Posted on 05/24/2023 1:45:51 PM PDT by nickcarraway
R.F. Kuang's novel offers a literary exploration of cultural appropriation taken to a new degree.
Who is she? R.F. Kuang is an award-winning Chinese American author, known for her best-selling fantasy novels in The Poppy War trilogy.
Yellowface, her latest work, focuses on a writer and thief named June Hayward, who finds herself stumped with little professional success. Athena Liu, however, is her extremely successful, sort-of friend and peer from Yale. After Athena chokes to death on a pancake with June watching on, the fate of her unfinished manuscript, and the aspects of her identity woven in, are taken into June's hands.
R.F. Kuang says fiction should be about imagining outside our own perspective.
What's the big deal?
The story then follows June as she steals Athena's manuscript, and attempts to pass it off as her own, falling down a rabbit hole of intentionally misrepresenting her own racial identity. What follows is an exploration of identity à la Rachel Dolezal, cultural ownership, and a searing commentary on absurdities within the publishing industry. The book has generated plenty of buzz, with reviewers landing on all sides of the spectrum, and some predicting it to be the next Big Discourse Book. Sponsor Message
What is she saying? Kuang spoke with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly about the book, and the process behind it.
On the ouroboros of identity with an Asian author writing from the perspective of a white woman who is doing the inverse:
I think it's hilarious that all of our assumptions about who gets to do cultural appropriation, or when something counts as cultural appropriation, kind of go away when you invert who is of what identity.
And I think that a lot of our standards about cultural appropriation are language about "don't write outside of your own lane. You can only write about this experience if you've had that experience."
I don't think they make a lot of sense. I think they're actually quite limiting and harmful, and backfire more often on marginalized writers than they push forward conversations about widening opportunities. You would see Asian American writers being told that you can't write anything except about immigrant trauma or the difficulties of being Asian American in the U.S. And I think that's anathema to what fiction should be. I think fiction should be about imagining outside our own perspective, stepping into other people's shoes and empathizing with the other.
So I really don't love arguments that reduce people to their identities or set strict permissions of what you can and can't write about. And I'm playing with that argument by doing the exact thing that June is accused of, writing about an experience that isn't hers.
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On writing an unlikeable character:
I love writing unlikable narrators, but the trick here is it's much more fun to follow a character that does have a sympathetic background, that does think reasonable thoughts about half the time, because then you're compelled to follow their logic to the horrible decisions they are making.
I'm also thinking a lot about a very common voice in female led psychological thrillers, because I always really love reading widely around the genre that I'm trying to make an intervention in.
And I noticed there's this voice that comes up over and over again, and it's a very nasty, condescending protagonist that you see repeated across works. And I'm thinking of the protagonist, like the main character of Gone Girl, the main character of The Girl in the Window. I am trying to take all those tropes and inject them all into a singular white female protagonist who is deeply unlikable and try to crack the code of what makes her so interesting to listen to regardless.
So, what now?
It’s NPR, so who cares?
Because this article shows an Asian woman bucking the woke trend.
One of the most acclaimed modern English authors is Japanese who grew up in England, Kazuo Ishiguro. There was an Asian-American author Laura Joh Rowland who has written Victorian historical fiction.
‘I think that a lot of our standards about cultural appropriation are language about “don’t write outside of your own lane. You can only write about this experience if you’ve had that experience.”’
It’s a pretty dumb idea, especially when you get to genres like sci fi and fantasy. Nobody’s ever traveled to another planet, or slain a dragon, after all. So I guess we just take out those whole sections and burn them?
You might think so, but five or six years ago a successful sci-fi writer had her book canceled because some people interpreted the “bad aliens” being symbols for black people. And another case, the publisher pulled a book, because a white writer was writing from a supposedly black perspective.
Fact is that when it comes to fiction write what you like. Agatha Christie never was a Belgian Police detective or a elderly village spinster. Lee Child is not a 6'4" American Military Veteran. Ilona Andrews is not a magical a$$ kicker who is married to a Werelion. David Weber is not a over six foot female military genius.
Your readers will do the sifting for you.
