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 I know I'm a month out of date with my reading, but it really seems sketchy, how that conversation usually goes.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.)