Some thoughts on the Lionel Shriver flap: “Cultural appropriation,” criticism, and writing minority characters
The other day, novelist and contrarian Lionel Shriver created quite a stir with a keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival denouncing the social justice movement’s war on “cultural appropriation.” In the last few years, this [trigger warning for culturally insensitive term!] crusade has manifested itself in such bizarre moments as the protests against a kimono exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, injunctions against white people practicing yoga or belly-dancing, attacks on college tequila parties with miniature sombreros and Katy Perry’s geisha-style song number at the American Music Awards, and most recently Disney withdrawing a Halloween costume depicting a Polynesian demigod.
Shriver talked about political pressures on white authors who “exploit” nonwhite characters in their work, including the criticism she has faced for the depiction of a black woman in her latest novel, The Mandibles. She denounced identity politics as not only stifling but counterproductive to the very progressive causes it supposedly seeks to advance. And she offered a robust defense of the right to “appropriate” culture (and the writer’s right to appropriate characters) across racial and ethnic lines, to “wear other people’s hats” as either a partygoer or an author. She also wore a sombrero for part of her speech.
Right on.
Of course, all hell broke loose. A fellow writer, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, walked out on the speech and then wrote about it, expressing her disbelief and outrage that Shriver would “make light of identity” and asserting that her attitude “drips of racial superiority.” Abdel-Magied’s breathless reporting on Shriver’s speech suggests that what she witnessed and heard was nothing less than an atrocity:
The faces around me blurred. As my heels thudded against they grey plastic of the flooring, harmonising with the beat of the adrenaline pumping through my veins, my mind was blank save for one question.
“How is this happening?”
But that’s sanity itself compared to a screed by one Maxine Beneba Clarke in Australia’s Saturday Paper in which the author (who did not hear the speech but read all the angry tweets) describes physically confronting Shriver with a “how dare you” and calling her “a disgrace.”
Meanwhile, sci-fi novelist and blogger Jim Hines, a staunch supporter of SocJus orthodoxy, mocks Shriver as a sensitive soul who can’t take criticism. Hines points out that white belly dancers aren’t being rounded up and sent to gulags and Katy Perry is still performing, and no one is stopping Shriver from publishing anything she wants:
Maybe Shriver is one of those “special snowflakes” we’ve been hearing about recently. It’s not that she as a writer isn’t allowed to write about other groups. It’s that she wants to be able to do so without anyone complaining. Without any pushback if she screws up. Without people getting angry. Without anyone daring to write negative reviews about her work, like the one she talked about in her speech.
This is a familiar argument: It’s really the critics of “political correctness” who want to suppress speech.
It’s also ridiculous. Of course Shriver doesn’t want to suppress negative reviews of her books. There’s a massive difference between criticism and “callouts.” Criticism is an individual opinion; callouts are groupthink. Criticism is a judgment primarily focused, in the case of art and literature, on artistic and intellectual merit. Callouts are an expression of offense, moral judgment and condemnation, delivered on behalf of a purported righteous community or collective. Criticism says, “This is bad.” The callout says, “This should not exist.” The response to “cultural appropriation” and other ideological offenses that has come to dominate much of the left-of-center media in the last few years is not criticism; it’s public shaming and pillorying. Its tone is scarily reminiscent of campaigns against ideological transgressors in the Soviet press.
As much as I admire and agree with what Shriver said, I do want to add a minor corrective that I’m not even sure is a disagreement. I think that, unlike the completely made-up offense of “cultural appropriation,” a writer’s or filmmaker’s treatment of issues of race, gender, religion and so on (including the treatment of characters belonging to particular demographics) is fair game for criticism, within reasonable bounds. You don’t need to be a “social justice warrior,” for instance, to agree that Gone with the Wind sugarcoats slavery and stereotypes blacks, or — more recently — that The Passion of the Christ is full of anti-Semitic themes. (Though it would be good to have more awareness of gross caricatures in various works of fiction of groups that are unpopular with the liberal intelligentsia, such as conservative Christians.)
About a year ago, there was a big flap over a romance novel called For Such a Time by Kate Breslin, which received some nominations from the Romance Writers of America. It’s a romance novel set during the Holocaust and pairing a Jewish woman (who is hiding her Jewish ancestry) with a Nazi concentration camp commander who is eventually redeemed by her love and helps her save Jews. Their story also ends with the Jewish woman converting to Christianity.
While much of the commentary on this story was full of SocJus jargon that made me wince — “erasure” this, “cultural appropriation” that — I think it was entirely fair to say that the novel was in bad taste. Yes, Breslin had the right to write it, and other people had the right to criticize it. We can respect artistic freedom and recognize that some subjects are more sensitive than others. A love story involving a Jewish woman and a Nazi officer can be written well, but it is not the material for a romance novel in which the stereotypical redeemable bad boy just happens to be a Nazi.
But here’s the problem. When frothing-at-the-mouth outrage against trivial or imagined transgressions becomes the order of the day, it becomes really hard for people who want no part of the knee-jerk outrage culture to point out things that really do cross the line. It’s not “PC” to say that, while authors have the right to create anything they want, some works — one that demonize or degrade people on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, or religion, ones that advocate violence against innocents, ones that whitewash tyrants — deserve moral censure. But when moral censure turns into a massive witchhunt, its very concept becomes discredited, even in far more circumscribed and modest forms. When a kimono exhibit can be called racist and offensive, you hesitate to call anything racist and offensive.
As far as the criticism of Shriver’s novel, The Mandibles — which I haven’t read yet, though I just bought it on Kindle — I admit I can see why one particular moment in it would raise some hackles. The only black member of the family at the center of the novel is Louella, once a white man’s glamorous trophy wife who develops early-onset Alzheimer’s and ends up suffering from severe dementia and incontinence. At one point, the family has to move from Manhattan to Brooklyn amidst economic collapse and urban chaos (Shriver’s novel is set in a future America spiraling into decline), and Louella has to be led on a leash to keep her from wandering off. It’s not surprising that such an image would rub some people, such as Washington Post reviewer Ken Kalfus, the wrong way. (Kalfus defends himself against Shriver’s charges of political correctness, arguing that his objections were to stereotypes, not cultural appropriation. I have no idea if his charges of other racial caricatures in the book are true.)
I will also say that the overall reception of The Mandibles, which got excellent reviews from the New York Times, The New Yorker, and a host of other mainstream publications including even that bastion of progressivism, The Guardian, is not quite a case of political correctness run amok.
And the response to her Brisbane speech? Well, the Guardian and the Times have given her a platform, and even articles somewhat critical of her stance in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books have acknowledged the validity of many of her points about “cultural appropriation.” So maybe there is hope for open cultural conversation.
And it’s about time, because the anti-Shriver backlash has certainly been a stark example of identity politics gone mad.
Originally published at www.allthink.com.
