The authors who manage to clear the low bar of incorporating characters/communities from diverse cultures into their fiction without cultural appropriation/stereotyping/racism… who are they and how do they do it?

I know many writers sidestep the difficulty altogether, either by creating a fictional universe with cultural proxies (fantasy stories/video games with Chinese, Japanese, and Russian analogues, I’m looking at you) or by writing in the distant future where the cultures have blended into new ones with flavors of the past (sci-fi does this a lot).

I’ve seen so very few authors do it well, but I do believe it’s both possible and worth doing.

Cross-posted in [email protected]

  • underline960@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    For people in the future who find this post, I found a video that I can think explores this question really well: Who Can Write Whose Story?

    Like a middle school Wikipedia book report, I’ve picked out some of his sources as being particularly accessible/helpful:

  • a14o@feddit.org
    2·
    26 days ago

    I recently read “The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands” by Sarah Brooks. I didn’t especially enjoy it, but it might fit your bill. The setting is explicitly multicultural and incorporates real-world ethnicities, but cultural difference is not an important theme. No stereotypes jumped out at me, although one might argue that some amount of cultural appropriation is necessarily involved when White authors write protagonists of color.

    • underline960@sh.itjust.worksOP
      2·
      26 days ago

      Yea, several reviews basically say the cast looks diverse at first, but they turn out to be one-dimensional.

      I wish we had more examples of authors writing something as ambitious (explicitly multicultural and incorporates real-world ethnicities) and actually succeeding.