[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

One of the obvious problems with this ghettoisation is that it confines writers from ethnic minorities to what they 'ought' to be writing about, and to the style with which they write it. It's not enough that Zadie Smith should be a black writer, she's also expected to focus her writing on a black topic (or what a largely white literary establishment think is a black topic, or style). We've joked about this in the past, the way that Latin American writers only really qualify as such if they write from a supposedly Latin American 'magical' perspective. We could equally say that being a Jewish writer has more to do with expressing a certain 'Jewish neurosis' that's easily recognised by gentiles, than it has to do with anything else. It must be a real problem for any black writer not that interested in adapting an oral tradition that supposedly underpins their culture, or a Jewish writer not overly preoccupied with their mother, and so on.

It's everywhere in culture, from world music to art cinema, to the whole manga craze in the West: that to be considered commercially viable an artist from a minority or marginal background is expected to promote a certain sense of their nationality or ethnicity in a way that foreign consumers can recognise and which satisfies their fetish for some kind of pure, authentic 'otherness'. It's like theme park culture. Go to Stratford Upon Avon and see it's been reinvented as 'Ye Olde English Village', purely to satisfy American tourists who want to wallow in a very American idea of Shakespeare's 'Englishness'.



I don't know but it wouldn't surprise me if that does take place. Although it's a similar problem as before: Joyce is probably just as much fetishised for his perceived 'Irishness' (whatever that may be) as for his purely literary innovations.

let's fucking burn and destroy culture!