
The Lives of Others: When does imagination become appropriation? - apollinaire
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/06/the-lives-of-others-when-does-imagination-become-appropriation/
======
mola
I really dislike this concept. Cultures mixed and borrowed from each other
since forever. To clamp together awefulness like blackface with the wearing of
a kimono as a costume is just crazy. Men writing women characters (and vice
versa) have created wonderful representations that echoed in positive ways
with countless people. The Japanese culture 'appropriated' alot from the
Chinese culture and made it their own. We all enjoy this diversity, there's
nothing wrong with that.

Why use such an umbrella term when the negative instances are usually done
with obvious malice? Why should people stifle their creativity because they
are influenced by 'not their' culture. I wish people would stop using this
term, and just call out people bent on _intending_ harm, and not just for
being insensitive to some made up norm.

~~~
beckyb
_disclaimer_ \- I am trans.

With that said, a lot of the problem stems from the fact that a popular author
from the "outside" culture is going to have a lot more influence on what
others in the outside culture believe/understand about the "inside" culture.

As an example from my community, just about every movie written about
transgender people by a cisgender person spends a lot of time showing the
subject putting on makeup or wearing heels, implying that the essence of what
it means to be a trans woman is wearing makeup or high heeled shoes... But it
isn't the case.

That would almost be ok, but the popular movie is going to get a lot more
airtime than an indie movie made by a trans person which shows what our real
lives are like. In fact, that movie may not get made at all.

So it's worse having the popular movie out there, making money off of our
lives, but misrepresenting them at the same time. (And this is all assuming
that no harm was intended... it's still harmful, and it happens all the time.)

~~~
OJFord
All films' portrayal of anything is crap when it's something familiar to you.
(Or crucially, I suppose, more familiar to you the viewer than to those
responsible.)

~~~
52-6F-62
Well put.

Though I think it should bear an asterisk: the stakes are higher for some
people. Based on my experience, I think movies about musicians are often
pretty stilted, but that kind of thing can be brushed off a little easier for
me than misrepresenting a person's innate identity can be for them (as in the
parent comment's position). And then—enter the always waiting host of
philosophical questions.

edit: Felt like adding a little to my comment. I've always figured art was as
much an exploration as an expression. I'm not sure anyone should be judged for
a single work in that case—but there are abundant nuances to that kind of
statement so don't hold it against me.s

------
philipkglass
This article is not about whether white people can wear kimonos. Author
Richard Russo wrote a well received story about a Belgian nun, with details
drawn from a nun that he met in real life. He is not, nor has he ever been, a
Belgian or a nun. He is not apologetic about writing a fictionalized life of
someone quite unlike himself, but he ruminates at length about the power of an
author's imagination, the limits of that power, its wise exercise, and the
ways it seizes authors as well as being seized by them.

Russo also wrote a book that revealed very private details of his late
mother's life. Did he owe her still-living friends and relatives silence until
they too were gone? The conclusion is: no, authors write about what seizes
their attention. But he doesn't really seek to absolve himself. It's more like
an addict talking about addiction: "I took another drink, because that's the
compulsion I felt."

The well-received story about a Belgian nun was received mostly among his
English-language readers in the United States. Not nuns or Belgians. What was
the Belgian nun reception like? Russo doesn't know. He suspects it would be
less enthusiastic, because they would spot the cracks in his story more
readily. The closer the readers are to the life experience of the characters,
and the further the author is from his characters, the more the author risks
readers' trust in trying to write those characters.

There's also a characterization-gap risk regarding authors and other authors
as well as regarding authors and readers. If Russo sells novels with
characterizations of Belgian nuns or black men, what does that do to the
literary prospects of actual Belgian nuns or black men who are trying to sell
their first manuscript? Can he end up non-maliciously but thoroughly quashing
their publishability just by showing up first, even if his nuns are less
authentic than those written by an actual nun? Quite possibly, yes. Russo
posits that the struggle for position among authors has become more desperate
in recent years. Publishers aren't as patient about investing in new talent
because they are facing more financial pressure. That means that established
authors like himself can casually, even accidentally, displace authors who
could draw better portraits of certain kinds of characters. That's unfortunate
for those would-be authors and for the reading public.

