Appropriate
A Provocation
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- US$11.99
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- US$11.99
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A timely, nuanced work that dissects the thorny debate around cultural appropriation and the literary imagination.
How do we properly define cultural appropriation, and is it always wrong? If we can write in the voice of another, should we? And if so, what questions do we need to consider first? In Appropriate, creative writing professor Paisley Rekdal addresses a young writer to delineate how the idea of cultural appropriation has evolved—and perhaps calcified—in our political climate. What follows is a penetrating exploration of fluctuating literary power and authorial privilege, about whiteness and what we really mean by the term empathy, that examines writers from William Styron to Peter Ho Davies to Jeanine Cummins. Lucid, reflective, and astute, Appropriate presents a generous new framework for one of the most controversial subjects in contemporary literature.
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"People would rather gnaw off the fingers of their right hand than talk through the tangled arguments around cultural appropriation," writes poet Rekdal (Nightingale) in this timely meditation on the topic. The essays take the form of a series of letters addressed to a student in one of Rekdal's creative writing classes who had asked for a recommendation for an essay to help better understand appropriation in literature. Rekdal begins by distinguishing appropriation from adaptation ("adapted work gestures to a relationship with a specific source text," she writes, while appropriation "requires comprehensive rethinking of the original work's expression") before moving onto questions of identity, empathy, and representation. Throughout, Rekdal explores the nature of creativity, and a publishing industry that "determines whose stories sound authentic' enough to deserve money and a readership." In the course of the letters, she analyzes a number of creative works, such as Katy Perry's performance in a geisha costume in 2013, which she suggests amounts to racism for its "Orientalist trope of the submissive Asian female that's existed since the late nineteenth century," and surveys the response to Jeanine Cummins's 2020 novel American Dirt, writing, the violent acts depicted in the book "exist only to activate our sympathies, not our critical reimagining of the characters, nor what underpins the migrant crisis itself." This passionate, nuanced take will raise sharp questions for literary-minded readers.
