Authenticity, Imagination, and the Money Question
I'm just going to repurpose this old class blog for my LIS639 journal, I hope that is okay. I went to all the trouble of installing WordPress and fussing with the CSS, it's kind of exciting to have an opportunity to make use of it again.
I'll begin by responding to some questions/reactions I have half-formed in response to the Cai readings, especially the one for yesterday. I don't always agree with Cai, and Chapter 3 was really no exception, though I appreciate his thoroughness and willingness to take a stance on an issue rather than attempting to present multiple viewpoints without commentary or real criticism, as if they are equivalent when they are not. Having a political objective to the work as a whole certainly supports that, but I do like that he does a lot of debunking.
This chapter was mostly about whether outsiders to a culture can accurately represent a culture through 'imagination' as opposed to direct experience. Cai seems to conclude that no, an outsider probably cannot do this leap of imagination well, but some have done a pretty good job after a lot of research and attempts at internalizing a culture. I agree with the points he makes late in the chapter that an active imagination cannot substitute for real-world cultural specificities, and thought the critical readings he gave of the two books about Chinese railroad workers and the differences between them (one a well-done depiction, one a poor depiction) were constructively chosen and discussed. I like Cai best when he gets into details--the scale of authenticity he adapts from Banks really works for me and gets away from the simplistic, dualist yes/no arguments Cai had set up at the beginning of the chapter by getting into degrees of cross-cultural incorporations a person can experience, and noting how the surface level of having read a few books might not make for adequate research into the culture, while more in-depth personal experiences and commitment to the new culture may make an outsider knowledgeable enough to take on the task of writing an appropriately authentic piece.
I think one thing I always flinch at with Cai are his 'should's. Should an author do research on a culture before attempting to represent it? Of course! But I think he often slides past the responsibility (and power!) of the reader and/or recommender in this equation. I guess I find the insistence on the author as the site of importance a bit frustrating, because in a lot of ways that focuses us on the individual decisions and relegates the systemic to the reader. Why are the reader's (or audience's, or editor's, or librarian's, or...) decisions also not personal--why does Cai mention so frequently whether an author 'should' write something and not ask whether a publisher--or, ultimately, a reader--'should' buy it?
I think that while Cai is very strong on the sociopolitical justifications, he lacks a serious and sustained evaluation of the economic aspects of multicultural children's publishing, and that's a weakness in his approach, at least in the chapters I've seen so far. Authors can write and research to their little hearts' content, but who is choosing their work for publication and what justifications are they presenting for taking a risk on that work? What (racist!) market forces are at work, and how can a conscientious reader--or publisher--work within the system, or outside it, to make sure authentic voices are heard, as opposed to simply publishing the white person's meditation on Chinese culture they wrote on the strength of imagination more than experience or research?
I was somewhat frustrating by Cai closing with the example of Staples who had the luxury of being able to fly across the world and spend a great deal of time in the company of the culture she wished to write about. Yes, she may have done an excellent job, but the fact that that kind of direct research for certain cultures may be out of the means of the vast majority of authors of any ethnicity, and the fact that there are economic, international, linguistic, cultural, and racial forces at work to keep insiders from Pakistani culture (to follow the Staples example) from writing an insider's account of life in the tribes is... important to take into account. I don't have answers, but I do have certain frustrations that Cai doesn't address to my satisfaction. I am not sure 'can, or should an author write a book about a culture not their own?' is the really vital question. I think the more important question is 'what makes inauthentic depictions profitable and more widely acclaimed, and how can we work to change that?'. All this focus on the author is great, but I think there's a lot of power in the reader, the bookseller, the teacher, the librarian, the publisher in supporting or ignoring in/authentically multicultural works--authors aren't out there creating things and making money off them in a vaccuum.