Authors Electric

Serious and potentially controversial topic this month:  Cultural appropriation . Hear me out. I read somewhere in the  news way back  about a pretty, young middle-class white girl wearing a Chinese dress (specifically a  cheongsam ) to a party. There was outrage and the poor girl was vilified online for  cultural appropriation . I’m sure she simply thought she was wearing a lovely dress and in many ways paying a compliment to any Chinese friends and the Chinese culture in general. And what was wrong with that? I have no real idea. So Chinese women wear cheongsams too. But apparently she was insulting anybody Chinese, by daring to wear their (national?) dress while being white. Being middle-class probably didn’t help either as the cheongsam is allegedly a symbol of female empowerment.  It’s a cultural minefield out there. We move into the literary sphere and suddenly we can no longer write about things of which we have no personal experience, ...

Sensitivity readers are the new thing. At least, it was new to me when I read an article by Lionel Shriver entitled We need to talk about sense and sensitivity . Apparently, US publishers are sending out manuscripts for review by sensitivity readers. Their job is to check for any misrepresentations, stereotypes, inauthentic dialogue or anything else that might conceivably offend “marginalised groups”, which include a host of racial, gender, and disability variants.  Shriver calls them the sensitivity police and warns of censorship coming to a bookshop near you.   critical theory Shriver likes a good fight. In 2016, she gave a speech at the Brisbane Literary Festival. It was so controversial that some of the audience walked out to write their own speeches. Shriver’s topic was cultural appropriation , in her eyes another form of censorship. Those who embrace a vast range of “identities” – ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, cl...