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>The sex and race-driven identity politics currently animating and, to my mind, diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West are either muted or

>The sex and race-driven identity politics currently animating and, to my mind, diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West are either muted or non-existent in Japan, where postmodern aesthetics are the outer skin of a modernist backbone. Japanese stories focus on the individual adrift in seas of excessive convenience and information, obsessed with personal not political identities, and questions of the soul. Oh boy, this puts into words how I've felt about Japanese vs. Western media for a few years now.

GuiA 8y ago
This paragraph is deliberately left vague - a Rorschach test of sorts. I am not quite sure what he is referring to exactly. I do know that my local bookstore has much more books from authors who are gay, trans, black, Asian, etc than it did 15 years ago. If you value diversity in your media - which I do - then this is wonderful. We had a NY Times best seller last year about black women mathematicians working at NASA in the mid 1900s - it’s very hard to imagine who would have published that book in the 90s or 2000s. If that constitutes “diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West” in the author’s mind, so be it, but perhaps he should be a tad more upfront about what he really means.
- nyolfen 8y ago
  >- it’s very hard to imagine who would have published that book in the 90s or 2000s. do you live in the same america as me? maybe it wouldn't have been a nyt bestseller ten or twenty years ago, but why do you think it wouldn't have been published?
  - mseebach 8y ago
    If you "predict" that it might not make a bestseller list, it's not a particular leap to predict that it wouldn't make it past a publisher, either? I am making no attempt to quantify this, I simply have no data, but it seems the argument is that today it is relatively more fashionable to write a book about black women doing something that is traditionally thought of as something white men would do, regardless of the "classic" qualities of the work. If it is the case (and I have no data to argue either way) that such a fashion means that a mediocre book about black women doing something (not saying the particular book is good or bad, I don't know it) gets published instead of a really good book about white men doing something, that could certainly be considered "diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West". But there has always been literature pandering to political fashions, and fashionable literature has always enjoyed an edge over unfashionable literature. Some of it is good and has stood the test of time, and some (most, probably, this is a power law domain) of it pretty bad, and totally forgotten. It's easy to look at the literature that survived from 20 years ago and compare with whatever flash-in-a-pan is being hawked by publishers right this minute and see all kinds of diminished products.
- lmm 8y ago
  My reading would be: contemporary western literary culture is excessively, stiflingly concerned about authenticity. I want to read books about a wide range of experience, far wider than any individual is likely to have in reality; the best fiction is at least partly an exercise in imagination as well as observation. It's great that authors from different racial/sexual/... backgrounds are writing, but with contemporary culture focused heavily on racial/sexual/... identities, we need novels that can engage with that and show us different perspectives within a unified narrative. So we need to be ok with authors writing from the perspective of identities other than their own, even- especially- when that inevitably leads to some inaccuracies. The push for diversity may have lead to greater inter-novel diversity, but it has, ironically, heavily damaged intra-novel diversity in the west, as many authors (understandably) no longer dare to attempt to represent other identity-perspectives in their work.
  - iamatworknow 8y ago
    You said it better than I could have, thanks.
  - bytematic 8y ago
    But is it worth it to have less volume and more authenticity?
    - lmm 8y ago
      It's not less volume though, it's no volume. No-one can write authentically as black and white, straight and gay, cis and trans, but we need books that incorporate all of those and more. Conceivably collaborative novels could be an answer, but I haven't seen them be very successful either.

GuiA 8y ago

This paragraph is deliberately left vague - a Rorschach test of sorts. I am not quite sure what he is referring to exactly. I do know that my local bookstore has much more books from authors who are gay, trans, black, Asian, etc than it did 15 years ago. If you value diversity in your media - which I do - then this is wonderful. We had a NY Times best seller last year about black women mathematicians working at NASA in the mid 1900s - it’s very hard to imagine who would have published that book in the 90s or 2000s. If that constitutes “diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West” in the author’s mind, so be it, but perhaps he should be a tad more upfront about what he really means.

nyolfen 8y ago
>- it’s very hard to imagine who would have published that book in the 90s or 2000s. do you live in the same america as me? maybe it wouldn't have been a nyt bestseller ten or twenty years ago, but why do you think it wouldn't have been published?
- mseebach 8y ago
  If you "predict" that it might not make a bestseller list, it's not a particular leap to predict that it wouldn't make it past a publisher, either? I am making no attempt to quantify this, I simply have no data, but it seems the argument is that today it is relatively more fashionable to write a book about black women doing something that is traditionally thought of as something white men would do, regardless of the "classic" qualities of the work. If it is the case (and I have no data to argue either way) that such a fashion means that a mediocre book about black women doing something (not saying the particular book is good or bad, I don't know it) gets published instead of a really good book about white men doing something, that could certainly be considered "diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West". But there has always been literature pandering to political fashions, and fashionable literature has always enjoyed an edge over unfashionable literature. Some of it is good and has stood the test of time, and some (most, probably, this is a power law domain) of it pretty bad, and totally forgotten. It's easy to look at the literature that survived from 20 years ago and compare with whatever flash-in-a-pan is being hawked by publishers right this minute and see all kinds of diminished products.
lmm 8y ago
My reading would be: contemporary western literary culture is excessively, stiflingly concerned about authenticity. I want to read books about a wide range of experience, far wider than any individual is likely to have in reality; the best fiction is at least partly an exercise in imagination as well as observation. It's great that authors from different racial/sexual/... backgrounds are writing, but with contemporary culture focused heavily on racial/sexual/... identities, we need novels that can engage with that and show us different perspectives within a unified narrative. So we need to be ok with authors writing from the perspective of identities other than their own, even- especially- when that inevitably leads to some inaccuracies. The push for diversity may have lead to greater inter-novel diversity, but it has, ironically, heavily damaged intra-novel diversity in the west, as many authors (understandably) no longer dare to attempt to represent other identity-perspectives in their work.
- iamatworknow 8y ago
  You said it better than I could have, thanks.
- bytematic 8y ago
  But is it worth it to have less volume and more authenticity?
  - lmm 8y ago
    It's not less volume though, it's no volume. No-one can write authentically as black and white, straight and gay, cis and trans, but we need books that incorporate all of those and more. Conceivably collaborative novels could be an answer, but I haven't seen them be very successful either.