ksmith | (no subject)

(no subject)

Not going to get involved in the cultural appropriation talk. I will only say that the one time I got slapped, it was for *not* representing one culture. I had represented a couple of others, one at a time, and the writer of the complaining email felt I was ignoring theirs on purpose.

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It's a tricky situation. It was hard watching friends of mine get dragged into the thick of it this week.

My favorite story of getting slapped down came from

tobiasbuckell. I was having lunch with him, David Anthony Durham, and Pat Rothfuss at WisCon. Toby told us about some vicious emails that he got from somebody chastising him about appropriating Caribbean PoC for his books. They had obviously just looked at his picture and not done any research to know that he is multiracial and from the Caribbean. He was not amused.

I have also been keeping well beyond minimum safe distance.

Though I have been gratified to see Southern Fire coming up when folk have been asking for fantasy with non-white protagonists.

And for the record, I never got any vitriol about that book, when it came out in the US or since.

Mind you, I did get a very overheated email when the Aldabreshin culture first appeared in Swordsman's Oath. From someone in Atlanta demanding to know how as an ignorant white Englishwoman, I dared to write about the African-American post-slavery experience?

I politely wrote back explaining this was an entirely imaginary world, these were dark-skinned people because they lived in the tropics and as far as I was concerned, nothing in the book had any bearing on any aspects of US history or culture. Happily that was the end of that.

I regarded it much in the light of a very few opinions I've seen about my books, that variously accuse me of being a)a man-hating feminist and/or b)a patriarchy-enabling betrayer of the sisterhood.

As saying far more about the complainant than it could possibly say about me!

Probably as a consequence of being an Invisible Writer, I have never had anything but positive comments on the cultures I've written about. Have been asked how long I lived in the Middle East, because according to them as knows, I got that right, and the other reactions have always been either positive or neutral. "You write about human beings," is the usual comment.

Well. Yeah.

Have scrupulously avoided the kerfuffle. There's a good reason why I effectively left the genre a while back, and endless, circular infights like this have a good deal to do with it.

They do tend to recur every six months or so, and nothing seems to get resolved.

I'll stand over here with you.

Every now and again I get sucked into these kerfuffles very briefly, and then I am forcibly reminded why I prefer to stay out of them.

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