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 I know I'm a month out of date with my reading, but it really seems sketchy, how that conversation usually goes.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

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.)