Thought this was interesting. And I'm sorry, I know this is a long clip but it all seemed pretty important to the article.
The debate over 'American Dirt,' Oprah's book club pick, is bigger than 'cancel culture'
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The debate over 'American Dirt,' Oprah's book club pick, is bigger than 'cancel culture'
The first few pages of American Dirt, the new novel by Jeanine Cummins about a Mexican woman and her 8-year-old son who flee a drug kingpin for the southern U.S. border, begin with a jolt of adrenaline. The son, Luca, is standing over a toilet when bullets fly into the bathroom. He barely has time to register what's happening — gunmen are murdering his family at a party — before his mother, Lydia, hurls them both into a shower stall to hide. It's a gripping scene laid out with urgent prose.
It's no wonder why Oprah Winfrey, who selected it this week for her book club, said she couldn't put the novel down after those first pages. The story follows Lydia, a middle-class bookstore owner who unwittingly befriends the kingpin who ultimately kills her family, as she tries to escape Mexico with Luca by her side. Critics say the book's depiction of Lydia's experience reads like a "cheap-thrill narconovela" and feels like "the work of an outsider."
But when Oprah announced the pick on CBS This Morning, she said, "Every night on the news, I think you hear so many stories, you hear so many migrant stories ... you see the stories of the border, I thought this humanized that migration process in a way that nothing else I had ever felt or seen had ... This story really changed me and changed the way I see what it means to be an immigrant trying to come to this country."
That's a powerful endorsement, especially coming from Oprah. But combining thrilling entertainment with the feel-good sensation of empathy can lead people to wildly problematic places (remember the movie Crash?), which is where we find ourselves with American Dirt.
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It's a familiar news cycle that too often gets reduced to an example of so-called cancel culture: Writer offensively portrays marginalized people without first-hand knowledge of said people's lived experiences, is rewarded handsomely by their industry or peers, and those who might see themselves reflected in the writer's narrative see a charlatan at work instead and voice their outrage over who gets to tell — and profit — from such stories. (Cummins received a seven-figure deal for the book.)
Some would have you believe that this debate is about cancelling Cummins and censoring anyone who dares to write about an experience they haven't lived. The controversy will be blamed on "political correctness" or so-called cancel culture, making it easy for readers and fans to move past the outcry.
In fact, the anger is about who gets to publish whose stories and for what price. It's about how quickly an author who takes on a subject written about by numerous Mexican and Mexican-American authors can find herself elevated above them all to Oprah Book Club status. And the controversy highlights people's intense desire to avoid hearing something they love is offensive rather than take seriously the critics' claims and genuinely explore why they must protest so loudly in the first place.
The backlash begins
The backlash against American Dirt had been brewing since December, when the Chicana author Myriam Gurba published her scathing review of the book.
"That Lydia is so shocked by her own country’s day-to-day realities, realities that I’m intimate with as a Chicana living en el norte, gives the impression that Lydia might not be … a credible Mexican," wrote Gurba. "In fact, she perceives her own country through the eyes of a pearl-clutching American tourist."
Other Latinx critics say the book traffics in tropes and caricatures. David Bowles, a Mexican-American author who read an advance copy of the book and reviewed it negatively, said it presented the reader with inauthentic characters and turned the plight of life-or-death migration into "trauma porn."
Such critical perspectives have always existed in literature. Yet in an era where anyone can use the internet and social media as a bullhorn, those voices increasingly threaten power brokers, including publishers, agents, and publicists, and audiences alike because they insist on revealing, in the public square, the inadequacies and betrayals of stories that some feel compelled to fiercely defend. No one, particularly not Oprah and or her devoted fans, wants to embrace a book like American Dirt, feel good about themselves for having done so, only to learn that it's reviled by many as inauthentic and even harmful to the very cause it seeks to champion.
Cummins has deflected questions about the criticism by saying it's up to each reader to decide how they feel about the book, and that individual writers shouldn't be made to answer for inequities created and perpetuated by the publishing industry.
"I was never going to turn down money that someone offered me for something that took me seven years to write," she said in a recent appearance.
American Dirt's publisher, Flatiron Books, said in a statement that it's "[C]arefully listening to the conversation happening around the novel. The concerns that have been raised, including the question of who gets to tell which stories, are valid ones in relation to literature and we welcome the conversation."
The outrage over the novel's success prompted one writer to draft a form letter urging independent booksellers to read critiques of the book, recycle advertising materials for it, prominently display books by immigrant and Latinx authors instead, and avoid hosting Cummins. The director of McAllen Public Library, located on the Mexico-U.S. border, declined an invitation to celebrate American Dirt in partnership with Oprah's Book Club.
"The numerous inaccuracies in her story are clear evidence of the white gaze, capitalizing on hurtful stereotypes and cashing in on human suffering," she wrote. "After two sleepless nights and numerous conversations with my predominantly Latinx staff, I decided that I cannot – will not– endorse this book at my library."
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Cummins did conduct extensive research in the process of writing her book. In 2015, she spoke to Norma Iglesias-Prieto, a professor in the department of Chicano and Chicana Studies at San Diego State University, whose initial support of the novel Cummins has used like a shield against criticism.
"I'm a big proponent of the idea that you can write outside of your lane if you do the work."
"I resisted for a very long time telling the story from a migrant's point of view because I was worried that I didn't know enough, that my privilege would make me blind to certain truths," Cummins said on CBS This Morning. "I expressed my concerns about this to [Iglesias-Prieto] and she said, 'Jeanine, we need every voice we can get telling this story.'"
Iglesias-Prieto, who responded to questions by email, said that in general she supported Cummins' interest in writing about immigration, partly because she had reached out to several experts in the field. That support, Iglesias-Prieto said, was for a research process that could lead to a well-founded narrative, not an endorsement of the novel that Cummins' eventually wrote.
Iglesias-Prieto said that Cummins sent the book manuscript last year to her with a request to help spot problems in the portrayal of the protagonists and Mexican culture. Iglesias-Prieto did not have time to read the novel then.
"The responsibility ultimately falls on the author and her editors, of which I was not one," she said.
Iglesias-Prieto quickly reviewed the book this week. While she demurred when asked about criticism of American Dirt's plot and characters, she agreed that critics are right to be skeptical of the book's success.
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