The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’
New York Times | Pamela Paul
“Did Dana Schutz, a white artist, have the right to paint Emmett Till? Was it fair that a white historian, David Blight, won a Pulitzer for his biography of Frederick Douglass? Should Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner be the ones to update West Side Story, a musical conceived by four Jewish men but fundamentally about Puerto Rican lives?”
These are questions posed by Paul as the gatekeepers of our culture (Hollywood, publishers, the arts) deem that “only those whose ‘lived experience’ matches the story are qualified to tell the tale.”
“It’s essentially a turf war. Only Latino authors can write novels about Latinos. Only Holocaust survivors can convey the truth of the Holocaust. Only disabled people can portray disabled people. Everyone else is out.”
Paul makes the argument for the benefits of the outsider’s voice and the drawbacks of “lived” experience: “The outsider’s take, whether it comes from a journalist, historian, writer or director, can offer its own equally valid perspective…Privileging only those voices with a stake in a story carries its own risks… You may find it harder to maintain a critical distance, which can be just as useful as experiential proximity. You may become blinded to ideas that contradict your own or subconsciously de-emphasize them. You may have an agenda… A creator may represent the identity of some characters, but unless a story’s cast is remarkably homogeneous, that person can’t authentically represent all of them.”
The list goes on.
In the end, it’s about our collective experience; our culture. “If we all wrote only from our personal experience, our films, performances and literature would be reduced to memoir and transcription….What an impoverished culture that would be.”
Related:
Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Essay on Literary Freedom as an Essential Human Right (2021)
Representation Matters: We Need to Do it Right. (Angel Eduardo, FAIR Substack, 5/11/22)