I guess I'll call it the Dave Chappelle Effect for now. I don't think that Chappelle ever came out and said that he left Comedy Central because he was uncomfortable with performing a black caricature for his audience of (by that time) mostly white people. I think he was a little more tactful, choosing instead to highlight the discomfort he felt about how his fame was affecting his private time with his family.
But the effect I'm talking about is something best articulated in "YELLING AT THE SCREEN: An Open Letter From Dave Chappelle to His White Fans" (a parody by a blogger whose name I forget), and also in all the internet gossip about his conversation with Oprah after his return from South Africa...
In any case, it's not just Chappelle. More than a few critics say that Chinua Achebe, Amy Tan, Nawal El Saadawi and a few other well-known and well-critiqued writers write more for the benefit of white audiences than for non-whites. Of course, I am no exception. My college application essay was about calling upon my "heritage" in order to survive life in suburban America.
In teaching poetry, in teaching the art of comic-making, I often hear the concern that young people, and especially young people of color aren't writing characters, drawing people, creating scenarios, in short, expressing perspectives that reflect their own experiences. The ones who do, however, are praised endlessly. Part of this is the very real concern that comics - and manga in particular - are nothing more than escape vehicles for young people who want to create a world far removed from the negative self-images they face in their daily lives. Pop culture is full of escape hatches and flights of fancy. Is manga just low art? Is anime just fantasy and is fantasy just entertainment?
I'm really interested in thinking about these questions. Why do I have to draw people who look like me? I want to draw people who look like me, who have experienced what I've experienced. But I don't think that that alone will liberate me or anyone else.
I left manga many years ago because I thought it was escapist at its best and at worst pornographic. The effect it seemed to have on my peers was the stimulation of hormone-driven fantasies, especially the manga and anime that had the highest fan-service content. (Fan-service refers to images of beautiful male and female characters in various degrees of undress, usually adhering to some white-supremacist standard of beauty ie: big clear-colored eyes, fair skin, hourglass figures, and long limbs, to name only a few of the requisite ingredients.) I thought it was nothing but low art, the way I thought hip hop and rap were low art. I was taught to consider novels and poetry high art. No pictures. No rhythm.
I called out writers who wrote about experiences not their own, challenging them to be more "authentic" - more "real." I thought I was radical because I was going to write about me. I was going to expose my weaknesses and my pain for the world to take lessons. I still believe in this, but my thinking has been modified.
Now that I am coming back to manga and appreciating the many "literary" qualities of the medium, its history in radical Japanese politics, and its potential as an art form, I feel frustrated by the limitations in the types of questions people ask me. Yes it's important to ask why anime characters have big eyes, but there are other questions to be asked. There are other issues to explore.
Maybe there are other ways to approach the answers to these questions than simply by drawing characters that look like us. I'm not saying that we haven't internalized white supremacist beauty standards. But I'm also trying to say that I don't want to recreate the Chappelle Effect. I don't want to draw Asian caricatures so that a white or black or asian audience can lean back and enjoy the show. I don't want to add spice to the melting pot. I want to do what I want to do.
But the effect I'm talking about is something best articulated in "YELLING AT THE SCREEN: An Open Letter From Dave Chappelle to His White Fans" (a parody by a blogger whose name I forget), and also in all the internet gossip about his conversation with Oprah after his return from South Africa...
In any case, it's not just Chappelle. More than a few critics say that Chinua Achebe, Amy Tan, Nawal El Saadawi and a few other well-known and well-critiqued writers write more for the benefit of white audiences than for non-whites. Of course, I am no exception. My college application essay was about calling upon my "heritage" in order to survive life in suburban America.
In teaching poetry, in teaching the art of comic-making, I often hear the concern that young people, and especially young people of color aren't writing characters, drawing people, creating scenarios, in short, expressing perspectives that reflect their own experiences. The ones who do, however, are praised endlessly. Part of this is the very real concern that comics - and manga in particular - are nothing more than escape vehicles for young people who want to create a world far removed from the negative self-images they face in their daily lives. Pop culture is full of escape hatches and flights of fancy. Is manga just low art? Is anime just fantasy and is fantasy just entertainment?
I'm really interested in thinking about these questions. Why do I have to draw people who look like me? I want to draw people who look like me, who have experienced what I've experienced. But I don't think that that alone will liberate me or anyone else.
I left manga many years ago because I thought it was escapist at its best and at worst pornographic. The effect it seemed to have on my peers was the stimulation of hormone-driven fantasies, especially the manga and anime that had the highest fan-service content. (Fan-service refers to images of beautiful male and female characters in various degrees of undress, usually adhering to some white-supremacist standard of beauty ie: big clear-colored eyes, fair skin, hourglass figures, and long limbs, to name only a few of the requisite ingredients.) I thought it was nothing but low art, the way I thought hip hop and rap were low art. I was taught to consider novels and poetry high art. No pictures. No rhythm.
I called out writers who wrote about experiences not their own, challenging them to be more "authentic" - more "real." I thought I was radical because I was going to write about me. I was going to expose my weaknesses and my pain for the world to take lessons. I still believe in this, but my thinking has been modified.
Now that I am coming back to manga and appreciating the many "literary" qualities of the medium, its history in radical Japanese politics, and its potential as an art form, I feel frustrated by the limitations in the types of questions people ask me. Yes it's important to ask why anime characters have big eyes, but there are other questions to be asked. There are other issues to explore.
Maybe there are other ways to approach the answers to these questions than simply by drawing characters that look like us. I'm not saying that we haven't internalized white supremacist beauty standards. But I'm also trying to say that I don't want to recreate the Chappelle Effect. I don't want to draw Asian caricatures so that a white or black or asian audience can lean back and enjoy the show. I don't want to add spice to the melting pot. I want to do what I want to do.
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