2 | White-Dominated Cultural Appropriation in the Publishing Industry

Zhinan Yu, Department of Communication

This chapter seeks to explore cultural appropriation as a diverse, ubiquitous, and morally problematic phenomenon (Matthes, 2016, p. 344) emerging particularly in white writers’ novels. In approaching this goal, a case study based on English writer James Hilton’s best-known novel Lost Horizon (1933) will be given through addressing relevant theoretical concepts including imperialist literature, colonialism and orientalism. The case study aims at exemplifying how white-dominated cultural appropriation implemented by writer’s misuses and misperceptions toward Asian cultures. Then, in the second part of this chapter, multifaceted perspectives will be drawn into the discussion for giving cultural appropriation a further sight beyond the novel itself, and pay attention to the book publishing industry as an international yet still race-biased business in terms of globalization.

Keywords: cultural appropriation; imperialist literature; white-dominated; Lost Horizon; book publishing; globalization.

Introduction

In a 2015 article published in The Guardian, novelist, essayist and literary critic Anjali Enjeti astutely asserted that writers of colour are “severely under-represented in the literary world”. In this piece, Enjeti chronicles a controversy over the Best American Poets 2015 anthology, wherein the volume’s editor, Sherman Alexie, decided to publish the poem “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” despite the author’s use of a racialized pseudonym. After selecting the poem, Alexie found out that the poem’s author, Yi-Fen Chou, was actually the Chinese pseudonym for Michael Derrick Hudson, a white man from Wabash, Indiana. In his bio as Yi-Fen Chou, the author indicates that this poem was rejected 40 times under his real name, but only rejected 9 times under his pen name, and he has realized he could

Copyright © 2018 Yu. Cultural Appropriation in the Publishing Industry 12 increase his rate of publication under this pseudonym (bio cited in Spears, 2015). Using a pen name is common practice, to be sure, but a white man using a Chinese pseudonymn to increase publication rate is a form of cultural appropriation that suggests there is a perceived privilege in assuming a stolen ethnicity (Enjeti 2015). In a perhaps strange move, Alexie chose to publish the poem under the Chinese pseudonym, seemingly condoning an act of cultural appropriation on the part of Hudson. Alexie justified his actions, blaming himself for racial nepotism when selecting the poem, arguing that he was drawn to the poem “because of his own personal bias to publish people of colour”. Enjeti (2015) disagrees with the editor’s designation of “racial nepotism”, arguing that “Nepotism represents shared alliances and acts of favoritism among people in power. And in the publishing industry, people of colour do not have power”. For Enjeti, then, this collection an example of a publishing industry rife with discrimination and cultural appropriation.

This chapter explores cultural appropriation and discrimination in the book publishing industry. In particular, it focuses on cultural appropriation as a diverse, ubiquitous, and morally problematic phenomenon in publishing (Matthes, 2016, p. 344), focusing on how white authors appropriate and often misrepresent non-white cultures. In approaching this goal, a case study based on English writer James Hilton’s best-known novel Lost Horizon (1933) will be invoked to help unpack relevant theoretical concepts including imperialist literature, colonialism and orientalism. Imperialist literature, according to Hall (1995) is a discursive frame referring to the ideology of colonialism, or white-centred expeditions that attempt to dominate the non-white cultures by propagandizing colonialist attitudes. Hall's study of culture and ideology is incredibly profound, and sparks further inquiries and debates between imperialist literature and individual and/or collective dignity within a culture that has been misappropriated. Lost Horizon offers a critical example in which we can see cultural appropriation served as Hilton’s colonial metaphor, fitting perfectly in the paradigm of imperialist literature. The second part of this chapter extends this narrative to the broader book publishing industry on a globalized scale. Drawing on Berry’s (2008) work on cross-cultural studies, this section will discuss racial discrimination in the industry (in general) and cultural appropriation (specifically) as a way to unpack the racial biases that dominate business practice.

