LitBits: The Politics of Author/Work Separation
I’ve been thinking about this problem a lot recently, firstly for some obvious reasons (a certain movie) and secondly because of some of the things I’ve been discussing with my students in my American Literature course. And one of the questions that keeps coming up for me is this: how do we know when we have crossed the line by holding a writer accountable for the controversial things they write? As an example, I am currently teaching Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Wild Meat and Bully Burgers. This particular novel is not all that controversial, though it certainly has its issues, but her later book, Blu’s Hanging, was the cause of much controversy in 1997/1998. The Asian American Studies National Book Award she received was later annulled after public outcry; many critics and academics have written about the incident since.[1] One of the problems Asian American (and other) critics had with the book was its representation of Filipinos in Hawai’i (they are dirty, morally questionable, violent, and/or pedophiles) and the complete absence of indigenous Hawaiians in the novel. Effectively, critics charged Yamanaka with failing to self-censor herself in a stereotypical context; in
