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 I know I'm a month out of date with my reading, but it really seems sketchy, how that conversation usually goes.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

[diceytillerman.livejournal.com]

I'm not in fandom, so i can't make a comparison, but I do agree with you about child_lit and what-all is placed on Debbie's shoulders. She's not 100% alone either onlist (Jean Mendoza and Beverlet Slapin at the very least are vocally supportive) or offlist (I've emailed her offlist in support more than once, and I only mention that because if I'm doing it, someone else must be too).

But overall, as a general trend, there's certainly a whole lot more protestations in the form of bingo squares than there is support. When I say support, I mean not just answering DR's posts and agreeing or taking it further, but original initiations of posts on the same topics. I can think of several possible reasons, but I don't know which one or ones are the real ones, and I don't quite feel comfy listing my potential reasons right here at the moment. I'll think on that, and maybe come back.

THanks for bringing it up. It's a critical question. Even for me who's just looking at the child_lit side and not the comparison with fandom: still valuable.

[cnoocy]

I think there is an incorrect belief among many white Americans, which is reinforced by the standard cultural education in the U.S., that Native stories are "ours", particularly in contrast to the local cultural legacy that belongs to Europeans. So Americans may react more strongly to critiques of Native appropriation. Since I'm not a ChildLitter, I don't know if that's going on on ChildLit, but it seems possible.

[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.

[temvald.livejournal.com]

Huh. What are the differences and similarities between remix culture and cultural appropriation? Could internalization of the values of the first affect discussions about the second?

[writinghood.livejournal.com]

This is NOT encouraging me to catch up on *my* ginormous backlog of unread child_lit digests.

So, speaking from a position of ignorance of the current child_lit dust-up (but familiarity with past ones) as well as pretty much total ignorance of the incidents in fandom you're thinking of, and to make a vast generalization... could it have something to do with age? Not that there aren't plenty of young people on child_lit and plenty of mature people in fandom, but the general impression is that the former would be an older community than the latter, on average. I'm trying not to be ageist (ugh, a phrase that usually precedes someone doing exactly that), but the longer you've had certain habits of thought, the harder it is to overcome them...? I wouldn't try very hard to defend it, but the thought did occur to me.

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

Not to burst your bubble or anything, but part of the reason the reaction is different here is because the fan cultures involved (and make no mistake, there are at at least two different fan cultures here, that of media fandom and traditional science fiction fandom [with a lot of people crossing over with comics fandom, and some other people working with general anti-racist issues]) is that this sort of discussion has been recurrent and part of the discussion has been dissection of why Bingo discussions are illegitimate.

I also find it curious (and I have no experience with the child-lit ml outside of the context of Kaplan's book, so I may have a totally inacurate picture) that there is a single person who serves point on the issue in childlit. In the fandoms, there are groups of people who speak to these (as well as related issues of feminism, queerness, genderqueerness, Judaism, and, increasingly, ablism and American cultural supremacy.) I think that helps us with burn out, but it also means there are (a) a wider variety of viewpoints on these issues and (b) it helps it to be less a question of a single person's personality. I mean, from the way you describe it, if Debbie's writing and way of explaining things doesn't work, you won't be learning about these things on child-lit. And I have to wonder if Debbie even tries to address these issues with non-Native cultures. (This is not me saying that she should be responsible for doing so, but if she's not, and she's the only person starting discussions about cultural appropriation, then most of the problematic stuff is sailing by the list unchallenged (unless there is way more child-lit published about Natives than I think there is, which is entirely possible.)

[(Anonymous)]

"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 don't want to derail your post from its original topic, but this is a concern of mine and I'd like to know your thoughts, perhaps in the future. Monica Edinger has posted about the dangers she sees in confusing "historical fiction" with "history." The standards of accuracy for one are much higher than the other. Fiction gets used in the classroom to the detriment of history, or fiction gets held to impossible standards of accuracy. Both suffer. How much leeway should a book be given because it is fiction? Should books on certain subjects be given less leeway? For example, if a subject has been treated very rarely in mainstream fiction, should it be held to higher standards of accuracy? When Catherine called Birdy won the Newbery, people pointed out its inaccuracies, but I think there would have been a much stronger outcry if the book had had a more unusual setting than medieval Europe. For my part, I find that the further a topic is from the main stream, the higher my expectations of accuracy are, but I am not sure that is justified.

Creators do play fast and loose with their source material, some more than others. I know that Peter Dickinson felt strongly that Lloyd Alexander's first Prydain book shouldn't be published. He saw it as inauthentic. I think he felt that Alexander had pillaged a culture to get the makings of a good story. I think the Prydain Chronicles are wonderful and find that I am willing to cut Alexander all kinds of slack because I like the results. To use your words: an ideological stance I find troubling.

I'm not a member of child_lit, but I've lurked through various discussions in archives and I've watched the recent discussion in fandom. In the recent discussion of Kanell, Reese seems to be holding fiction to the standards of non-fiction. I've read her posts and her review as well as Slapin's and get the impression that the problem with Kanell's book is less about accuracy and more about . . . writing. I think maybe the book sucks. If the book had been powerful, beautiful, and moving, would the inaccuracy be as important to Reese? I can't tell.

[(Anonymous)]

Hello,

When one comment disappears into the ether, I assume it got eaten by accident. When a second one disappears into moderation limbo, I assume it's deliberate. I don't know if I said something I shouldn't have, or if you want to discourage anonymous comments, but I apologize for any transgressions and won't bug you anymore.