Representation and appropriation

 A hopefully-growing list of creative writing type links.

• Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, Writing the Other
• Elif Batuman, 'Get a Real Degree'
• Jeannette Ng, 'Cultural Appropriation for the Worried Writer: Some Practical Advice'
• Zadie Smith, 'Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction'
• Adolph Reed Jr., Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why
• Charlie Jane Anders, 'When Is It OK to Write About Someone Else's Culture or Experience?'
• Nisi Shawl, 'How Not To Be All About What It's Not All About: Further thoughts on writing about someone else's culture and experience'
• Lila Shapiro, 'What the Job of a Sensitivity Reader is Really Like'
• Kit de Wal, 'Don't dip your pen in someone else's blood: writers and 'the other''
• Hiromi Goto, 'Wiscon38 Guest of Honor speech'
• Nisi Shawl, 'Transracial Writing for the Sincere'
• Itxy Quintanilla, 'Cultural Appropriation in Fiction' 
• FayOnyx, Decolonizing Games Resource List
• Bettochi, Klimick, and Perani, 'Can the Subaltern Game Design?'
• Kazumi Chin, 'So You Want to Play Someone of Another Race'
• James Mendez Hodes, 'Best Practices for Historical Gaming'

In terms of writing advice, these are a bit more leftfield but relevant in various ways:

• Stuart Hall, Selected Writings on Race and Difference
• Tuck and Yang, 'Decolonization is Not a Metaphor'
• Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists
• Frank B. Wilderson III, 'Grammar & Ghosts: The Performative Limits of African Freedom'
• Decolonising Utopia resource hub
• The Combahee River Collective Statement
• Angela Davis, Beyond Abolition Democracy
• Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel
• Barbara Foley, 'Intersectionality: A Marxist Critique'
• Vanessa Wills, 'What Could It Mean to Say, 'Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism?''
• bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
• Stuart Hall, Maggie Steed et al., It Ain't Half Racist, Mum
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography'
• Birch and Heideman, 'The Trouble with Anti-Antiracism'
• Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature?

Snippets:

“Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.” -- Stuart Hall

"Bearing in mind that thoughtful pre-publication critique is your best defense against unintended resonances and associations, there are some steps you can take to ensure receiving helpful critiques—and some steps you can skip. To begin with, it’s worth noting that not all those who felt the story’s resonance with the Nazi Holocaust were Jews or descendants of other groups victimized by the Holocaust. That’s good, because it means you don’t have to have a preconceived idea about who you may be unintentionally offending. And you don’t have to run your manuscript by people with exactly the same ROAARS traits as your characters. What you need is a pool of reasonably intelligent, well-informed, and articulate readers." -- Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward

"Against this revivalist definition of culture, we need a a materialist conception which looks at culture not as spiritual or religious heritage but as a set of material practices through which people live and produce the meanings of their lives. The starting-point for such an analysis is not the heritage of the past but the actual realities of the present, and one of the things that most crucially matter, then, is the degree of access to cultural goods — such as education or training in the arts — that different classes and social groups have in real life. When we look at culture in this way, we immediately recognise that social conflicts of various kinds, along lines of class, caste, gender, ethnicity, etc. actually leave very little room for all the people, or even majority of the people, to have roughly equal access to cultural goods, that may be shared by ‘a people’ or a whole nation to any significant extent." -- Aijaz Ahmed

"So I’ve tried to strike a balance in my own work, when I write about marginalized people whose experiences are different than my own. I aim for representation without appropriation." -- Charlie Jane Anders

"On reflection, it’s possible to see that Django Unchained and The Help are basically different versions of the same movie." -- Adolph Reed Jr.

"One trend we have noticed, with growing apprehension, is the ease with which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences, supplanting prior ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches which decenter settler perspectives." -- E. Tuck and K.W. Yang

"Very often, I feel people are implicitly asking me for permission. And I understand, there is this weight of expectation and responsibility that you want to be free from. I desperately want to write with the freedom that I felt when I was ten, when I didn’t worry about what other people thought about my work or who was reading it. Self awareness can be uncomfortable, and you think perhaps this can help you return to that state of grace. [...] There is no simple fix that can be done once and allow you to stop worrying about cultural appropriation forever. It doesn’t work like that." -- Jeannette Ng

"You may notice that one profound difference has been left out of this acronym: class. This was a deliberate omission." -- Shawl and Ward

From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière

As usual, my emphases / underlinings / paragraphs.

Democracy to come thus cannot be a community of substitutable persons. In other words, what the democracy to come can oppose to the practice of nation-states is not the action of political subjects playing the part of the anyone.

It is the commitment to an absolute other, an other that can never become the same as us, that cannot be substituted— or, we can add, an other that cannot stage his or her otherness, that cannot stage the relationship between his or her inclusion and his or her exclusion.

Democracy to come is a democracy without a demos, with no possibility for a subject to perform the kratos of the demos.

Such a democracy implies another status of the heteron: the heteron as the outside, the distant, the asymmetric, the nonsubstitutable. Derrida’s notion of hospitality implies much more than the obligation to overstep the borders of nation-states in order to deal with what he calls the “ten
plagues” of the International Order. What the hospes goes beyond is above all the border that allows reciprocity or substitutability.

In this sense, the hospes is the strict opposite of the demos. The character of the hospes opens up an irreconcilable gap between the stage of the possible or the calculable and the stage of the unconditional, the impossible, or the incalculable.

What this precludes is the aesthetic performance of the as if. The hospes erases the heterotopy of the demos as he creates a radical gap between the sphere of political compromise and the sphere of the unconditional, between the calculable of the law and the incalculable of justice.

What is dismissed by this opposition is the performance of those who play the part of the demos that they are not. When protesters say in the streets that “this is just” or “this is unjust,” their “is” is not the deployment of a determinant concept subsuming its object. It is the clash of two justices, the clash of two worlds. This is what a political dissensus or heterotopy means.

But it is the kind of justice that Derrida rules out. In his view there can only be either the normal, consensual application of the rule operating as a machine or the law of unconditional justice. This is what the “to come” means.

The ethical to come is the opposite of the aesthetic as if. It means that democracy cannot be presented, even in the dissensual figure of the demos, that is, of the subject that acts as if it were the demos.

There can be no substitution of the whole by the part, no subject performing the equivalence between sameness and otherness. The heterotopy of the demos is substituted by two forms of irreducible heterogeneity: the temporal heterogeneity of the to come and the spatial heterogeneity of the hospes.

These two forms are combined in the figure of the first-comer and the newcomer. The hospes or the newcomer is the other that cannot come to the place of the same, the other whose part cannot be played by an other. 

This dissymmetry is clearly spelled out by Derrida in Rogues when he identifies the anyone that is at the heart of the democracy to come. This anyone is not the subject of a dissensus, the subject who affirms the capacity of those who have no capacity. It is the object of a concern. Derrida gives to the “first to happen by [le premier venu],” a term he borrows from Jean Paulhan, a quite significant meaning; it is, he says, “anyone, no matter who, at the permeable limit between ‘who’ and ‘what,’ the living being, the cadaver, and the ghost.”

The anyone thus becomes the exact contrary of what appeared first; it is the absolute singularity of the figure that Aristotle conjured up at the beginning of Politics, the being that is less or more than the human being—less insofar as it is the animal, the cadaver, or the ghost that is entrusted to our care (a` revoir). The other, in that sense, is whoever or whatever that requires that I answer for him, her, or it. This is what responsibility is: the commitment to an other that is entrusted to me, for whom or for which I must answer.