'Here's What Would Happen If Stephen King Were Treated Like a Latina Writer'
https://www.alisa-va...a-latina-writer
'The controversy over the new immigration novel American Dirt, explained
A non-Mexican author wrote a book about Mexican migrants. Critics are calling it trauma porn.'
https://www.vox.com/...-oprah-flatiron
'It received glowing blurbs from luminaries like Stephen King, John Grisham, and Sandra Cisneros. Early trade reviews were rapturous. The New York Times had it reviewed twice — once in the daily paper, once in the weekly Book Review — in addition to interviewing the author and publishing an excerpt from the novel.
But over the past few days, the narrative around American Dirt has changed. One of those New York Times reviews was a pan, the other was mixed at best. Another critic revealed that she'd written a review panning the book, too, and the magazine that commissioned her review killed it.
All of these negative reviews centered on one major problem: American Dirt is a book about Mexican migrants, and author Jeanine Cummins has identified as white, calling her family mostly white "in every practical way" a few years ago. (She has since begun to discuss a Puerto Rican grandmother.) Cummins had written a story that was not hers — and, according to many readers of color, she didn't do a very good job of it. In fact, she seemed to fetishize the pain of her characters at the expense of treating them as real human beings.
So on Tuesday morning, when Oprah announced that American Dirt would be the next book discussed in her book club, the news was treated not as the crown jewel in the coronation of the novel of the season, but as a slightly awkward development for Oprah.'
[However, the critiques pointed out numerous inaccuracies caused by the author's lack of familiarity with Mexican culture (including Mexican Spanish), and particularly criticized reductive and inaccurate stereotypes. Also, the most prominent writers attacking her for being too 'white', not having the lived experience, and acting as a 'white savior' telling other peoples' stories... themselves have non-Hispanic names, look white in many of their photos and promotional materials (with non-Mexican 'white' U S o An) fathers and mestizo Mexican mothers), and are not immigrants. All of which they fail to disclose.]
'Auntie Sandra's Cabin: Why No One Should Be Surprised Sandra Cisneros Endorsed American Dirt
[...] I came to realize, over time, that Cisneros, Bergholtz and their gang are what my dad calls "ethnic entrepreneurs." Their entire existence is predicated on not only the oversimplification of the "exotic peoples" they purport to represent but about whom they actually know jack shit, but also is dependent upon the continued marginalization and exoticization of said peoples, because without it them fakeass Aztec empresses would have no rebosos at all. My father describes such people as comemierdas, the highly academic Spanish word for shiteaters. He, having grown up in actual Latin America, where there are actual distinct social classes, ethnicities, races and all of the resultant problems that come from real, complex multi-directional oppressions and histories, is deeply amused by people like Cisneros.
"And if the oppression they say they detest were to disappear overnight," he says with a grin, "what then? Who are these comemierdas then? What do they have to talk about, it they aren't talking about 'la causa y la lucha'? They got nothin'. They are no one. They've marginalized themselves and bought into the lie of their comoditized Disneyahuatl mythology." (Okay, that word was mine, clearly, I'm paraphrasing, but I'm sure my dad won't mind - and yes, I called him dad, not papi, gorwing up, fuck you Bergholtz). "Their entire identity is defined in the negative - they struggle against 'white people hating brown people,' therefore they are. But if they had no struggle left, if they actually succeeded at toppling the oppressor, would they have anything at all to say about what it is to be the default person?"
Nope. They would not.
Cisneros, and others like her, are culturally American. Culture and language are not genetic. They are not carried like some distant genetic memory of sunshine in one's melanin or DNA. But because this nation likes to conflate skin tone or last name with actual culture, asserting "difference" where none often resides, in service to the dominant white power structure, Cisneros has accepted that, being brown with a vag, she cannot possibly be the default American like Robert Downey, Jr. is. She underscores this by dressing like what Bergholtz thinks Mexicans dress like, which is to say the way a Mayan woman might have dressed in the 19th century if she shopped at Dollar Tree.
This is exactly the conclusion the dominant class would like all minoritized people to adopt about themselves, because it is disempowerment and invalidation disguised as ethnic pride. Once you convince the oppressed to marginalize themselves, to make themselves small and predictable in the name of some coveted "authenticity," you win. Once you convince them to become professors and appoint themselves the Arbiters of Authenticity, then they begin to police themselves, weeding out people like - well, like me. And so it is that the snake is convinced to eat itself.
Imagine, for a moment, if this notion of white male authenticity were applied to all white male authors, or creatives in general. It becomes obviously absurd. And yet, done to me and others "like me," it is considered to be an exercise in "diversity."'
https://www.alisa-va...d-american-dirt
This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 30 January 2020 - 05:01 AM
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Aptorian, on 22 January 2020 - 04:15 AM, said:
