/lit/ - Literature

>>10427113
>There is a particular set of circumstances that authorized Pynchon’s telling of the event, circumstances which do not exist today. For starters, there weren’t any Herero (or Namibian, for that matter) writers of fiction who had prominently addressed the genocide at the time of his novels. In the ’60s and ’70s there was no internet, nor the masses of scholarship we take for granted. In such circumstances, it was almost a moral imperative to write the genocide down—repeatedly, in Pynchon’s case—to draw attention to it again and again.

Pynchon was "authorized" to write about the Herero because there weren't any Herero writers at the time; if there had been, then he would not have been "authorized" to write about it. But because there was no internet, and no Namibian writers, nobody even knew about the Herero so Pynchon was compelled, required by law even, to write about them and how they got their shit pushed in by ebil rayciss pre-Nazi Nazis

>I thought, okay, this is obviously a very cool book with proper lefty sentiments

Thank God it didn't offend her sense of propriety

>When I first read V., though, I was taken aback by the sudden change of scene. What is this, I thought, Pynchon’s ‘Out of Africa’ fantasy? I was deeply skeptical about this white man, not to mention tired and afraid.

"I was afraid, literally shaking, as I contemplated the racism I was about to confront, and the outrage it would inevitably generate."

>Later that same year, 2016, we would all hear Lionel Shriver’s speech on how the concept of cultural appropriation was just stupid. She praised bestselling author Chris Cleave—white, British—for his “courage” in creating “Little Bee,” a fourteen-year-old Nigerian asylum seeker in his book of the same name. She scoffed at the critics who believe Cleave was wrong to appropriate such a story for himself, because “they are his characters, to be manipulated at his whim, to fulfill whatever purpose he cares to put them to […] It’s his book, and he made her up. The character is his creature, to be exploited up a storm.” It felt like an imperial slap in the face—but it didn’t surprise me.

Holy shit, I can't even mock this anymore. Literally shitting on a white leftist author because his pro-refugee propaganda was racist because he wrote about a nonwhite character. "Controlling" the actions of a fictional negress is Imperialism. I just imagined Morgan Freeman being shoved into a gas-chamber, I guess that makes me Cecil Rhodes.

Kudos, OP, for forcing me to acknowledge that people like this actually exist.