CHRIS THURMAN: Rendering the Other, with not a hint of exoticism
As we all head for the plughole of urban hypermodernity, Lynne-Marie Eatwell's subjects will endure
Cultural appropriation has become a cause célèbre in the court of public opinion; it has its staunch defenders and its fierce detractors. It has also, rather unhelpfully, become a catch-all term. People apply it to extreme cases such as Jessica Krug and Rachel Dolezal, white US women who built careers on the claim that they were black. Then there are the more banal controversies: singer Adele donning a bikini decorated in the Jamaican flag and knotting her hair to mark the cancelled Notting Hill Carnival.
If dress-up and sustained pretence both fall into the category of impersonation, then another contested form of cultural appropriation is representation. Novelists, in particular, get defensive on this score. If it is the prerogative — nay, the job — of a writer to enter into the minds of characters and to depict them through acts of “sympathetic imagination”, surely no person or group should be off-limits? In principle, no, of course not. But in practice, far too many autho...
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