A second, powerful strand of the English literary imagination to set beside the domestic novel: the male-dominated world of imperial adventure, which takes empire, rather than Middlemarch, as its microcosm…In this period, the very idea of adventure became synonymous with the demonstration of the moral, social and physical mastery of the colonizers over the colonized. – Stuart Hall (1995, p. 20-21)

Cultural appropriation is a common phenomenon that can be pervasively seen in the literature and other forms of art. In an artistic and aesthetic sense, “cultural appropriation”, according to Young (2008) is defined as an act of borrowing specific cultural elements from other cultures and then incorporating those elements into the artists’ own artworks (p. 4). Especially in novels, as Young (2008, p. 31) claims, where cultural appropriation is more thoroughly conveyed because it is the thing that all novelists would do. Of course, the opening story about Hudson-as- Chou points to another form of cultural appropriation: a white man assuming the name, identity and cultural heritage of a marginalized minority writer. However, although cultural appropriation is such a commonplace in novels, since it always compounds ethical and cultural issues, it has become necessary to understand this concept as more than cultural borrowing but also a form of cultural misrepresentation. To a greater extent, cultural appropriation could place minority cultures in danger of being further misinterpreted and marginalized, and in this regard, Lutz (1990) gives the definition of cultural appropriation based on his aboriginal study, as part of a process of displacing people and history by other dominant cultural heritage (p. 167). No matter which angle you choose to approach cultural appropriation, cultural exploitation and domination will always be its intended ends.

Written by James Hilton in 1933, Lost Horizon tells a fictional story about four westerners' fantastic expedition and journey in a remote valley (called “Blue Moon”) of Tibet. This novel achieved huge success and immediately became popular in western societies following publication and made into a film (also named Lost Horizon) in 1937. Impressively, the mysterious Tibetan valley in the story becomes embodied as the hidden mythical locus of Shambhala, as well as the idealized projection of a Chinese-style paradise, characterized as

Moving through the Grey: Publishing in Action The Publishing Business: Transformations and Opportunities (ISI6314 – Winter 2018) Cultural Appropriation in the Publishing Industry 14 peaceful and transcendent, as having spectacular natural landscapes, and whose inhabitants enjoy longevity. This novel is the first document that narrates fantasies about Tibet and the myth of Shangri-La from a Westerners' perspective. But arguably, Hilton's imaginations and fantasies are not all positive, and the most obvious to detect is the persona setting of the major roles in this novel. Hugh Convey, one of the four foreign travellers, a veteran as well as the lover of Shangri- La who is assigned as the successor of the High Lama in Shangri-La at the end of the story. Charles Mallinson, a diplomat, who is also the only one desires to leave Shangri-La, but goes missing as a result. Henry Barnard, a fugitive who steals 100 million dollars, and finally decides to stay in Shangri-La for prospecting gold. Miss Roberta Brinklow, a Christian missionary who wants to remain in Shangri-La and preaches Christianity. Besides them, there are several Chinese characters should also be mentioned. Chang, the guide who leads the four Western travellers into Shangri-La and provides them much help. Lo-Tsen, a young and beautiful Tibetan girl, who falls in love with Mallinson and eventually leaves the valley with him. In this novel, the four protagonists more or less project Hilton's subtle colonizing attempts of Tibet. In the story, except Mallinson, the three other Westerners are willing to settle themselves in Shangri-La. Later, they even successfully proclaim their superior positions as whites. Convey is honoured as the new High Lama—the holiest religious leader, which implies he takes control of religion. Similarly, Brinklow's preaching also connotes religious imperialism of Christianity in local Tibet. Sadly, Chinese characters are not safe from Hilton's colonized depictions either; for example, Chang is good at speaking English, and Lo-Tsen (a Chinese girl who inhabits in such a hidden valley) can play the piano. From these descriptions, we can see even Hilton's imaginary wonderland is in the faraway East; white culture still inevitably embedded into Tibetans’ daily lives. As Said (1977, p. 18) notes, “the Orient was almost a European invention and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences”.

In this novel, the idea of “otherness” is also associated with cultural appropriation in tandem with Young’s (2008) analysis of subject appropriation. In general, subject appropriation describes a culture that has been represented by the writer, is not actually his/her own culture, but rather imaginations from an outsider’s perspective to depict insiders’ lives (p. 8). In this sense, writers taking elements and symbols from other cultures that they are not naturally engaged in, as does Hilton in Lost Horizon. Hilton, having never been to Tibet, would not have known what

