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 I know I'm a month out of date with my reading, but it really seems sketchy, how that conversation usually goes.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

[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.