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Oh, I dunno...because when we start moving down this track (white people are incapable of recognizing good work from outside "white" culture), what we're doing in essence is choosing to believe that the evidence of our own mental processes is in some way deficient, and so we *can't* make a value judgment...a notion which I feel quite comfortable calling bullshit. First of all, we have to accept that there's this enormous gulf between "white" and "black" (or "Asian," "Native American," "Latino," etc.) culture in America -- despite the reality that black and white Americans do all live in the same culture, even if some of us would like to believe otherwise -- and second of all we have to accept that you can narrowly define "black" and "white" culture in the first place.
Most importantly, though, by determining that (presumably) white academics are incapable of judging the merits of a minority writer, we presume that a minority writer's work must by necessity be so different from that of a white writer that it's as if the minority is from a different planet altogether; it falls upon the academic merely to catalog it, not to interpret it, as this is clearly beyond his ken. It's hard for me to decide who's insulted more by this theory -- the academic who, because of his/her ethnicity, is incapable of "getting" literature when it's written by a person of a different race; or the minority writer who, because of his/her ethnicity, is incapable of producing work that can communicate to people outside his/her culture.
As for "who decides" -- well, the truth is, SOMEONE has to decide, don't they? Every course needs a syllabus. It sounds as if the notion rankles, but I don't see any other way to teach a class -- someone has to choose this book over that one. It sounds like what we disagree on is the criteria for selection. Yours has more to do with who the writers are and where they come from than with what they've written and how well they've done it, and I find that disturbing. If we propose that there is no way to tell good work from bad work, then we may as well not teach literature courses at all.
Further, we suggest a level of subjectivity in art observation of any kind that I just don't believe in. What you and I get from reading a work of fiction will, by necessity, differ; but for you and I each to have an *utterly* different experience implies one (or, I guess, both) of us is suffering a severe derangement of the senses. So -- subjectivity, yes; total subjectivity, though, I think is about as plausible as total objectivity.
Um....apologies for the threadrot... |
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