~~~
mydongle
Wait, but don't writers usually already do real research into whatever they're
going to write about? If I did research on what Belgian nuns did in their life
and wrote about it, is that wrong? Is that less accurate than if the Belgian
nun wrote it herself? The thing is, most Belgian nuns probably are never going
to write a book and especially not the book that I wanted to write. I hope we
don't start banning people from writing about things they've never
experienced, because that's the point of fiction and imagination. I've never
slayed a dragon, but I can write about doing so because I imagined it. Sigh,
one day probably only black people will be allowed to write black characters
huh? Or maybe you have to pay a black person for their input and account and
for them to endorse your writing?

~~~
philipkglass
Russo approaches this in a less combative way than you have framed it. He has
imaginative power: what does it do to him, what does he do with it, and what
_should_ he do with it? He hasn't definitively answered these questions even
after 5000 words of pondering. It's the opposite of a Twitter hot take telling
other people what they are allowed to do.

Authors do variable amounts of research to background their characters.
Sometimes shockingly little. Many HN readers can probably relate to
encountering an eyeball-rolling "hacking" scene in a thriller. It's _possible_
that a diligent author can write a character of a certain background just as
well never having lived it, but the odds are not in their favor.

The not-having-lived-it problem leads to some interesting challenges with
historical fiction. Nobody alive today has been a 14th century French knight.
Which authors really try to do their research and don't just treat time and
place as set dressing for generic drama? How much work am I going to do as a
reader to discover these harder-working authors? Sometimes I wonder: should I
just dive in to scholarly source material about medieval history instead of
reading novels set there? Sometimes the answer is "yes, just read history."

~~~
NateEag
This touches nicely on why I have always preferred science fiction, fantasy,
fairy tales, and mythology to historical fiction:

When the whole thing is fiction, you don't need to fuss about which parts are
historically accurate.

Historical fiction must necessarily be a blending of truth and lies, and as
such it has never held my interest.

------
gnicholas
> _I’d have to be willing to admit defeat and pull the plug should it become
> clear that the book I was writing was misbegotten, even if that realization
> came after years of hard work. I would owe my friend Jenny and all trans
> people that much._

This critical sentence is artfully written in the passive voice. Who decides
if the story is misbegotten, inaccurate, offensive, etc.?

The author? The majority of people who share a characteristic with one of the
characters in the story? A sliver of said population, who are very active on
Twitter?

In an essay this long, I expected that this critical question would not have
been glossed over.

~~~
JadeNB
> > I’d have to be willing to admit defeat and pull the plug should it become
> clear that the book I was writing was misbegotten, even if that realization
> came after years of hard work. I would owe my friend Jenny and all trans
> people that much.

> This critical sentence is artfully written in the passive voice. Who decides
> if the story is misbegotten, inaccurate, offensive, etc.?

I think it’s not actually in the passive voice, except _possibly_ that “become
clear”. It seems as if you may be reading it as if the author is acting out of
fear of others’ judgement, but notice that Russo _doesn’t_ say “I’d have to
stop if it was offensive”—a fear of others’ reactions—but rather “I’d have to
[stop] if it … was misbegotten”, which I take in the sense of ‘ill conceived’.
That is an internal judgement, not an external one, and in this context I
think the answer to your question is clear: Russo, being the only one who
knows for sure how he conceived his story, is the one who decides if it is ill
conceived.

~~~
FabHK
I think the only (grammatical) passive in there could be "the book was
misbegotten", if it were the passive of active "Russo misbegot the book" (with
Russo being the only possible subject, as you convincingly argue). However,
the verb "misbeget" doesn't seem to exist anymore [1] - what remains is the
old participle as an adjective, and as such the fragment is just a good old
active sentence, like "the car was red".

