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 I know I'm a month out of date with my reading, but it really seems sketchy, how that conversation usually goes.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

(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.