to serve children by giving them books about their own experience, which is very frequently not the experience of the person posting. It's incredibly well-meaning. And, you know, problematic. (And, I admit, the position that I come from myself, the media fandom has done wonders in helping me start to break out of.)

(Not that the list is monolithically white, by any means. Julius Lester, Roxanne Hsu Feldman, and Debbie herself are among the prominent members of color on the list. But for whatever reasons, children's literature scholarship and children's librarianship are fairly white fields in many English-speaking countries.)

[(Anonymous)]

"A lot of the arguments about Kanell's book said that because it is fiction, the story could do whatever it needed to do to create the best narrative. Which is ideologically a stance I find troubling; I don't think fiction can stand outside of the world in which it exists, using art as a justification for potential harm."

I don't want to derail your post from its original topic, but this is a concern of mine and I'd like to know your thoughts, perhaps in the future. Monica Edinger has posted about the dangers she sees in confusing "historical fiction" with "history." The standards of accuracy for one are much higher than the other. Fiction gets used in the classroom to the detriment of history, or fiction gets held to impossible standards of accuracy. Both suffer. How much leeway should a book be given because it is fiction? Should books on certain subjects be given less leeway? For example, if a subject has been treated very rarely in mainstream fiction, should it be held to higher standards of accuracy? When Catherine called Birdy won the Newbery, people pointed out its inaccuracies, but I think there would have been a much stronger outcry if the book had had a more unusual setting than medieval Europe. For my part, I find that the further a topic is from the main stream, the higher my expectations of accuracy are, but I am not sure that is justified.

Creators do play fast and loose with their source material, some more than others. I know that Peter Dickinson felt strongly that Lloyd Alexander's first Prydain book shouldn't be published. He saw it as inauthentic. I think he felt that Alexander had pillaged a culture to get the makings of a good story. I think the Prydain Chronicles are wonderful and find that I am willing to cut Alexander all kinds of slack because I like the results. To use your words: an ideological stance I find troubling.

I'm not a member of child_lit, but I've lurked through various discussions in archives and I've watched the recent discussion in fandom. In the recent discussion of Kanell, Reese seems to be holding fiction to the standards of non-fiction. I've read her posts and her review as well as Slapin's and get the impression that the problem with Kanell's book is less about accuracy and more about . . . writing. I think maybe the book sucks. If the book had been powerful, beautiful, and moving, would the inaccuracy be as important to Reese? I can't tell.

[deborah]

I think you can't make general comments about standards for genre outside of specifics. If I write a wildly inaccurate story about the Holocaust or the American Revolution, as long as the inaccuracies are incorrect representations out of truths widely known (rather than inaccuracies which correspond with commonly believed urban legends), I'm not going to change what people know about the Holocaust. If I write a wildly inaccurate story about the Vermont eugenics project, I am telling the only story people are ever likely to hear about the Vermont eugenics project. Presented as historical fiction, it will stand in as history because it will be the only information the readers will ever get about the actual history. As you say with Catherine Called Birdie, nobody minded a little bit of inaccuracy about gender presentation given how much you can expect readers to understand medieval Europe already. I think that higher expectation for lesser known topics is entirely justified.

The Prydain Chronicles do not even extratextually draw any connections to the Mabinogion except in as much as they use similar names. I think it's very different to draw elements from a mythology than it is to set a fiction in a historical time.

Moreover, in the context of this particular book we are dealing with a historical time which is recent, little-known, and refers to atrocities committed on people who are still today suffering the results of those atrocities. There's a big difference between that and making Arawn a bad guy, or letting Catherine had a 20th-century perspective on individuality and gender.

I think if the book had been powerful, beautiful, and moving, the inaccuracy might have been even more important. Because then the book would have had readers, lots of them.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you. I admit to looking for reassurance that it was reasonable to have different standards for mainstreamed subjects than for marginalized ones. I'll have to think about the differences between drawing elements from mythology and setting a story in an historical time. I would feel very, very, uncomfortable if Alexander had rummaged through the a First People's cultural background to pick up a few names and images for his stories, and for me what is important is something you mentioned in your OP--doing harm and defending it as art. Dickinson might have been offended by Alexander's tactics, but I couldn't believe that he was "hurt." This isn't true for other victims of cultural appropriation.

[writinghood.livejournal.com]

> The Prydain Chronicles do not even extratextually draw any connections to the Mabinogion except in as much as they use similar names. I think it's very different to draw elements from a mythology than it is to set a fiction in a historical time.
Agreed. Also, FWIW, extratextually, Lloyd Alexander did more to cut the connections than to draw them: always said very clearly in the forewords of his books that Prydain was not Wales, although inspired by his love for that country, and that he was not retelling Welsh mythology, and that, among other things, Arawn was considerably less villainous and Gwydion rather less heroic in Welsh mythology than they were in his books. It's hard to imagine how he could be any more explicit about the fact that, while he loves the mythology and was inspired by it, he is not attempting to co-opt another culture's stories, or much clearer about what kind of liberties he was taking. And that information was in the forewords, not an afterword, so I, at least, went into the stories when I was a kid already knowing they weren't retellings.

Disclosure: Alexander's my favorite author (tied with DWJ); the Prydain Chronicles are about as close to my favorite books in the world as you can get, and I adore the man and have trouble hearing a word against him. I try to be objective, but everybody's got an author or book they feel that way about, I'm sure. (I'm sad to hear that Peter Dickinson didn't think they should be published. Well, the man's not right about everything. When I met him, I told him how much I'd been impressed by a story he'd written, and described it, and he denied having written it. I had to go home and look it up to make sure I wasn't going crazy, but there it was, in a little-read anthology of short stories by his wife. He'd just forgotten about it. :)

[(Anonymous)]

I think an earlier response of mine was eaten by the blogosphere. I also come down on the side of higher expectations for less well known subjects. I am still considering the question of myths versus historical settings. I don't think there's a difference in expectations there for me. I love the Prydain books, but I know that I would feel very, very uncomfortable if Alexander had rummaged through the cultural framework of a First Nation to find the inspiration for his story. I'm leery of giving something a pass just because I like it; that's exactly why I doublecheck my love of the Prydain books.

I go back to your original post and the idea that you shouldn't do harm and justify it as "art." I can imagine the Dickinson was offended by Alexander's work, but I cannot see that he was "hurt." I have to believe that an Abenaki looking at his myths used in a similar way would have a different experience. I think the difference between mainstream and marginalized is more important than the difference between myth vs. history.

(And I *still* think that we shouldn't use fiction as a substitute for history in the classroom. As a supplement, yes. In place of non-fiction, no.)

[(Anonymous)]

Hello,

When one comment disappears into the ether, I assume it got eaten by accident. When a second one disappears into moderation limbo, I assume it's deliberate. I don't know if I said something I shouldn't have, or if you want to discourage anonymous comments, but I apologize for any transgressions and won't bug you anymore.

[deborah]

Sorry about that. I have anonymous comments set to screen automatically (I get a lot of spam at this account), and I have to come in and unscreen them, and I just didn't get to these within a couple of days.

(I have no problem with anonymity, by the way, but if you want to create a simple pseudonym and just sign your posts "-- the Mad Lurker" or some such, it means I will be able to distinction on them as comments from you from anonymous comments from anybody else.)

Anyway, I do like your comments, and I am going to respond to them, but I'm not sure what I'm going to say, so thank you for contributing. I've unscreened them now in case anybody else wants to take a look and respond.