Recently the American author Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin) caused controversy with her keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival. Asked to deliver a talk about “community and belonging”, Shriver used her platform to deliver a broadside against political correctness and cultural appropriation, particularly in literature. Shriver felt she was being criticised for daring to write about cultures that were not “her own”, and railed against this as a trend that would inordinately affect literature if it were allowed to become mainstream.

According to Racerelations.about.com, “Cultural appropriation typically involves members of a dominant group exploiting the culture of less privileged groups — often with little understanding of the latter’s history, experience and traditions.” But in fiction, writers often write from the perspective of characters who are different from them in race, gender, culture and age. Is it right to call this cultural appropriation in literature, or is this a complete misunderstanding of what fiction actually is? In my opinion, writers are not bound to stay within the lines of their own experiences and identities. Being a writer gives you a passport to travel in other people’s minds in order to freely relate the stories you want to tell, but not to distort or misrepresent, either by ignorance or design, the culture and people whose stories you relate.

Shriver weighed in when she declared in her speech that any writer should be free to write about any character of any race, using vernacular that doesn’t belong to them. Chafing against what she sees as politically correct zealots who label this as cultural appropriation, she said, “Any story you can make yours is yours to tell, and trying to push the boundaries of the author’s personal experience is part of a fiction writer’s job.” Without cultural appropriation, she argued, much of today’s literature would simply not exist. She said this while wearing a sombrero to mock the fact that a Mexican-themed frat party in the US had been censured for being insensitive to students of Hispanic origin.

The question of cultural appropriation in literature is being raised by today’s young writers

In all likelihood Shriver was reacting to criticism of her own novel, The Mandibles, found by reviewers to contain offensive racial characterisations of black people and Latinos. She mentioned this criticism in her Brisbane speech, pillorying the idea that a writer had to “ask permission” to tell others’ stories. Critics of Shriver’s speech say that she was referring to stories told by white writers about non-white cultures that have misrepresented them for exploitative purposes throughout history.

Much literature has challenged existing power structures even while other texts have cemented and solidified them. White writers traditionally occupied positions of privilege vis-à-vis writers of colour, telling others’ stories and using elements of others’ culture without ever being questioned about accuracy or legitimacy. It was just assumed that by dint of their own privilege, they had the experience, ability, and authority to write about others’ cultures and countries. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a classic example of how Africa came to be defined by the literature written by a white man; Rudyard Kipling did something similar in writing about India. It took at least 70 years, the demise of colonialism, and the emergence of postcolonial writing for indigenous voices from those cultures to be heard for themselves.

Yet even non-white authors don’t all agree that cultural appropriation is a literary crime. Many argue that there is no such thing as cultural appropriation in writing, including Pakistan’s own Kamila Shamsie. In an interview for the New York Times, Shamsie said, “The moment you say a male American writer can’t write about a female Pakistani, you are saying, ‘Don’t tell those stories’. Worse, you’re saying: ‘As an American male you can’t understand a Pakistani woman. She is enigmatic, inscrutable, [and] unknowable. She’s [the] other. Leave her and her nation to its otherness. Write them out of your history’.” I agree with Shamsie’s thoughts, as long as the American male is doing his best to write with as much truth and accuracy as possible the realities of being a Pakistani woman, and present her in an accurate context, not to serve his own fantasies or misconceptions about her.

Almost every writer who has been recognised by the literary establishment, itself dominated by white agents, publishers and editors, is encountering accusations of cultural appropriation. J.K. Rowling was said to have appropriated elements of Native American folklore for her North American Potterverse history.

Almost every writer who has been recognised by the literary establishment, itself dominated by white agents, publishers and editors, is encountering accusations of cultural appropriation. J.K. Rowling was said to have appropriated elements of Native American folklore for her North American Potterverse history. Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help was charged with ventriloquising black women to tell the story of the stereotypical “black domestic.” Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love was criticised for using ‘exotic’ countries and people as the background for the white character’s spiritual and personal growth.

Of course, not every white writer has committed the ‘crime’ of cultural appropriation. Writers from European/Western/North American backgrounds can and do portray non-white cultures and people with respect and reverence, doing the necessary research and reflection to create works that produce more than crude stereotyping or caricature. But today’s young and upcoming writers, tired of being called ‘other’, ‘minority’, or ‘BAME [Black, Asian, and minority ethnic],’ are eager to bring about the demise of the white writer’s absolute reign. Here are the opening paragraphs of the manifesto of Mangal Media, a Web-based literary journal devoted to promoting these previously unheard voices:

We are a collective of writers, journalists, artists, and scholars from the war-torn Third World. We will no longer allow white boys in keffiyehs to steal our stories and sell them … We, who are directly affected by, and the subject of, the stories on international news, will now be the ones to write them. Our voices will no longer go through the intermediary of blue-eyed children from Western Europe and North America (WENA). Our talented sisters and brothers who can and do write, who can and do paint, who can and do make music, will no longer be valued at less than WENA’s children, because we are destroying the WENA brand.

Cultural appropriation can be seen as an arts-based extension of physical colonialism. However, the outcry against cultural appropriation in literature should be seen as a 21st century demand to broaden the diversity of its practitioners. With a plethora of writers from non-white cultures writing and speaking about their experiences in fiction, memoir, and non-fiction essays, white writers are now being challenged and held responsible for the portraits they paint of races and cultures that aren’t their own.

As the world’s disparate cultures and communities become more and more connected, the very discipline of literature is expanding from its traditional strictures into an art form influenced by the vernacular, storytelling styles, oral and written traditions of non-white cultures. White writers previously utilised these cultures as they pleased to serve their stories. But now, the indigenous writers of those cultures wanting to enter the mainstream demand to be recognised as the keepers of these vernaculars, and the original and rightful tellers of these stories.

The debate about cultural appropriation in literature is actually a debate about whose will be the definitive voices of the next century of writing, and whether there is enough space for the old and the new. It is also a demand for mainstream writers (read: white, male, Euro-American, Western) to step back and allow the non-mainstream (read: non-white, female, diaspora or immigrant) to have their say. But the old guard won’t give up their space so easily. The reaction from writers like Shriver is actually a visceral example of a saying that’s become popular in the light of growing awareness to systemic injustice: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels a lot like oppression.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 9th, 2016