The 2015 Man Booker winner has blasted the publishing industry for pressuring authors to write ‘astringent prose set in suburbia’ for an ‘archetype of the white woman’
“James said that because white women readers dominate the market, “the male editors will only accept one type of story. Everyone knows what a New Yorker story will look like. I could have been published 10 times over – I knew that there was a certain kind of prose I could have written; intense scenes that hinted, rather than explored.”
In a recent Facebook post, James wrote a response to a piece titled On Pandering by novelist Claire Vaye Watkins, in which she examined the pressure on female writers to suit male expectations of writing in order to get published.
Calling the essay “potentially game changing”, James wrote: “While she recognizes how much she was pandering to the white man, we writers of colour spend way too much time pandering to the white woman … astringent, observed, clipped, wallowing in its own middle-style prose and private ennui, porn for certain publications.”
“If I pandered to a cultural tone set by white women, particularly older white female critics, I would have had 10 stories published by now,” he continued. “Though we’ll never admit it, every writer of colour knows that they stand a higher chance of getting published if they write this kind of story. We just do.”
On Friday, James said he wasn’t talking about a particular woman, but “an archetype that exists in the fiction, in the criticism”. He said his comments had the support of other authors, including Roxane Gay and Marie Mutsuki Mockett. “I am not drawing wild conclusions, it is something I have noticed,” he said. “Sometimes we have to stop ourselves and say ‘This is the story I want to write and this is how I am going to tell it, publication be damned.’”
“Marie was rejected because [a publisher] said, ‘Can you make your half-Japanese protagonist more white?’ Even white female writers who write about, say, queer issues, don’t get published because they don’t fit into this suburban, astringent, very crafted kind of story.”
James said this bias towards the archetypal female reader was “probably” a factor in his famous 78 rejections for his first novel, John Crow’s Devil. He blamed the popularity of “cultural ventriloquism” in fiction, where white authors write in a “palatable” way about countries and cultures of which they have no experience.”
“After the collapse of communism, pollution in Eastern countries became a global concern. I discussed it with Figaro Magazine, who offered to send me to Copșa Mică, Romania, one of the most polluted cities in the world. I arrived on site after crossing the Carpathians in Dacia. The streets were covered with black soot. So were the sheep, and the children leaving school. It was snack time. The city was covered with black smoke and a toxic substance released by the zinc factories. The companies said it was all harmless, and everybody went about like everything was fine, hanging their laundry and planting their gardens.” [x]
Fidgeting Can Cancel Out the Bad Effects of Sitting All Day
See on Scoop.it - The future of medicine and health
Finally, some good news for those of us who sit for a living
Sitting is basically the new smoking.
An ever-growing body of research is showing that being sedentary and sitting for long periods of time are linked to poor health consequences, including a laundry list of risks for conditions ranging from obesity to heart disease. Even exercising doesn’t make up for the negative health effects of being stuck in your seat.
But before you beg your boss for a standing desk, a new study suggests that moving a little throughout the day—also known as fidgeting—can actually counteract the problems that come with sitting for extended periods of time.
The new study, published Wednesday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that women who sat for long periods of time have a lower mortality rate if they considered themselves moderately to very fidgety, compared to women who said they only fidgeted occasionally. Women who sat for long periods of time without fidgeting had an increased risk of death that wasn’t seen among other groups. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, the researchers didn’t find a difference in mortality risk between women who sat more versus those who were more active—as long as the sitters were fidgety.
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