Kindle Notes & Highlights
When it comes to writing about or through the lives of others, we have to begin with the desire to respect each other’s dignity and difference from ourselves, and this requires an understanding of the history of the individuals we wish to represent.
adapted works derive their pleasure from the fact that we recognize the original source. Appropriative works don’t require that we recognize these sources at all.
It’s this combined problem of cultural privilege, profit, and self-aggrandizement that must be considered when we appropriate items from other cultures.
while a small-press poet may not individually have as much cultural power as a Picasso, she is also part of a larger, and longer, narrative of how Western cultures have represented non-White communities.
You and I are individuals, but we also come from and represent powerful nations that have materially profited from and profoundly harmed the cultures we are now influenced by.
cultural appropriation means someone with more cultural capital and power has taken the objects, artifacts, and stories of someone with less cultural capital and power without permission and for her own benefit.
the term “cultural appropriation” carries with it the distinct whiff of colonialism.
you can appropriate a French text and not have it touch the same nerves as appropriating a West African one, since at certain points in history, our nations have literally bought and sold West Africans.
appropriation can cause harm, whether through cultural theft that leads to material loss, or through the proliferation of damaging stereotypes.
differentiate more usefully between appropriative works that harm another culture and appropriative works that simply write outside the boundaries of the writer’s own identity
I myself use the term “cultural appropriation” specifically to suggest a work that’s bound up in the production and dissemination of negative, if also unconscious, stereotypes of another group or culture, and the specific terms “subject” and “content appropriation” for works that are attentively influenced by other cultures, or include nuanced non-White or non-Western characters.
It’s largely understood by biologists that race is a social construct that groups people together based on the similarity of physical appearance and features, while ethnicity refers to one’s cultural affiliation.
To insist that DNA gives us our identity is both fetishistic and essentialist.
works that engage in cultural appropriation traffic in stereotypes that link bodily and cultural difference with innate physical and mental characteristics.
writers manipulate language to get the emotional effects we want and that, having gotten those effects, these emotions can stand in for the harder task of working for social change.
Empathy may be a profound, exciting, and beneficial emotion, but it cannot be used to justify or critically frame any work engaged in appropriation.
Whose desire animates your text? •In what ways does this desire replicate hierarchies and stories you are already familiar with?
Does this desire expand or contract historical memory, and in what ways does this desire encourage you to investigate you own racial meaning? •Is your understanding of your own identity at the margin or the center of the story? •Does your identity need to be at the margin or the center of this story?
The Confessions of Nat Turner is not interested in making a character believable to all audiences: it is an appeal to the White male imagination of both Black men and Southern women,
the loudest criticism against Styron’s novel was that it didn’t fit conceptions of Turner that American audiences wanted at the time.
Styron’s Turner neither fulfilled White Americans’ longing for a pacifist Black savior, nor did it appeal to those in the Black Power movement,
I risk misreading a text according to its reflection of my own historical moment.
if you engage in subject appropriation, you will research your characters thoroughly, doing all the intimately engaged critical, historical, literary, and sociological due diligence necessary before committing the details of your character’s life to the page.
Advice/solution
Do I believe these facts are accurate, both about the mutilation of bodies and the relationship between the police and Mexican cartels? Yes. But I do not believe these facts, and the impassive way these facts are rendered, would be forefront at this moment in Lydia’s mind. Who, essentially, are these passages written for?
Obviously, the intended audience for American Dirt is one that knows little about Mexico,
American Dirt appeals to readers who want to thrill to the plight of imperiled characters while never having to question their own political connection to the migrants imagined on the page.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin protests slavery but does nothing to dismantle the spiritual and aesthetic ideals that reify racist paradigms.
Violent events exist only to activate our sympathies, not our critical reimagining of the characters, nor what underpins the migrant crisis itself.
because Cummins centers her novel solely on the activity of these characters’ border crossing rather than the metaphor of their crossing, she makes them feel like statistics.
Halliday telegraphs to the reader that we are never meant to read Amar’s story as his own, but as another metatextual attempt at both Alice’s story and Halliday’s biography.
it has no sentimental project, thus it does not try to engage the sympathies of readers unfamiliar to Muslim Americans.
Both American Dirt and Asymmetry are obviously works of subject appropriation. But only American Dirt’s appropriations feel questionable to me,
Cummins is not claiming to speak for others, exactly, but she certainly wants to speak alongside them.
the majority of “comps” or “comparative” titles editors use to determine a publication’s market value are White-authored.
For them, Cummins’s Whiteness was exactly what made this novel so attractive to its publishing house,
In that sense, the publishing world’s embrace of American Dirt absolutely occurs at the expense of Latinx authors,
it is not the depiction of race on the page, but the ways colonial history continues to shape publication policy that offends people.
when faced with the enormity of our institutions whose actions implicate us, X, I think it’s easy to direct our fury at the representatives of these institutions rather than demand the institutions change themselves.
If I dislike the book, what does my anger do but bring me into community with other like-minded critics on the Internet?
there are two essential debates lodged within the question of appropriation: one is whether it can be done, and one is whether it should be done.
If, however, you don’t believe anyone should write in another’s voice out of respect for the problems of racial inequality and colonialism that are preserved in our publishing system, or until we have achieved social equality in civic life, then art, skill, and research don’t matter.
In a culture that consistently rewards the White imagination and its artistic productions at the expense of artists of color, any ethical choice you might make is fundamentally constrained. With these realities in mind, you might argue that the only option with regard to appropriation is to opt out.
!!
I’d like to trouble the assumption that opting out is the only anti-racist position you can take.
If the far right argues that the other is inhuman, the far left now seems to think the other is unimaginable. Neither is a satisfying proposition,
Diversity is solved by having more bodies in the room and on the page. Equality is solved when people with historically less power take an equal share of the decision-making with those who’ve historically had more.
If you resist appropriation out of respect for social equality and history, that’s a profoundly ethical choice, X, but it will have to be an individual one, since it can’t be institutionally enforced in a country that values and protects freedom of speech.
an appropriative work that succeeds aesthetically might also be treated by readers as a larger ethical failure, and why appropriative works can never be excused or justified on the basis of accuracy.
even sensitive literary portrayals may perpetuate racist systems.
Literature is not an automatically innocent or socially progressive pursuit because it is creative, and what’s at stake when we write is not only self-expression or imaginative freedom,
Does writing in the voice of another help or worsen these conditions? Does it mute other writers we wish to speak alongside of, or does it bring more voices into the conversation? The answer is both, X, at the very same time.
