Critiques and common pitfalls

[dark_administrator]

There are less than 8 days (!!!) before yuletide assignments are due. We hope you're making good progress on your assignment and wish you luck. For those who are already done (!!!!!), congratulations!

In the meantime, there are a few things we want to address. One of the components of our Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Challenge is:

[...] if you end up writing problematic source, engage in fixing it: finding the invisible people of colour and putting them back in, writing the back story for a character without tying it into the white people's narratives, critiquing by making explicit the blind spots and bigotry and flaws in the celebrated white heroes of the narrative.

We encourage you to be aware of how the source for which you're writing in particular portrays race, ethnicity, culture and the intersectionality of these issues with others, especially when the source is not created by people from the identity it portrays.

Last year, we posted about some common pitfalls while writing outside your own culture and how to attempt to avoid them, where we also highlighted a discussion about white and Western consumption of manga and anime, and collected critique posts of some white/Western/other sources.

This year, we'd like to offer similar resources. We're trying to collect a central list of critique posts on the topics of race, ethnicity and culture for white/Western/other sources so if you know of any links, we would love to be linked to them!

List of Critique Posts for White/Western/Other Sources

Burn Notice

• centerofgravitas: On Burn Notice

Inspector Chen - Liz Williams

• tevere: On Liz Chen's Inspector Chen series

Temeraire - Naomi Novik

• drelfina: On Naomi Novik's Throne of Jade & Empire of Ivory
• lizbee: On Naomi Novik's Tongues of Serpents and the representation of Aboriginal people in Australia
• thedeadparrot: On Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, #1, #2 and #3

Princess and the Frog (2009)

• Shannon Prince:The Princess and the Frog and the Critical Gaze

We'd also like to discuss some common pitfalls in writing chromatic characters and non-Western cultures. What problems have you encountered as a writer and/or a reader? And how do you think they can be countered against?

Here are some questions that might help you ground your writing for this challenge:

• Who is your audience? Of course, you're writing for your yuletide recipient, but think of also who else will be reading your story. Vandana Singh wrote some great posts on this issue, Some Thoughts on Writing (or not writing) the Other and As Others See Us: More on Writing the Other, but often, it is assumed that the audience will be white and Western and, therefore, will automatically sympathize with a white and Western character.
  
  Here at dark_agenda, we encourage the assumption that the audience will be diverse as well as a prioritizing of a chromatic audience. Assume that (other) Asian descent readers will be reading your anime/manhua/hwa/ga story, that (other) black and African readers will be reading your story set in Kenya or set during Europe's 19th century colonization of Africa, that (other) Aboriginal/Indigenous/First Nation readers will be reading your story about an Aboriginal/Indigenous/First Nation culture, that (other) Latin@ readers will be reading your story about a Latin@ character, etc. and address your story to them. Don't forget or ignore them.


• From what cultural contexts are you working? The discussion about manga and anime touches a little bit about the issue of a white and Western narrative in non-white and -Western sources, but the issue is more widespread than that.
  
  Often, such things as traditions, motivations, emotions, habits, etc. that are more common in white and/or Western cultures are superimposed onto chromatic characters, or the stories of chromatic characters and cultures are narrated from a wholly white and/or Western point of view. This can result in what reads as blackface, brownface, redface, yellowface, whitewashing, Westernization, culture appropriation and many other names for the erasure of chromatic voices and cultures. So we think it's important to think about the cultural contexts of a character and to acknowledge their many identities, including that of racial, cultural and/or national identity as well as to think about your story's narrative and (re)focus it on chromatic narratives if necessary.

What other questions should we ask themselves? And what other posts or articles have helped you clarify your writing process?

Last Updated: 14 Dec. 2010.