Whose life is it anyway? Novelists have their say on cultural appropriation
Whose life is it anyway? Novelists have their say on cultural appropriation
Posted by John P. Bradford // October 2, 2016
Jonathan Franzen claimed he wont write about race because of limited firsthand experience, while Lionel Shriver hopes objection to cultural appropriation is a passing fad. So should there be boundaries on what a novelist can write about?
Hari Kunzru
Clearly, if writers were barred from creating characters with attributes that we do not own (gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on), fiction would be impossible. Stories would be peopled by clones of the author. Since trespassing into otherness is a foundation of the novelists work, should we restrict ourselves in some way, so as to avoid doing violence to those who identify with our characters? The injunction to refrain from cultural appropriation sounds like a call for censorship, or at best a warning to self-censor, an infringement of the creative liberty to which so many surprising people profess themselves attached.