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 I know I'm a month out of date with my reading, but it really seems sketchy, how that conversation usually goes.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

[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)