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> She went on to argue that Cummins, a white American woman with some Puerto Rican background, had no business writing about a culture and identity group to whi
by jancsika 6y ago
> She went on to argue that Cummins, a white American woman with some Puerto Rican background, had no business writing about a culture and identity group to which she didn’t belong.
Ooh, I just read Gurba's blog.
Her argument in essence: a white author's inexperience with a culture leads to bad writing.
Example from her blog: Mexican protagonist described by her husband as the smartest women he knows. But Mexican protagonist is continually shocked by occurrences that would not shock a Mexican, but would shock an outsider. Bad writing.
There are other points made in the blog. In fact there are some other accusations that stop short of plagiarism, but no examples are given which is pretty unprofessional IMO.
Regardless, Gurba is clearly and strongly asserting that the book is a piece of shit from a literary standpoint, and that the author's inexperience with the culture and people is the reason for that shittiness.
There's already a certain kind of click-baitiness to publishing a rejected piece that "dunks" on a popular book like this, ok, I get that. But the "New Moralism" author is downsampling that to a completely substance-free pure click-bait of "white people don't belong here" meme.
That is sneaky, sneaky, sneaky. If you got sucked in further to the article from that sentence you just got played by the author and possibly by HN's blackbox sorting algo, too.
- MikeUt 6y agoYou may be right about Gurba, but you're dead wrong if you're trying to imply that the criticism of even just that book (to say nothing of the others mentioned in the article) was based only on the grounds of 'bad writing'. From the article: “I was sure I was the wrong person to review this book,” Groff wrote, noting that neither she nor the author were Mexican migrants. “In contemporary literary circles, there is a serious and legitimate sensitivity to people writing about heritages that are not their own because, at its worst, this practice perpetuates the evils of colonization, stealing the stories of oppressed people for the profit of the dominant.”
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoSo if I'm a white male, I'm only allowed to write about white males? That means that if I write a book, it will be full of white males. How does that help the oppressed? It just removes them from the dominant narrative entirely. (I mean, maybe it makes books by white males so bland that nobody wants to read them, and so books by white males stop being the dominant narrative...)
- bradlys 6y agoMaybe the idea is to stop having white males being given such a strong ownership of the market?
- orwin 6y agoI think you have to read a lot of books to understand what they mean. And i don't think this woke crowd is right btw. If you're writing fantasy or fiction in anothertime book, be my guest and write about any character (although if it is supposed to be based on history and you're completely off about the culture at the time, i don't want to read your junk, really). If you're writing about a character in modern time, either you do some really good research, or you'll be off, and if your book/movie is bad, the woke crowd will drop on you. I mean, even if "The Wire" or "Treme" was ran today, nobody would drop on it. And i will take another example for people in the US. Books about the so-called "white trash"/"trailer trash" or who depict people in this population are mostly wrong. Sometime its hilarious, sometime you just stop reading because the book is so bad. For me it was books about Appalachians hillbillies. Since its the american crowd i know the most, i was quite exited to read about them. I've found on good book, one. The rest is complete trash. Honestly if my grandfather or any of his friends found those books, those would burn.
- ulisesrmzroche 6y agoWhat bugged me about that blog post is that if we go by her logic, she shouldn’t be writing about Mexicans either. She’s an American with Mexican heritage. She should only write about chicanos and that’s it. It’s like how only Americans identify as latinx.