Yoon has a fantastic post here about the Cultural Appropriation panel at Wiscon. Be sure to read the comments.
This is stream of consciousness with no particular point to be made. Apologies in advance.
This reminds me a bit of the huge debate on Table Talk back in the day. See, Salon.com had Sherman Alexie (author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and Indian Killer) review Ian Frazier's book On the Rez, which was about life on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
Frazier is white/European. Alexie is... actually, I forget what tribe he is. Something Northwestern? Anyway, he is (take your pick of labels) American Indian/Native American/indigenous/First Nation. (I have no idea if he's legally Indian with membership in a recognized tribe, or not. For the purposes of this discussion it's irrelevant.) Anyway, Alexie shredded Frazier's book, in large part because of the cultural appropriate issue. There was a thread on Table Talk about the book and the review, in which Alexie took part.
I came away from that discussion rather less sympathetic to Alexie's position than I started it. Because sure as Yoon says, there's often a problem of misrepresentation when talking about another culture. Don't lie. Be honest. Keep things in context. But Alexie went past that, to the point where he seemed to be asserting that no whites should write about Indian life. That only Indians should be allowed to because whites were, by reason of their whiteness, incapable of adequately and fairly representing the Indian experience. There might also have been something in there about profiting off the Indian experience, but I could be misremembering--it was some years ago.
And this is the point where I go, yeah, but. Because once you draw that line, you're making it impossible for any fiction writer to describe any experience other than their own. I've never been homeless, so I'm not allowed to write about a homeless person? I've never been black, so I can't write about black characters?
If we go by that argument, so much for Megan Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons and Harriet Beacher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. (I bet this is the first time anyone's ever drawn a connection between those two books!) Or Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, which is by all accounts a deeply flawed and romanticized view of Californian Indians, but which made a huge difference in both public perception and public policy. As did Stowe, for that matter.
And, okay, yeah, that's a straw man: nobody's ever going to argue that Uncle Tom's Cabin shouldn't have been written because it's inaccurate. Except for the fact that I can't identify the point at which it's okay to appropriate and not okay to appropriate. Slippery slopes!
Alexander McCall Smith's novels about Botswana (Number One Ladies Detective Agency and its sequels): are they an example of the colonial power profiting off the lives of the underdeveloped, or someone drawing attention to social ills that need addressing? Both? (Kevin Costner was granted honorary membership in the Lakota tribe after Dances With Wolves; did they retract it after he built a casino in Deadwood [on property the tribe still has not relinquished its claim to]?)
And yet, and yet. Yoon's not wrong. Firefly is very problematic in its use of Chinese culture and language without having any Chinese characters at all. And in the comments,
mrissa is not wrong about how appropriation of Northern European myths and cultural artifacts happens all over the place and nobody cares at all. (Because ... why? Because "white" means having no culture?)
So is it the identity of the culture being appropriate that's the issue? It's not okay to appropriate from cultures which are historically oppressed (Native Americans, African-Americans), in the minority in the US/UK (Caribbean, Pacific Islander), or merely foreign (Japanese, Korean), but okay to appropriate from unoppressed majorities? Or, it's okay for a Korean-American to appropriate from Pacific Islanders, but not for a caucasian American? Why should the identity of the writer matter? But it does--it's all tangled up with context. Race, ethnicity, religion, history, language, identity. Oppressor and oppressed; imperialism and genocide.
What if I take the basic structure of a society and change its presentation, so instead of Masai cattle herders they're, I dunno, green hexapeds herding white buffasheep on a planet with two moons? Adaptation, transposition, transformation--that's what writers do. So is it wrong to transform? Or right?
Argh. ::flails inliberal white guiltconfusion::
One of the things worth considering is what the use of cultural elements in a specifically fantastic concept says about that culture. I think that there's an argument to be made that using something in fantasy at the same time makes it real and at the same time invalidates it. Because while Emma Bull's The War for the Oaks makes explicit the world of the Sidhe and the Unseelie Court, makes it three-dimensional, it also makes it unreal. This is a work of fiction: everything in it is fiction. There are no Phoukas, there is no Eddie or Willie; it all came out of Bull's brain.
What happens when you do that to a living theology? And not in a parody, but in an openly fantastic, yet serious, novel?
Few people use Judeo-Christian theology as the starting point for fantasy (the only magic system I can think of that uses it explicitly is Kurtz's Deryni); but it's apprently okay to use Native American myth/creation stories--even though many tribal members still practice and believe those stories. Because the use of something in fantasy automatically delegitimizes it in the Real World: this is why Stargate SG-1 never asks whether Jesus was a Tok'ra, but freely raids Celtic, Sumerian, and Asian myths for deities to turn into parasitic snakes. (Or little grey man, in the case of the Asgard.)
Man, I could ramble on about this all day, because it relates in startling ways to some of my professional interests. Except that I should be doing work instead.
*
On a vaguely related note: Project Implicit, courtesy of Harvard, which allows us to identify subconscious assumptions and biases through a series of flash-based tests. Absolutely fascinating, and a bit disconcerting.
*
In other news,leadensky is rediscovering the love of the plotty gen fic (although I suspect she never lost it). Yay for plotty gen fic! We need more of it!
Speaking of which, I sat up too late last night readingmoonshayde's A Proiri, a plotty gen Season 9 SG-1 novel with a huge cast of characters and two interlocking plots. It's very ambitious, and uses a ton of plot elements from the last few seasons, particularly the Ori and the NID and Baal, in interesting ways. There's one action sequence with Jack offworld in charge of three SG teams that is definitely worth the price of admission.
