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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
im all for having a fluid canon of course, it's the ghettoization that bugs me. see? "here's the canon-- and here's the cannon for the little people who couldn't cut it but we have to mention them out of political correctness"
zadie smith-- does she belong to contemporary literature or is she an "anglo-afrocaribbean woman writer" (or whatevers)?
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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'.
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i had this friend who studied british literature and being into theory shit she looked at the sociology & institutions & things. one thing she mentioned to me once was that when an irish/scottish/welsh writer/poet was new etc. it was classified as "provincial" but when they got famous they suddenly become "english literature". and funny thing, one of the earliest reviews of joyce published he's cast as some sort of talented irish wildman lololol
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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.