And boy will they sift. There is nothing out there that someone is not an expert on and thinks you got what you wrote wrong. And when it comes to culture, eh lets just say every family is it's own culture. Sure you may share certain things with others outside your family group but you do not share everything.
Was Harry Potter a TERF?
Tolkien obviously never lived in Middle Earth, but his work is amazing because he was an expert in Medieval language and literature.
In Winter's Tale, Bohemia has a shoreline on the Mediterranean. It doesn't matter, because that was never the kind of authenticity he was after.
And Obama was never... oh wait, nevermind that was a biography.
Tolkien actually was a wizard.
Nah, Tolkien said that he was a hobbit. :)
The world building was way beyond what anyone else had done to that point. I am not sure anyone will ever come up with something as deep and detailed because they often are pressured to publish, publish, publish. Just coming up with a few words that sound like a legitimate foreign language is difficult enough and he came up with enough to make a language that can be used. It needed to be expanded of course as the years went on but so do organically developed languages.
She was the first woman to be Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy,[2] to be SFWA Grand Master,[3] and to be inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.[4][5][6]
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Key Out of Time, by Andre Alice NortonBaldies "Ohhhh!" Karara clutched at Ross, her breath coming in little gasps, giving vent to her fear and horror. They had not known what might come from this plan; certainly neither had foreseen the present chaos in the lagoon.Perhaps the broadcast energy of the enemy whipped the already vicious-tempered salkars into this insane fury. But now the moonlit water was beaten into foam as the creatures fought there, attacking each other with a ferocity neither Terran had witnessed before.
Lights gleamed along the shore where the alien invaders must have been drawn by the clamor of the fighting marine reptiles. Somewhere in the heights above the beach of the lagoon a picked band of Rovers should now be making their way from the opposite side of Kyn Add under strict orders not to go into attack unless signaled. Whether the independent sea warriors would hold to that command was a question which had worried Ross from the first.
Tino-rau and Taua in the waters to the seaward of the reef, the two Terrans on that barrier itself, and between them and the shore the wild melee of maddened salkars. Ross started. The sonic warning which had been pulsing steadily against his skin cut off sharply. The broadcast in the bay had been silenced! This was the time to move, but no swimmer could last in the lagoon itself.
"Along the reef," Karara said.
That would be the long way round, Ross knew, but the only one possible. He studied the cluster of lights ashore. Two or three figures moved there. Seemingly the attention of the aliens was well centered upon the battle still in progress in the lagoon.
"Stay here!" he ordered the girl. Adjusting his mask, Ross dropped into the water, cutting away from the reef and then turning to swim parallel with it. Tino-rau matched him as he went, guiding Ross to a second break in the reef, toward the shore some distance from where the conflict of the salkars still made a hideous din in the night.
The Terran waded in the shallows, stripping off his flippers and snapping them to his belt, letting his mask swing free on his chest. He angled toward the beach where the aliens had been. At least he was better armed for this than he had been when he had fronted the Rovers with only a diver's knife. From the Time Agent supplies he had taken the single hand weapon he had long ago found in the armory of the derelict spaceship. This could only be used sparingly, since they did not know how it could be recharged, and the secret of its beam still remained secret as far as Terran technicians were concerned.
Ross worked his way to a curtain of underbrush from which he had a free view of the beach and the aliens. Three of them he counted, and they were Baldies, all right—taller and thinner than his own species, their bald heads gray-white, the upper dome of their skulls overshadowing the features on their pointed chinned faces. They all wore the skintight blue-purple-green suits of the space voyagers—suits which Ross knew of old were insulated and protective for their wearers, as well as a medium for keeping in touch with one another. Just as he, wearing one, had once been trailed over miles of wilderness.
Nothing she says is revelatory or innovative or unique at all. That’s what fiction writers are supposed to do. Her words are revolutionary only because she’s speaking truth in on a medium full of liars that reach the brain dead.
As for the story of stealing a dead person’s manuscript... there’s nothing new under the sun.
Nope that has been the plot of several books dating back to the 20s. Someone had created something or is close to creating something, that person dies, someone else publishes the work and takes credit for it.
The only variable is if the creator is killed by the person who takes credit or if they died of natural causes.
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