Entry tags:

cultural appropriation, feminism, ibarw, wiscon

[Wiscon 30] Cultural Appropriation

Cultural Appropriation & Writing Fantasy Outside Western Tradition

Not all fantasy fiction is, or indeed should, come from faery, from Middle Earth, from Tolkien or from other Western European traditions. Not everything should be pseudo–medieval in nature, and it seems that more and more fantasy authors are drawing upon other cultural frameworks in fashioning their fictions. Yet, that comes with its own issues, such as cultural appropriation. A discussion of the embrace of neglected mythoi, and the pitfalls that may await the adventurous traveler there.

M: Nisi Shawl, Judith E. Berman, Theresa Crater, Gregory Frost, Yoon Ha Lee, Ekaterina Sedia

Other panel write-ups
oyceter's post on the Cultural Appropriation Panel
yhlee's post on the Cultural Appropriation Panel

Granddaughters of panel
oyceter's Cultural Appropriation Pt. 2
rilina's IBAR link index

It seems almost redundant to write up the panel at this point, given not only the amount of discussion that's taken place but the amount of time that's passed and the scantiness of my notes. Here's what I've got anyway:

Books recommended by panelists
Amos Tutola, Palm-Wine Drinkard (Yoruba)
Catherynne Valente, Yume no Hane/The Book of Dreams & The Grass-Cutting Sword
Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman
Lafcadio Hearne
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Geraldine Harris, White Cranes' Castle
Lindsey Davis
Gwyneth Jones, Divine Endurance
Geoff Ryman, Air
Liz Williams, The Ghost Sister

Notes on the panel
Judith Berman, unfortunately, was visibly exhausted: she is an anthropologist and was one of the most thoughtful of the panelists. She defined cultural appropriation for the panel, and also had a sophisticated understanding of cultural and ethnic identity. She spoke, for example, of conflicts between her responsibilities to the Pacific Northwest people she studied, who might consider stories private or sacred or season-specific, and her responsibilities to her academic culture, which considers the passing on of knowledge a sacred duty. She was one of the few panelists who appeared to understand herself as partaking in a (or multiple) living cultures as well as an observer of other people's culture; who did not consider, for example, "academia" a default, an objective, or a value-neutral culture, but who did not dismiss its values, either. She also, unsurprisingly, spoke of culture as varied, polyvalent, and subject to change. ("It's the nature of people to tell stories to each other and for stories to move and to change. There's this joke: How many folklorists does it take to change a lightbulb? One to change about it, and four to talk about how much better the old one was.")

Nisi Shawl attempted to frame cultural appropriation as an issue of power and historical privilege: When writing about another culture, are you acting as an invader, a tourist, or a guest? Are you taking the place in the sun of someone who could use things in a more culturally appropriate manner? (Or, as Yoon asked, are you writing what no one else will write?) This discussion foundered on questions of permission and power: Gregory Frost emphasized respect for sources, Ekaterina Sedia emphasized the quality of the work, and Theresa Carter emphasized first-hand experience and monetary remuneration.

There was, as Catherynne Valente remarked immediately after the panel, a lot of white guilt in that room. The few questions from the audience at the end focused on how a white writer could know she was doing it right, acting responsibly; someone mentioned the sense of ease and freedom she gained when she realized how casually and thoroughly Japanese manga appropriated American culture. Greg Frost compared American culture to a nuclear bomb, then backtracked quickly, saying that of course as midlist writers he (we) had very little power; few people in the room appeared to hear Judith Berman's description of cultural appropriation and the use of exoticism as "the dark side of decolonization."

My reactions
My reactions to the panel now are inextricably mixed with my reactions to the online discussions afterward. It took me some time to untangle some of the personal aspects of my reactions as well, namely that I had encouraged yhlee and oyceter to come to Wiscon; I felt, in a vague way, that they were my guests, and I thought they would be at home in my community, and instead my community failed me. My community was a good deal more racist than I had expected or acknowledged; it had done a lot less of what I considered the basic groundwork of feminism than I had expected; it had not greeted my friends with the respect they deserved.

