Talk:Cultural Imperialism in Fandom

I think this might be better served as Cultural Imperialism (that's an actively used concept in non-fannish circles to refer to the Americanisation and Westernisation of things). I'm prepared to expand it to cover that, too. --Awils1 04:23, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

I agree. If I were looking for a page about that, I would look for Cultural Imperialism. (Also, I trip over "Americentrism" every time I try to pronounce it.) --Doro 10:10, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

I like your idea (obviously since I was just posting about this yesterday and Cultural Imperialism is the term I used), gets away from the problematic reduction of America to just the US too. --facetofcathy 11:59, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Yay, agreement! I've moved it, and started hacking away at specifics of the trope. --Awils1 12:23, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

If I can draw attention to Talk:Yank-wank this question about the Yank-wank page, which is related to this topic, and we would likely want to link from here. I think it should be renamed ameripick or some variation on that. --facetofcathy 12:38, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

SPN Roundtable Workshop

I think it's not clear what exactly the "Cultural Imperialism" part of the SPN round table workshop is. Is it that US culture is so dominant that non-US fans feel the need for guides to make the canon culture more accessible to someone not entrenched in that culture? Is it that the existence of the workshop pointed out that US culture actually *is* that dominant in the source texts we are fannish about and people were upset about it? Is it that getting the culture of a character not noticabley wrong can be part of what makes or breaks 'in character' writing (at least for people who have a different culture than the one depicted in canon)? Is it that they didn't get it completely *right* because all they know about the US is what they absorbed from US media? Mostly the summary of this controversy makes me go "Huh?". o_O --Doro 20:46, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

I agree that this is a little hard to parse as is, and I think the problem stems from the light amount of content above. And I don't actually understand some of your example questions, the first one about dominance creating a need for guides doesn't actually make sense to me at all. It's more about the expectations of US fans.

The roundtable conversation had a bunch of issues. This is my personal opinion of the post: From the title on down, it promoted the idea that the narrative itself, not just the character or the narrative voice in close third person even, should conform to a US writer's style. Which some people will agree with and did in comments and some people will consider extremely offensive and a sign that only USians or good simulacrums need apply--buried in that is the way that fans can favour the work of USian writers (either through unconscious bias or by directly wanting to put down non-USians) by holding writers in general to standards of authenticity that the canon itself doesn't even meet, and no two fans will agree on anyway. Commenters promoted the idea that the goals of non-US writers who may not care about their "authenticity" or who value their own authentic narrative voice that is not USian are not as important as the experience of US readers who want only to read a USian narrative voice. The issue of the authors' nationality comes up in the FW post, but that's a bit of a side show. --facetofcathy 21:40, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

It's more about the expectations of US fans. Actually, no, it isn't. Not at all! O_O That workshop was by non-US writers for non-US writers (who were then told by US writers that what they were doing was offensive to themselves, they just weren't realizing it and needed to be told by US fans). Let me phrase it his way: for years the number one recurring heated discussion in the German part of media fandom was whether you can write fanfiction (especially slash) in German and if it can possibly be any good when it's not in English. Also, there are quite a few fans who are proud that they pass as a native speaker on the internet and a lot more think that passing as a native speaker is a sign of success in fandom. It wasn't any US fans saying "Boo! Your language sucks!" and yet it was still the topic most likely to erupt into something close to a flamewar. As far as I know, German fandom isn't the only fandom that's heavily indoctrinated to think that stories a) happen in the US and b) in English. If you want to be any good, you have to be good at a) and b). That's certainly an issue connected to cultural imperialism, but saying the fact that the authors of the workshop are non-US EFL speakers is a side show really misses the point. --Doro 22:34, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

No, you're right, I apologize for brushing aside that point. I also really obviously did not understand your example questions at all, I thought you were saying that there was a right way to do fic and people just didn't like hearing it, so clearly my reading comprehension isn't great right now.

The idea that the workshop authors brought into the post that what they were saying was the way to write is internalized CI when they stepped from personal choice to objective value statements, but the promotion of those ideas by commenters was coming mostly from US fans and being expanded beyond what the authors were saying as well, I think, although that gets into authorial intent. I don't think that anyone in the post itself said outright anything about the nationality of the authors, but I may have missed it, but that did happen elsewhere, the FW post etc. and that was definitely coming from all fans and definitely was an attempt to say their point of view on authenticity didn't matter. But that isn't the whole story, there isn't just one point to this affair being discussed here. There are expectations of US fans on display here and attempts to impose their "standards" on others. There were US fans in comments saying they would not read "ESL stories", etc., even if one did recant that attitude pretty strongly.

All this aside, what you think about that workshop, what I think, it all should go on the page, and I didn't do a very good job, so hack it right up and start over if you want. I just was very uncomfortable leaving it a link to Fandom Wank with no details.--facetofcathy 16:21, 9 April 2011 (UTC)