But we're now sort of off-topic, methinks.

[1] Etymology Online: "bastard, illegitimate, unlawfully or irregularly
begotten," 1550s, past-participle adjective from obsolete misbeget "beget
wrongly or unlawfully" (c. 1300), from mis- (1) "badly, wrongly" \+ beget

------
blueyes
I don't think "appropriation" is the right way to frame this question. It's
really about failures of the imagination. It is possible for an author's
imagination to fail whether or not they share a group identity with the
subject of their fiction; i.e. there are lots of bad writers. Certain kinds of
imaginative failure are specific to people outside of a group writing about
that group (these failure modes tend to deal in stereotypes and sometimes
propaganda), but that doesn't mean they will all fail.

So the easy filter of "author Y is not X, and therefore should not write about
X because X will be misrepresented" doesn't stand. The second objections seems
to be about market failures: "author Y is not X, and therefore is taking an
opportunity from authors who do belong to group X." Personally, I don't think
art is zero-sum. I don't believe that, for every book that was published by a
well known author, a lesser known author was rejected. And I'd like to point
out that, while publishers may still be important, we live in an age when
artists can publish their work online and go directly to their readers. Those
that build a following will get picked up. Those that don't may use that
feedback to reflect on their style. The urge to write doesn't guarantee anyone
a living.

------
ArtDev
This article seems to completely skip the question in the title.

Regardless, the concept of "cultural appropriation" is absurd and dangerously
ignorant.

Thinking about it makes me want some Korean Street tacos right now. Which are
amazing, by the way.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
> Regardless, the concept of "cultural appropriation" is absurd and
> dangerously ignorant.

I share your sense that "cultural appropriation" is an absurd notion. But I'm
unable to provide any objective reasons for (or against) my views on this.

Does anyone know of a good, principled way to debate questions like "Is
'cultural appropriation' a concept that belongs in our ethical systems?"

~~~
aspenmayer
I think this is a very pertinent question. Here’s an essay for you which
explores this topic and how it relates to other issues.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK

MULTICULTURALISM, OR, THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF MULTINATIONAL CAPITALISM (1997)

[https://newleftreview.org/issues/I225/articles/slavoj-
zizek-...](https://newleftreview.org/issues/I225/articles/slavoj-zizek-
multiculturalism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-multinational-capitalism)

The intro paragraph:

‘Those who still remember the good old days of Socialist Realism, are well
aware of the key role played by the notion of the ‘typical’: truly progressive
literature should depict ‘typical heroes in typical situations.’ Writers who
presented a bleak picture of Soviet reality were not simply accused of lying;
the accusation was rather that they provided a distorted reflection of social
reality by depicting the remainders of the decadent past, instead of focusing
on the phenomena which were ‘typical’ in the sense of expressing the
underlying historical tendency of the progress towards Communism. Ridiculous
as this notion may sound, its grain of truth resides in the fact that each
universal ideological notion is always hegemonized by some particular content
which colours its very universality and accounts for its efficiency[.]’

~~~
aspenmayer
I found the whole essay via Google Scholar; apologies for not including it
before, but thought the original source was best.

Žižek, Slavoj. Multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational
capitalism. New Left Review, 1997.

