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.
no subject
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.