Moving through the Grey: Publishing in Action The Publishing Business: Transformations and Opportunities (ISI6314 – Winter 2018) Cultural Appropriation in the Publishing Industry 15 real Tibet and Tibetan culture would look like; as such, his story is merely built upon his fantasies and imaginations. Also, in reference to Young’s argument, in Lost Horizon, Hilton portrays Tibet as the embodiment of Shangri-La and gives it dual natures. “Here the archetypal positive (as wisdom and sophistication) and negative (as roughness, simplemindedness, and superstition) images of Tibet find themselves juxtaposed on one and the same place, but while the negative connotations apply to the locals, the positive ones happen to be reserved for the white elite” (Dodin & Räther, 2001, p. 12). Hall and Said both agree that in imperialist literature, words like non-active, non-patriating, non-autonomous, non-sovereign, cheating, cunning, savagery, and barbarian are usually used to describe Orients or any “coloured” cultures as alienated and marginalized “others” (Said, 1977, p. 101). In saying this, their arguments attempt to illustrate that white superiority might always be privileged in dominating over non-white, human or non-human, like we can observe in Lost Horizon, even though the author’s colonized attempts are expressed subtly.

The case study of Lost Horizon, in conjunction with the analyses of cultural appropriation, attempts to not only diagnose cultural appropriation as a stubborn suppresser to non-white cultures, but also to facilitate deeper thought about whether such cultural nidus remains stagnant in its colonial and racial biases. The following section will extend the current discussion from the novel into the present-day book publishing business, to consider how cultural appropriation unfolds within the larger context of globalization.

Globalization and Book Publishing

Globalization can be seen as the process that increases interaction between communities on a worldwide scale thanks to intercultural communications and commercial collaborations across the nations. However, the effects of such process should be perceived critically because both positive and negative outcomes will arise out of it (Berry 2008). Taking minority cultures as an example, globalization on the one hand enables members within these cultures to resist cultural domination, homogenization, imperialism, and colonialism, thus they can have better chances to reclaim their cultural heritage as well as to modify the wrongly depicted cultural identities (p. 330). On the other hand, globalization can also lead to marginalization of alienated groups, and

Moving through the Grey: Publishing in Action The Publishing Business: Transformations and Opportunities (ISI6314 – Winter 2018) Cultural Appropriation in the Publishing Industry 16

“leaving their members without any cultural nexus in which to carry out their lives” (p. 332). Such arguments make a justifiable account that argue for treating the impacts of globalization not only as a cause but also an effect of cultural appropriation at stages of writing, editing and publishing. To explore this, it is crucial to figure out what role that globalization plays in transforming the traditional way of operation in publishing industry, as Davies (2015) writes: “in less than 100 years publishing has changed from a craft industry led by individuals…to one now dominated by giant international publishing corporations” (p. 23). However, even as the industry itself becomes increasingly international, there seems to be little interest in increasing the racial diversity of employees and authorship.

According to recent statistics, 79% employees working in the publishing industry are white (Deahl, 2016). Childress (2017) also points out, gatekeepers of publishing including literary agents and acquisition editors in the United States are 95% white. Among 1,200 literary agents, Childress observes that 38% of them show an equal interest regarding fictions but only 15% of them would be willing to take a look if the story involves ethnic and multicultural content. “I think some white agents and editors may shy away from multicultural texts, feeling that they are not qualified to judge or just scared of taking on subjects, topics with which they are not familiar”, says by Kannel, an African American writer (McGee, 2016). In fact, rather than consider it either as a matter of qualification or fear of taking on non-white content, it speaks more to an outgrowth stemmed from lacking of racial diversity in the publishing industry.

Not only are employees of book publishing industry overwhelmingly white, so are the majority of authors. Based on The Bookseller magazine’s statistical finding, among the 500 titles of 2016, 343 were written by UK authors, and only 1.7% of them were written by British black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) writers. These data show that white-centric values in book publishing still holds a significant position, and in contrast, racial bias has not been eliminated. In addition, Childress (2017) argues that, compared to white writers, writers of other races are more harshly censored by publishers. For example, editors routinely ask them to “dumb down” their stories without considering it may damage cultural specificity and accuracy of the story, just simply because those editors do not believe “people talk that way” (cited in Childress, 2017). In dealing with this problem, authors like Zindell, who refuses to dumb down his stories, turn instead to self-publish their work, in doing so, he says: “My primary aim is no longer to be a

