Cultural Tourists (Part 2): Publishing and Representation
Wendy Xu has a brilliant and critical assessment of racism in Eleanor and Park, and it’s tempered by Mike Jung’s post on how he can experience both love and be troubled by the novel. The latter is one of the complicated experiences of a reader is who is not privileged, who constantly struggles to find themselves in the literature they read and who sometimes settles for any representation. If in Part 1 I talked about the behavior of cultural tourists, let’s look at the larger implications of that here. In the Philippines for example, we have several talented authors like Eliza Victoria, Ian Rosales Casocot, and Dean Francis Alfar. Unfortunately, their readership is dwarfed by the number of fans of Western authors like Robert Jordan, J.K. Rowling, and George R. R. Martin. If our authors aren’t being read in our own country, how much better will they fare overseas? And this isn’t a scenario unique to the Philippines. It happens to a lot of countries affected by colonialism or imperialism (or both).