[https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:58909765](https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:58909765)

[http://clarkbuckner.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/www.Zizek...](http://clarkbuckner.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/www.Zizek_MultiCulturalism.org_.pdf)

------
icosa
It's an interesting read of someone struggling with a hard idea. Im glad he
started to think about the context, and why it's different for him to write
about a Belgian nun than if he wrote a book with a black or trans main
character. But he missed the idea that if he does want to write a book where
the context is tricky, he should ask for help from people who know more about
the context, who might help him realize whether or not the book is
"misbegotten" and if he is "not up to this particular task." Writers look up
lots of weird things for their books. They can look up a person who knows more
about it and pay them for their help. That person might even give them ideas
that they would never have thought of! The writer can also ask more questions
to find out if what they want to write has tricky context: between the writer
and the subject, who has the power? Who might be harmed? Does this fit bad
patterns? What is the context? [ _]

[_] Questions from this post about how to have deeper conversations about
cultural appropriation: [https://jamesmendezhodes.com/blog/2020/1/2/how-to-
change-you...](https://jamesmendezhodes.com/blog/2020/1/2/how-to-change-your-
conversations-about-cultural-appropriation)

------
lubujackson
My problem with the "no appropriation" argument is that it violates the golden
rule (do unto others...) If I am over here doing something on my own, why
should anyone be able to tell me I am doing it wrong? Doing that is corrective
in a way that ignores individual experience and stiffles someone else's
expression - for the sake of an individual's feelings not being hurt. And an
action that hurts your feelings might be shrugged off by someone else, yet
every member of a marginalized group has this innate right to "set the rules
of engagement" when talking to anyone outside their group.

I think that is ridiculous. You can talk to your own experience, you can
educate others about your views, you can try to broaden what people consider
normal and natural or tell them why actions come across as shitty to you, but
telling people they are violating your rules is simply an inversion of the
power dynamics. It may make you feel good but it doesn't help anyone
understand you better or feel closer to you. What we need is fewer boundaries
and more curiosity, not stronger distinctions between people.

Censorship is not the way to understanding.

------
082349872349872
Is mimesis really the issue here? The imagination/appropriation problem is
only one if one assumes the reader is naively taking the author's world for
truth. If a critical reader approaches a story as revealing the author as well
as the characters, a story that falls short of perfect fidelity can still be
entertaining, and may even be edifying.

(I often work with people who are not communicating in their mother tongue.
When I spot an orthographical or grammatical "error", I try to treat that as a
hint of what similar constructs in their mother tongue might be; I'm sure they
do the same with my translation mistakes)

------
082349872349872
William Gibson was too poor to afford a computer when he started writing; he's
said that cyberpunk was pure imagination, and it might never have existed if
he'd known what machines were really like.

------
lazyeye
Never. Absolutely never.

------
bokbok8379
Let's just move to a system like North Korea has for their media. I don't
think they have any issues with their population getting offended.

------
teddyh
Note: This has nothing at all to do with the 2006 movie _Das Leben der
Anderen_.

~~~
jhbadger
True, but in many ways the argument applies to it as well. When the movie came
out many former East Germans complained that the movie (which was written by
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who was from West Germany) was unrealistic
because the idea of Stasi agents who threw away their careers to protect
dissidents as shown in the movie just wasn't something that happened, and
probably a movie written by East Germans who really experienced the Stasi
wouldn't have written it that way.

~~~
bloak
I certainly got the impression that "Das Leben der Anderen" was made by West
Germans. If it had been made by East Germans I'd expect to have found in it
something surprising, something exotic, something I hadn't seen before,
because I never even visited East Germany. But in fact everything in the film
conformed precisely to Western ideas of what East Germany was like. I didn't
even hear any music I didn't recognise: every background song seemed to have
been taken from a one-euro shop CD called "Das Beste aus der DDR".

~~~
082349872349872
Youtube probably has some DDR-era stuff, if you speak german. ("Besserwesser"
is a pejorative these days for former West Germans who think they know more
than the former East Germans [about what it was like])

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VKBgxOY5g8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VKBgxOY5g8)
is Sting's reminiscence[1] of how his song "Russians" came to be; having
watched some USSR kid's TV[2] myself, I agree with him that the russians did,
in fact, love their children too.

[1] Sorry it's a video, the article I originally read has gone down the memory
hole.

[2] hint: YT search gives different results in latin and in cyrillic.
Separating BRD from DDR will be more difficult.