Oh, and Min has something to say about fannish communication. ::settles in to read::
This is stream of consciousness with no particular point to be made. Apologies in advance.
This reminds me a bit of the huge debate on Table Talk back in the day. See, Salon.com had Sherman Alexie (author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and Indian Killer) review Ian Frazier's book On the Rez, which was about life on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
Frazier is white/European. Alexie is... actually, I forget what tribe he is. Something Northwestern? Anyway, he is (take your pick of labels) American Indian/Native American/indigenous/First Nation. (I have no idea if he's legally Indian with membership in a recognized tribe, or not. For the purposes of this discussion it's irrelevant.) Anyway, Alexie shredded Frazier's book, in large part because of the cultural appropriate issue. There was a thread on Table Talk about the book and the review, in which Alexie took part.
I came away from that discussion rather less sympathetic to Alexie's position than I started it. Because sure as Yoon says, there's often a problem of misrepresentation when talking about another culture. Don't lie. Be honest. Keep things in context. But Alexie went past that, to the point where he seemed to be asserting that no whites should write about Indian life. That only Indians should be allowed to because whites were, by reason of their whiteness, incapable of adequately and fairly representing the Indian experience. There might also have been something in there about profiting off the Indian experience, but I could be misremembering--it was some years ago.
And this is the point where I go, yeah, but. Because once you draw that line, you're making it impossible for any fiction writer to describe any experience other than their own. I've never been homeless, so I'm not allowed to write about a homeless person? I've never been black, so I can't write about black characters?
If we go by that argument, so much for Megan Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons and Harriet Beacher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. (I bet this is the first time anyone's ever drawn a connection between those two books!) Or Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, which is by all accounts a deeply flawed and romanticized view of Californian Indians, but which made a huge difference in both public perception and public policy. As did Stowe, for that matter.
And, okay, yeah, that's a straw man: nobody's ever going to argue that Uncle Tom's Cabin shouldn't have been written because it's inaccurate. Except for the fact that I can't identify the point at which it's okay to appropriate and not okay to appropriate. Slippery slopes!
Alexander McCall Smith's novels about Botswana (Number One Ladies Detective Agency and its sequels): are they an example of the colonial power profiting off the lives of the underdeveloped, or someone drawing attention to social ills that need addressing? Both? (Kevin Costner was granted honorary membership in the Lakota tribe after Dances With Wolves; did they retract it after he built a casino in Deadwood [on property the tribe still has not relinquished its claim to]?)
And yet, and yet. Yoon's not wrong. Firefly is very problematic in its use of Chinese culture and language without having any Chinese characters at all. And in the comments,
mrissa is not wrong about how appropriation of Northern European myths and cultural artifacts happens all over the place and nobody cares at all. (Because ... why? Because "white" means having no culture?)So is it the identity of the culture being appropriate that's the issue? It's not okay to appropriate from cultures which are historically oppressed (Native Americans, African-Americans), in the minority in the US/UK (Caribbean, Pacific Islander), or merely foreign (Japanese, Korean), but okay to appropriate from unoppressed majorities? Or, it's okay for a Korean-American to appropriate from Pacific Islanders, but not for a caucasian American? Why should the identity of the writer matter? But it does--it's all tangled up with context. Race, ethnicity, religion, history, language, identity. Oppressor and oppressed; imperialism and genocide.
What if I take the basic structure of a society and change its presentation, so instead of Masai cattle herders they're, I dunno, green hexapeds herding white buffasheep on a planet with two moons? Adaptation, transposition, transformation--that's what writers do. So is it wrong to transform? Or right?
Argh. ::flails in
One of the things worth considering is what the use of cultural elements in a specifically fantastic concept says about that culture. I think that there's an argument to be made that using something in fantasy at the same time makes it real and at the same time invalidates it. Because while Emma Bull's The War for the Oaks makes explicit the world of the Sidhe and the Unseelie Court, makes it three-dimensional, it also makes it unreal. This is a work of fiction: everything in it is fiction. There are no Phoukas, there is no Eddie or Willie; it all came out of Bull's brain.
What happens when you do that to a living theology? And not in a parody, but in an openly fantastic, yet serious, novel?
Few people use Judeo-Christian theology as the starting point for fantasy (the only magic system I can think of that uses it explicitly is Kurtz's Deryni); but it's apprently okay to use Native American myth/creation stories--even though many tribal members still practice and believe those stories. Because the use of something in fantasy automatically delegitimizes it in the Real World: this is why Stargate SG-1 never asks whether Jesus was a Tok'ra, but freely raids Celtic, Sumerian, and Asian myths for deities to turn into parasitic snakes. (Or little grey man, in the case of the Asgard.)
Man, I could ramble on about this all day, because it relates in startling ways to some of my professional interests. Except that I should be doing work instead.
*
On a vaguely related note: Project Implicit, courtesy of Harvard, which allows us to identify subconscious assumptions and biases through a series of flash-based tests. Absolutely fascinating, and a bit disconcerting.
*
In other news,
leadensky is rediscovering the love of the plotty gen fic (although I suspect she never lost it). Yay for plotty gen fic! We need more of it! Speaking of which, I sat up too late last night reading
moonshayde's A Proiri, a plotty gen Season 9 SG-1 novel with a huge cast of characters and two interlocking plots. It's very ambitious, and uses a ton of plot elements from the last few seasons, particularly the Ori and the NID and Baal, in interesting ways. There's one action sequence with Jack offworld in charge of three SG teams that is definitely worth the price of admission. Oh, and Min has something to say about fannish communication. ::settles in to read::