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davidlevineThere's been a lot of noise recently in the writerly lobe of the left blogosphere about the question of "cultural appropriation." I missed the Wiscon panel where the recent dust-up started, and I've read only bits and snippets of the ongoing discussion.
The issue came up in the comments thread of a friendslocked post by another writer. In that thread I confessed that I had no idea whatsoever what, exactly, cultural appropriation is and how to avoid it.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
littlebutfierce pointed me to a couple of specific posts that helped me get my head around the issue, what I feel about it, and why people get so wrapped around the axle about it.
From andweshallmarch I got the idea that cultural appropriation consists of presenting yourself as a member of a culture not your own (which I think everyone would agree is both heinous and rare) and that every majority writer should make the attempt to put themselves in another's shoes -- to write sympathetically about cultures not their own. This I can totally relate to.
From clairelight, on the other hand, I got the idea that only writers with talent, skill, and Responsibility should even attempt writing about other cultures. This I have some trouble with, because a) this doesn't really provide guidance to anyone, because all writers believe they have talent, skill, and Responsibility; and b) this doesn't allow beginning writers to learn-by-doing.
I suppose I could buy into clairelight's concept if I assumed that beginning writers would be allowed to try writing about other cultures as long as editors and critiquers acted as a filter to prevent less-than-sensitive works from being published. But we all know that tastes vary; people argue with Gordon Van Gelder's and Sheila Williams's selections all the time. So who gets to say "you, you have Talent, you may write about other cultures; but you, you have no Talent, you may only write about your own culture"?
I think the bottom line in this, as in so many things in writing, is: the rules are the rules, but you can get away with anything if you can somehow (e.g. through skillful writing) convince the reader to accept it. Problems arise when people think they are good enough writers to break the rule "thou shalt not pretend intimate knowledge of a culture not your own" but they are wrong, and unfortunately the definition of "good enough" is determined by each individual reader.
That's why there's argument about what cultural appropriation is and how to avoid it. A sensitive and skillful portrayal of a culture other than the writer's is diversity and is good; an insensitive and ham-handed portrayal of a culture other than the writer's is cultural appropriation and is bad. But the difference between these is the difference between well-written and not-so-well-written. Many stories fall into the huge gray area between the extremes, where individual taste dominates and it can be difficult even to articulate the reasons a story works or doesn't work. But because this issue is so important, each reader's opinion on a story or a class of stories is elevated in significance, and disagreements on whether a story is successful or not turn into larger arguments over whether what the story was trying to do was appropriate or not.
For myself, I think that I will continue to do as I have done: to write about people, from whatever culture, and to imbue them with humanity to the best of my ability.
The issue came up in the comments thread of a friendslocked post by another writer. In that thread I confessed that I had no idea whatsoever what, exactly, cultural appropriation is and how to avoid it.
littlebutfierce pointed me to a couple of specific posts that helped me get my head around the issue, what I feel about it, and why people get so wrapped around the axle about it.From andweshallmarch I got the idea that cultural appropriation consists of presenting yourself as a member of a culture not your own (which I think everyone would agree is both heinous and rare) and that every majority writer should make the attempt to put themselves in another's shoes -- to write sympathetically about cultures not their own. This I can totally relate to.
From clairelight, on the other hand, I got the idea that only writers with talent, skill, and Responsibility should even attempt writing about other cultures. This I have some trouble with, because a) this doesn't really provide guidance to anyone, because all writers believe they have talent, skill, and Responsibility; and b) this doesn't allow beginning writers to learn-by-doing.
I suppose I could buy into clairelight's concept if I assumed that beginning writers would be allowed to try writing about other cultures as long as editors and critiquers acted as a filter to prevent less-than-sensitive works from being published. But we all know that tastes vary; people argue with Gordon Van Gelder's and Sheila Williams's selections all the time. So who gets to say "you, you have Talent, you may write about other cultures; but you, you have no Talent, you may only write about your own culture"?
I think the bottom line in this, as in so many things in writing, is: the rules are the rules, but you can get away with anything if you can somehow (e.g. through skillful writing) convince the reader to accept it. Problems arise when people think they are good enough writers to break the rule "thou shalt not pretend intimate knowledge of a culture not your own" but they are wrong, and unfortunately the definition of "good enough" is determined by each individual reader.
That's why there's argument about what cultural appropriation is and how to avoid it. A sensitive and skillful portrayal of a culture other than the writer's is diversity and is good; an insensitive and ham-handed portrayal of a culture other than the writer's is cultural appropriation and is bad. But the difference between these is the difference between well-written and not-so-well-written. Many stories fall into the huge gray area between the extremes, where individual taste dominates and it can be difficult even to articulate the reasons a story works or doesn't work. But because this issue is so important, each reader's opinion on a story or a class of stories is elevated in significance, and disagreements on whether a story is successful or not turn into larger arguments over whether what the story was trying to do was appropriate or not.
For myself, I think that I will continue to do as I have done: to write about people, from whatever culture, and to imbue them with humanity to the best of my ability.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-16 08:32 pm (UTC)I am not ethnically Indian (i.e. Native American); I write the stories I do because I think the folklore on which I'm drawing, and from which I'm extrapolating, is fascinating and deserves to be kept alive. I simply try to treat the relevant material with respect, and to be as accurate as I can in presenting the source mythology. So far, I've had no complaints....
Part of the specific difficulty with Indian/Native American folklore is that it can be very tricky to separate genuine traditions from the body of New Age pseudo-Indian lore that sprung up toward the end of the Hippie Era. Another problem, at least in some regions, is that much knowledge was flat-out lost when particular cultures or tribal groups went nearly or entirely extinct from "white man's diseases" after contact was made -- and material collected too long after contact has sometimes been colored, sometimes in very peculiar ways, by the interactions between natives and white missionaries.
There are definitely areas of these stories where I'm inventing things as I go along. But I do that because (a) the available source material is often fragmented and incomplete, and (b) my stories are set mostly in the here and now, and I have to guess at how the mythic elements might interact with today's world. As long as I'm up front about what I'm doing, I don't think that's inappropriate. There's a rich body of source material here, and I hope to be exploring it for some time to come.