Reading While Black

Browsing the HNS’s page of forthcoming novels I came across an entry under March 2008 for the release of The Painter from Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein that is described as “an epic historical novel based on the true story of Pan Yuliang, a celebrated and controversial female Chinese painter”.

“Jennifer Cody Epstein” is a pretty anglo name so I’m guessing she isn’t in any way Chinese, yet this brings me to the difficult-to-gauge subject of Cultural Appropriation. As seen on Joyce’s LJ entries after WisCon and the sore feelings aroused at the mention of J.R. Ward’s Brotherhood series, Cultural Appropriation is to the benefit of authors who don’t see themselves as having a “culture” (meaning, white people who don’t have relatives or close ancestors from the “Old Country”). On the flip side, I find it patronizing that an author of color or with close ties to the “Old Country” be restricted to writing solely about their ethnicity and/or heritage.

But here’s the catch-22: if an author chooses to explore characters and/or situations that have nothing to do with their ethnicity or heritage, or even writes vaguely-colored characters, they hide their ethnicity through a number of rouses, are accused of “writing white” or not being [black] enough. Yet if a Chinese author–a Chinese woman–were to write The Painter from Shanghai their name would be coupled with the phrase “Chinese author”, readers and reviewers would be all atwitter over how “authentic” the book is, and publishers would expect them to write all about the “Chinese experience”.

And again this leads me back to the chicken or egg question: can a black author break out if they write something “mainstream”? Or is the glass ceiling only broken if “mainstream” readers happen to stumble across their books? Do the readers loyal to the niche market have no interest in “mainstream” trends like Navy SEALs, vampires or historical romance? Or are there no black authors wanting to write or submit novels featuring Navy SEALs or Black Ops agents or spies or werewolves or black damsels in distress?

What about other genres like thrillers, mysteries, and horror? Maurice Broaddus ran a little roundtable discussion with black horror writers on this blog last year where they detailed their frustrations in the industry. If Brandon Massey and Tananarive Due are respected authors of horror fiction, with Massey even being compared to Stephen King, why does their skin color and the color of their characters shunt them to “black fiction & literature”? And yet, why should they have to “whiten” either themselves or their characters in order to reach “mainstream” audiences?