That wasn't entirely a rational response; neither Yoon nor Oyce came solely because of me, and Yoon probably had more friends, contacts, and general standing in the Wiscon community than I did. But I had encouraged them to come, and I did feel responsible for how well the con went for them. And, of course, if I'd been paying more attention, I would have been more prepared for the amount of white resistance to the recognition of privilege and institutionalized racism even among feminists, sf fans, and the feminist sf community; if I'd been paying more attention, I would not in the past have contributed to this resistance myself. Looking back, I can see that this was hardly the first set of arguments of race to occur in my circles of media and literary fandom, and hardly the first time attempts to discuss race were derailed into increasingly minute discussion of white ethnicities or nonracial forms of oppression and privilege. But I hadn't been looking before; and now I was. I think the big kicker for me was when oyceter made a post asking to discuss cultural appropriation of people of color and to keep discussion of white ethnicities elsewhere, only to get comment after comment after comment protesting the exclusion of white ethnicity.

I can't remember now if this came before or after the stirring proclamations by several writers that they sought no permission for what to write about and would write about what they damn well pleased, in response to oppression by ... well, nobody that I could see, since both Yoon and Oyce explicitly disclaimed this notion in their original posts. There was and is a lot of focus on the power of art and empathy; there was and is very little discussion about explicit disparities in political power between different races and ethnicities.

And, you know, I get it. I actually do. I cringed at the atomic bomb comparison in the panel, and I cringed at the retraction, and I cringed at the woman (girl? I think she was young) who asked plaintively, "But what do I do? How do I know it's okay?" It doesn't feel like you have any power, when you are going through your day, when you're a midlist sf writer who can't keep your books in print, or a wannabe writer who hasn't sold a story yet, or when you're dealing with any of the frustrations and grievances of your day. It doesn't feel like you have any power, or that the power you have does you any good; but that's what privilege is. Not recognizing the power you have, or the ways in which it is founded on the disempowerment of others. American hegemony depends on cultural dominance as much as or more than other forms of economic dominance; as midlist sf writers working in English, we're part of that hegemony, whether we like it or not. So how do we use that power? How do we represent humanity, how do we discuss culture, how do we judge aesthetics, what efforts do we make to broaden our audience, to listen to different speakers, to share our power?

And I get the uneasy feeling of being both empowered and disempowered. I do. I feel frustrated by all the different forces that want to silence me, that make me want to silence myself, the internal voice that says women have nothing to say, the internal voice that says white people have too much to say, the internal voice that says why are you writing about unimportant things?, the internal voice that says, why are you writing at all?

I get that people want to be respectful, but you know -- I don't. I don't respect my material. I have friends who write in Moleskin notebooks with fountain pens, but me, I write in beat-up spiral notebooks with cheap ballpoints whose ink bleeds through the pages. I don't treat my material like silk. I treat it like my favorite pair of jeans, beat-up and ink-stained and torn at the knees, comfortable enough to do anything with. truepenny talked once about the metaphors writers used for writing, and said ruefully hers were violent; mine are, well, kind of sexual. I don't respect stories. I fuck with them. They're mine, when I'm writing, and I will do with them what I damn well please. And how that accords with external considerations of real-world power issues--well, sometimes it accords well and sometimes it doesn't, and I have to deal with that as the stories come.

I think a lot of people in that room at Wiscon, and a lot of people online afterward, wanted an easy solution, wanted a step-by-step guide on How to write foreign cultures and depict other races and not offend anyone and still be a good person and get a gold star and maybe a shortcut to Heaven and I get it, I really do, I want that goddamn gold star. But I'm not convinced that there's a gold star to be had. I'm not convinced that the solution to problems of cultural appropriation is going to be quick or easy or result in an easy conscience for anyone: okay, I've done my work, I've paid my dues, I don't need to worry about racism anymore. No gold stars, no free passes: just work. Like the rest of feminism is. Like the rest of writing is. And maybe some things get easier as you go on, but ...

But.