The authors who manage to clear the low bar of incorporating characters/communities from diverse cultures into their fiction without cultural appropriation/stereotyping/racism… who are they and how do they do it?
I know many writers sidestep the difficulty altogether, either by creating a fictional universe with cultural proxies (fantasy stories/video games with Chinese, Japanese, and Russian analogues, I’m looking at you) or by writing in the distant future where the cultures have blended into new ones with flavors of the past (sci-fi does this a lot).
I’ve seen so very few authors do it well, but I do believe it’s both possible and worth doing.
You must log in or register to comment.
I know this isn’t an author but a publisher, so please don’t crucify me, but have you checked out Tilted Axis Press? Their whole focus is on diverse translated fiction, particularly of stories or cultures that are less represented in the field. I’ve been a big fan of them for years.
For people in the future who find this post, I found a video that I can think explores this question really well: Who Can Write Whose Story?
Like a middle school Wikipedia book report, I’ve picked out some of his sources as being particularly accessible/helpful:
- Alexander Chee’s How to Unlearn Everything
- Who Can Write About What? A Conversation With Roxane Gay and Jay Caspian Kang. (NYT paywalled) (transcript on rentry)
- Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward (book, so no link, but you can find it online)