Organizers for an Australian literary festival have pulled an American novelist’s keynote speech from their website and apologized to those who may have been offended, after author Lionel Shriver took on the sacred cow of “cultural appropriation” in her remarks at the Brisbane Writers Festival, The New York Times reported in Tuesday’s paper.
For its part, however, the festival is disputing that it ever had any footage of the remarks to begin with.
“Ms. Shriver donned a sombrero for much of her speech — an allusion to a case in the United States in which non-Mexican student government members were impeached for doing the same during a fiesta-themed tequila party at Bowdoin College,” The Times said. “To frequent laughter from the audience, Ms. Shriver warned that the anti-cultural-appropriation movement that began in America had already reached Britain — where she lives most of the year — and might be headed to Australia.”
But apparently not everyone had the same sense of humor.
Ms. Shriver’s talk “was a monologue about the right to exploit the stories of ’others,’ simply because it is useful for one’s story,” complained writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied in her Sept. 10 opinion piece for the left-leaning The Guardian newspaper. “It was a poisoned package wrapped up in arrogance and delivered with condescension.”
Ms. Abdel-Magied said she walked out of Ms. Shriver’s speech because, she told her mother, her continued presence would legitimize Ms. Shriver’s views.
“Lionel Shriver, by her own admission, did not speak to her brief [sic],” festival organizer Julie Beveridge said. “The views expressed during her address were hers alone,” The Times quoted the Australian poet.
“As a festival of writers and thinkers, we take seriously the role we play in providing a platform for meaningful exchange and debate,” Ms. Beveridge wrote on the festival’s website, The Times reported.
In a series of tweets Monday evening (Washington, D.C., time), the festival said it didn’t have full audio or video of Ms. Shriver’s remarks to post online and that Ms. Shriver’s separate Q&A with an Australian newscaster would soon be podcast.
“BWF don’t have a copy of the speech and we have no audio recording due to the venue it was held in,” the festival explained, adding, “Some footage was recorded, but we don’t have access to this currently.”
“Lionel Shriver’s Conversation with RN’s Paul Barclay will be podcast — we’ll share when it’s live. #bwf16”
The Guardian newspaper has a transcript of Ms. Shriver’s speech here.
While Ms. Shriver’s views on cultural appropriation and race may have incensed some festival-goers, her views should hardly be considered surprising given a treatise she wrote in April.
In a piece at Prospect Magazine’s website at the time, Ms. Shriver took aim at what she considered an unhealthy obsession with sex and gender self-identification issues roiling the literary community.
“I am often asked how I manage to write persuasively from a male character’s point of view, which I do frequently. The secret? There is no secret. Writing from a male character’s point of view is no more difficult than writing from the perspective of another woman,” Ms. Shriver. “That’s because for all of Facebook’s 71-genders-and-counting, the experience of self cannot be all that different.”
“[T]he crucial constituents of our characters have little to do with gender, unless we insist on labelling clumps of qualities — forcefulness, violence, inability to cry; tenderness, consideration, inability to drive — as exclusively male and female, which they are not.”
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