Moving through the Grey: Publishing in Action The Publishing Business: Transformations and Opportunities (ISI6314 – Winter 2018) Cultural Appropriation in the Publishing Industry 17 commercially successful writer… Today I’m writing for the pure joy of writing — the best motive of all for writing” (Evans, 2017). Writers like Deahl, Childress, Zindell and many others have begun to notice that book publishing has become less diverse, with less variety in the manner of cultural identifiers, including gender, race, ethnicity, age and sexual orientation (Masad, 2016). As Mejias argues, when “diversity” enters the discussion, there is an implication toward “variety”, which suggests a varied inclusion of materials and content from different cultures. In this sense, variety also means there should be an increasing number of non-white writers’ voices included in the publishing industry (cited in Masad, 2016). Unfortunately, as writer Ayesha Pande (2018) states, “the industry seems to have a tendency to glom onto and elevate the very few successful voices by people of colour and think of them as representative of their entire community”.

What are the larger cultural impacts of appropriation? Rogers (2006) believes that cultural appropriation can lead to exchange, domination, exploitation and transculturation, which may turn culture into “a relational phenomenon that itself is constituted by acts of appropriation, not an entity or essence that merely participates in appropriation” (p. 475). However, from a literary perspective, some writers insist that cultural appropriation should be allowed in fictional writing, otherwise writers can only write stories about themselves (Bolt, 2016, p. 68). As novelist Margaret Drabble argues: “appropriation is what novelists do. Whatever we write is, knowingly or unknowingly, a borrowing. Nothing comes from nowhere” (cited in Young, 2008, p. 31). Yet these arguments overlook the morally questionable and controversial nature of cultural appropriation: when writers (as outsiders) draw on their own experiences and imaginations of other cultures that they have never been engaged in, they are in fact distorting and misinterpreting them in a negative, or even offensive way (Young, 2008, p. 9). Such claims from writers’ point of view bring in debates about the boundaries on what content can be. Furthermore, with the popularization writing on web platforms, it is getting more challenging to control the dissemination of culturally appropriated messaging, and it will also be very difficult to subvert the stereotypical view that people already have about a certain culture. Iseke-Barnes’s (2005) research significantly articulates how indigenous culture, history and science has been overlooked and misrepresented by dominant cultures in the process of making and maintaining of power. In her analyses, the Internet is a tool used to entrench and preserve cultural

Moving through the Grey: Publishing in Action The Publishing Business: Transformations and Opportunities (ISI6314 – Winter 2018) Cultural Appropriation in the Publishing Industry 18 hegemonies (p.157). Thus, in the age of web 2.0, institutions like media and book publishing companies, then, should take more responsibilities not just for being the source of cultural appropriation, but also for being the distributors of these misappropriated ideas in the scope of race, gender, and culture.

Time to Embrace a Multicultural Future in Book Publishing

Cultural appropriation is a long-standing issue in the publishing industry. While the Lost Horizon offers a clear example of how cultural imperialism, colonialism, and racism are implemented through Hilton’s imaginations and appropriations of Shangri-La, the opening discussion of Hudston’s appropriation of a Chinese pseudonym suggests that these issues still resonate. Indeed, the Hudson-as-Chou case points to a perhaps even larger issue in the publishing world, wherein white authors do not simply appropriate cultural references in their stories, but they also appropriate identities and cultural heritages that are not their own. But these issues are not limited to white writers; indeed, cultural appropriation and discrimination resonates throughout the book publishing industry. As the second part of this chapter reveals, white-dominated cultural appropriation is an underlying threat to the broader publishing industry. Not only does it harm artistic creation, but it also results in a lack of racial diversity within the publishing industry. These issues have greatly restrained minority authors from sharing their own cultural heritage, as their work is either routinely rejected or harshly censored by a majority white publishing industry. In this regard, although the publishing industry is attempting to adapt to an increasingly globalized market, old racial biases remain at the core of the industry. It is thus imperative to call attention to these issues, and encourage renewed discussions about racial diversity and multicultural content in this global sphere. Through an increase in diversity in book publishing (both in terms of authorship and content), readers, then, will be in a position to explore the world through a variety of lenses and give greater power to writers of colour. In so doing, the experiences and cultural expression of the world’s authors, no matter what culture she/he comes from will have greater representation in the global book publishing industry.

Moving through the Grey: Publishing in Action The Publishing Business: Transformations and Opportunities (ISI6314 – Winter 2018) Cultural Appropriation in the Publishing Industry 19 References

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