One of the more reactionary and harmful dictums that seem prevalent in today's society is that artists should only write about their own skin colour or gender and not choose a subject, show a world or create a character that differs from the artist in skin colour or gender.
According to James McDonald in his excellent article Where
is our Zola? "This position, taken up by selfish elements of the
upper-middle class, ultimately boils down to a scramble for the limited number
of dollars spent on Art, literature and music. "Stay in your lane" is
the popularised refrain for this self-serving prescription, which is cravenly
obeyed by a disturbing proportion of otherwise reputable artists.
Art is always an approximation, never fully successful, but
when done well, one that embraces the otherness and the sameness of writer,
reader and subject in the act of inquiry and compassion. To rope off subjects
from artists is to deny the nature of Art itself and to deny activity that is
fundamental to being human. A new form of censorship in publishing has
accompanied the rise of identity politics. The new censors are called "sensitivity
readers." Briefly, sensitivity readers function as the "Diversity,
Equity and Inclusion" inquisitors of the publishing industry, reading
manuscripts and hunting for potentially "offensive" or "inaccurate"
material. The imposition of upper-middle-class identity politics upon culture
is censorious and philistine. But it is also reactionary. The ultimate targets
of identity politics and the language of "offence" and "sensitivity"
are the working class and its democratic rights. Concepts like "offence"
and "sensitivity" are nebulous abstractions and subject to broad, not
to say nefarious, interpretation. While today it may be deemed offensive to
call someone "fat," in future we may be told that matters of class,
class struggle and socialism are upsetting and offensive."
It is rare nowadays for any artist, let alone a writer, to
go against the stream on this matter. To her eternal credit, the writer Rebecca
F Kuang has opposed the idea that authors should not write about other races or
gender. At the recent Hay Festival, Kuang spoke of the 'weird kind of identity
politics in American publishing. It really does not make sense to categorise
books this way. Kazuo Ishiguro: you'd never find his books in the sci-fi
fantasy section, but The Buried Giant is.” Also at the Hay Festival was the world-renowned
author Pat Barker[1]
who said she distrusts publishers'' 'fashionable' efforts to boost diversity.
Kuang said she found the idea that writers should only write
about characters of their own race "deeply frustrating and pretty
illogical". Kuang believes that that
problem is not just confined to the publishing industry but has become a political
issue saying that the situation has "spiralled into this really strict and
reductive understanding of race".
As the Marxist writer Niles Niemuth wrote, "The American ruling class (alongside its European counterparts) is promoting racialist politics and racial division to undermine the class unity of the working class amidst the rise of social inequality to ever greater heights, the eruption of mass protests over police violence and the growth of the class struggle in the US and internationally. The push to present every social problem in the United States as a racial issue is a reflection of the deepening crisis of world capitalism and an effort by the Democrats, the trade unions and the pseudo-left to stave off a united, independent working-class offensive against the capitalist system."[2]
She would do well to take on board the thoughts of one of the
most important Marxist writers, A.K. Voronsky, when he asked, "When does
the artistic image appear convincing? When we experience a special psychic
state of joy, satisfaction, elevated repose, love or sympathy for the author.
This psychic state is the aesthetic evaluation of a work of Art. Aesthetic
feeling lacks a narrowly utilitarian character; it is disinterested, and in
this regard, it is when he writes organically bound up with our general
conceptions of the beautiful (although, of course, it is narrower than these
concepts). The aesthetic evaluation of a work is the criterion of its
truthfulness or falseness. Artistic truth is determined and established precisely
through such an evaluation."[3]
He continues, "There is no need to confuse the artist's
special gift of insight with the desire to strike the reader by producing a
beautiful turn of phrase, a special style, or a totally new work of Art. Such a
desire usually leads to pretentiousness, deliberate overrefinement, excessive
floweriness and artificiality. The work becomes incomprehensible, and the
reader, like Turgenev's deacon, says to himself: "Dark is the water in the
clouds," and "Thus be it beyond our ken." Many contemporary
poets and prose-writers commit this sin, and they confuse the ability of the
artist to see what no one else has seen with a desire to astound the reader."
Kuang does not hold out much hope that the publishing industry
will change. If anything, she believes it will get worse. Noises made in 2021
to support change went out the window. She says there was “a lot of chatter,
but no substantive support for those authors, no real commitment to diversify
lists or the faces of people working on the other side of publishing."
When the staff at HarperCollins, her publisher, went on
strike for better pay and working conditions while her novel was in production
– Kuang co-hosted strike rallies for the union. When I asked her about her
hopes for the publishing industry and her writing going forward, she answered, "I
hope everyone unionises."It is hoped this militancy is reflected in her
future work. I highly recommend Yellowface and all her previous novels.
