Lionel Shriver’s full speech: ‘I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad’
Lionel Shriver’s full speech: ‘I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad’
Posted by John P. Bradford // September 14, 2016
This is the full transcript of the keynote speech, Fiction and Identity Politics, that author Lionel Shriver gave at the Brisbane Writers Festival
I hate to disappoint you folks, but unless we stretch the topic to breaking point this address will not be about community and belonging. In fact, you have to hand it to this festivals organisers: inviting a renowned iconoclast to speak about community and belonging is like expecting a great white shark to balance a beach ball on its nose.
The topic I had submitted instead was fiction and identity politics, which may sound on its face equally dreary.
But Im afraid the bramble of thorny issues that cluster around identity politics has got all too interesting, particularly for people pursuing the occupation I share with many gathered in this hall: fiction writing. Taken to their logical conclusion, ideologies recently come into vogue challenge our right to write fiction at all. Meanwhile, the kind of fiction we are allowed to write is in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that wed indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.
Lets start with a tempest-in-a-teacup at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Earlier this year, two students, both members of student government, threw a tequila-themed birthday party for a friend. The hosts provided attendees with miniature sombreros, whichthe horror numerous partygoers wore.
When photos of the party circulated on social media, campus-wide outrage ensued. Administrators sent multiple emails to the culprits threatening an investigation into an act of ethnic stereotyping. Partygoers were placed on social probation, while the two hosts were ejected from their dorm and later impeached. Bowdoins student newspaper decried the attendees lack of basic empathy.
The student government issued a statement of solidarity with all the students who were injured and affected by the incident, and demanded that administrators create a safe space for those students who have been or feel specifically targeted. The tequila party, the statement specified, was just the sort of occasion that creates an environment where students of colour, particularly Latino, and especially Mexican, feel unsafe. In sum, the party-favour hats constituted wait for it cultural appropriation.
Curiously, across my country Mexican restaurants, often owned and run by Mexicans, are festooned with sombreros if perhaps not for long. At the UKs University of East Anglia, the student union has banned a Mexican restaurant from giving out sombreros, deemed once more an act of cultural appropriation that was also racist.
Now, I am a little at a loss to explain whats so insulting about a sombrero a practical piece of headgear for a hot climate that keeps out the sun with a wide brim. My parents went to Mexico when I was small, and brought a sombrero back from their travels, the better for my brothers and I to unashamedly appropriate the souvenir to play dress-up. For my part, as a German-American on both sides, Im more than happy for anyone who doesnt share my genetic pedigree to don a Tyrolean hat, pull on some leiderhosen, pour themselves a weisbier, and belt out the Hoffbrauhaus Song.
But what does this have to do with writing fiction? The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: youre not supposed to try on other peoples hats. Yet thats what were paid to do, isnt it? Step into other peoples shoes, and try on their hats.
In the latest ethos, which has spun well beyond college campuses in short order, any tradition, any experience, any costume, any way of doing and saying things, that is associated with a minority or disadvantaged group is ring-fenced: look-but-dont-touch. Those who embrace a vast range of identities ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, classes of economic under-privilege and disability are now encouraged to be possessive of their experience and to regard other peoples attempts to participate in their lives and traditions, either actively or imaginatively, as a form of theft.
Yet were their authors honouring the new rules against helping yourself to what doesnt belong to you, we would not have Malcolm Lowrys Under the Volcano. We wouldnt have most of Graham Greenes novels, many of which are set in what for the author were foreign countries, and which therefore have Real Foreigners in them, who speak and act like foreigners, too.
In his masterwork English Passengers, Matthew Kneale would have restrained himself from including chapters written in an Aboriginals voice though these are some of the richest, most compelling passages in that novel. If Dalton Trumbo had been scared off of describing being trapped in a body with no arms, legs, or face because he was not personally disabled because he had not been through a World War I maiming himself and therefore had no right to appropriate the isolation of a paraplegic we wouldnt have the haunting 1938 classic, Johnny Got His Gun.
We wouldnt have Maria McCanns erotic masterpiece, As Meat Loves Salt in which a straight woman writes about gay men in the English Civil War. Though the book is nonfiction, its worth noting that we also wouldnt have 1961s Black Like Me, for which John Howard Griffin committed the now unpardonable sin of blackface. Having his skin darkened Michael Jackson in reverse Griffin found out what it was like to live as a black man in the segregated American South. Hed be excoriated today, yet that book made a powerful social impact at the time.
The author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University who for the record is white, defines cultural appropriationas taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone elses culture without permission. This can include unauthorised use of another cultures dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.
What strikes me about that definition is that without permission bit. However are we fiction writers to seek permission to use a character from another race or culture, or to employ the vernacular of a group to which we dont belong? Do we set up a stand on the corner and approach passers-by with a clipboard, getting signatures that grant limited rights to employ an Indonesian character in Chapter Twelve, the way political volunteers get a candidate on the ballot?
I am hopeful that the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad: people with different backgrounds rubbing up against each other and exchanging ideas and practices is self-evidently one of the most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life.
But this latest and little absurd no-no is part of a larger climate of super-sensitivity, giving rise to proliferating prohibitions supposedly in the interest of social justice that constrain fiction writers and prospectively makes our work impossible.
So far, the majority of these farcical cases of appropriation have concentrated on fashion, dance, and music: At the American Music Awards 2013, Katy Perry got it in the neck for dressing like a geisha. According to the Arab-American writer Randa Jarrar, for someone like me to practice belly dancing is white appropriation of Eastern dance, while according to the Daily BeastIggy Azalea committed cultural crimes by imitating African rap and speaking in a blaccent.
The felony of cultural sticky fingers even extends to exercise: at the University of Ottawa in Canada, a yoga teacher was shamed into suspending her class, because yoga originally comes from India. She offered to re-title the course, Mindful Stretching. And get this: the purism has also reached the world of food. Supported by no less than Lena Dunham, students at Oberlin College in Ohio have protested culturally appropriated food like sushi in their dining hall (lucky cusses in my day, we never had sushi in our dining hall), whose inauthenticity is insensitive to the Japanese.