Appropriate

November 15, 2020
A poet responds to troubling questions about authorship and identity. Rekdal, a literature professor, Guggenheim fellow, award-winning poet laureate of Utah, and "mixed-race person," responds to the concerns of an imagined student in six cogent, thoughtful letters about the vexed problem of cultural appropriation. "When we write in the voice of people unlike ourselves," she asks, "what do we risk besides the possibility of getting certain facts, histories, and perspectives wrong?" Rekdal makes the useful distinction between adaptation--refashioning facets of a work--and appropriation, writing about or through the lives of others who do not share the author's group identity. Such works, critics object, "traffic in stereotypes that link bodily and cultural difference with innate physical and mental characteristics." Yet, writes the author, "to insist that a writer must be from the same group identity as the voice of the author has a dangerous flip side to it: while it warns off writers from blithely taking on subject matters outside their own experience, it also implicitly warns writers within the same group identity that an authentic experience of that identity does exist--to the group at least--and can and may be policed from within." Besides citing many recent theorists--e.g., Toni Morrison, Ibram X. Kendi, and Claudia Rankine--Rekdal analyzes poems, fiction, and art, mostly 20th and 21st century, including William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner and Jeanine Cummins' American Dirt. She discusses publishing policy that promotes "marketplace colonialism" and the connection of appropriation to "cultural privilege, profit, and self-aggrandizement." Rekdal's sophisticated analysis reveals a generous respect for the creative process: "I don't believe that an artist writing outside her subject position can only write into racist stereotypes," she asserts. Authors should not be required to produce "socially approved depictions of race"; appropriation, she adds, may help us "to critique the very systems that fail to represent us." An astute, lucid examination of an incendiary issue.

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December 21, 2020
“People would rather gnaw off the fingers of their right hand than talk through the tangled arguments around cultural appropriation,” writes poet Rekdal (Nightingale) in this timely meditation on the topic. The essays take the form of a series of letters addressed to a student in one of Rekdal’s creative writing classes who had asked for a recommendation for an essay to help better understand appropriation in literature. Rekdal begins by distinguishing appropriation from adaptation (“adapted work gestures to a relationship with a specific source text,” she writes, while appropriation “requires comprehensive rethinking of the original work’s expression”) before moving onto questions of identity, empathy, and representation. Throughout, Rekdal explores the nature of creativity, and a publishing industry that “determines whose stories sound ‘authentic’ enough to deserve money and a readership.” In the course of the letters, she analyzes a number of creative works, such as Katy Perry’s performance in a geisha costume in 2013, which she suggests amounts to racism for its “Orientalist trope of the submissive Asian female that’s existed since the late nineteenth century,” and surveys the response to Jeanine Cummins’s 2020 novel American Dirt, writing, the violent acts depicted in the book “exist only to activate our sympathies, not our critical reimagining of the characters, nor what underpins the migrant crisis itself.” This passionate, nuanced take will raise sharp questions for literary-minded readers.

January 1, 2021
A suitable logline for this book from poet and essayist Rekdal (Nightingale, 2019) could be: Ask better questions about appropriation and do the work to arrive at better answers. More than once, Rekdal employs the fitting verb "trouble" to reflect her project; she rejects holistic and untroubled conclusions in favor of contradictory multiplicity. Appropriate is six letters addressed to X, a fictional amalgam white student who has written a poem in the voice of a Black character. After tense class discussion, X wants to know: is my poem racist appropriation? In response are these thoughtful, investigative pages full of yeses, nos, sometimes, maybes, and it's-not-that-simples. Using pop cultural and literary examples, Rekdal considers identity hoaxes, identity commodification, colonialism, harm, imagination, money, and some of her own problematic work. Elevating reading as a vehicle to develop empathy does not impress Rekdal nearly as much as asking difficult questions like, what does it mean if you appreciate the aesthetics of a racist work? What if readers' tastes and values are unaligned? Ibram X. Kendi teaches that people can be concurrently racist and anti-racist; Rekdal applies this to texts as well. In the end, Rekdal advocates for asking a "continuum of questions," including self-interrogation, when authoring anything.

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Starred review from April 16, 2021

Using the epistolary form, Rekdal (English, Univ. of Utah; Nightingale) tackles the challenging subject of cultural appropriation in writing. She analyzes appropriation in a series of six letters to a person named X, who represents an amalgamation of her students and colleagues who have debated or struggled with this topic. Rekdal examines cultural and subject appropriation in all its manifestations--commercial, ethical, and racial--by exploring poetry and other literary works. She analyzes a variety of writers, including Jeanine Cummins, Percival Everett, Ernest Hemingway, Patricia Smith, and William Styron. Rekdal underscores the shortcomings of the U.S. publishing industry, which remains predominately white and supportive of a system that promotes "marketplace colonialism" where appropriation continues to flourish. Her examination of racial fakes, such as the nonexistent Japanese poet Yasusada (probably the creation of a white American writer), is excellent. Rekdal also points out potential merits of appropriation and warns that privileging identity over talent might create more damage than good. This book asks many thought-provoking questions for students and potential writers to consider. These questions aren't necessarily answered here, but they should engage the reader in serious reflection about appropriation. VERDICT Highly recommended for creative writing students or readers interested in this extremely relevant topic.--Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA

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