The question of whether any amount of library research can ever suffice has been nagging me in my alternate fall of the Soviet Union novel. My undergrad major was Russian, but I never had the funds to go over there, so as I write, I wonder if I've only succeeded in creating characters who are contemporary Americans with a thin layer of ersatz Sovietness glued on, as opposed to characters who genuinely react as people raised in the various regions of the old USSR really would have. And then there comes the concern of cultural misappropriation, of whether I'm trespassing.
We tend to think of cultural misappropriation primarily in the sense of tiny minorities, obscure tribes and the like, especially in connection with Western writers making profits on knowledge freely given by those peoples, but it seems to me that we can also trespass even against cultures that are large and strong. Except I don't know where the line is, so I'm not sure how to keep from stepping across it. But I don't want to go to the opposite extreme of saying that we should each only write about our own cultures, our own societies and communities, because that's the only way we can be sure we're not trespassing.
We tend to think of cultural misappropriation primarily in the sense of tiny minorities, obscure tribes and the like, especially in connection with Western writers making profits on knowledge freely given by those peoples, but it seems to me that we can also trespass even against cultures that are large and strong. Except I don't know where the line is, so I'm not sure how to keep from stepping across it. But I don't want to go to the opposite extreme of saying that we should each only write about our own cultures, our own societies and communities, because that's the only way we can be sure we're not trespassing.
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