On 'Yellowface', appropriation and how life imitates art
after reading Yellowface, I looked around me and it seemed like everyone was getting their work stolen by white people
I wrote the bulk of this newsletter edition in June 2023. A lot has changed since - including Twitter’s rebrand, which is funny because Twitter is the fil rouge of this newsletter.
Y’all know how hyped up I was about R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface (my review of Babel should be proof enough + my very cringe Instagram post of me mimicking the book cover that I will not share here).
This won’t come as a surprise - I (still) think that R. F Kuang is very talented. This book is a total departure from anything she’s written before, and it has definitely ruffled feathers, for a lot of justified and unjustified reasons. This is not gonna be a nuanced take, nor an actual review, but I’m gonna write about everything the book made me think about and feel, about lurking on Twitter threads, both on Book and Academic Twitter, about jealousy, about real cases of Yellowface and Blackface, and I’ll give ya some personal updates at the end. This is gonna be an unstructured piece so grab a matcha and sit tight.
In Yellowface R. F. Kuang writes from the perspective of June, “brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward, from Philly” who steals, appropriates and publishes the manuscript The Last Front, written by her superstar “friend”/author Athena “a beautiful, Yale-educated, international, ambiguously queer woman of colour” who dies while choking on a piece of uncooked pandan pancake batter.
June prunes and edits the stolen manuscript that focuses on the plight of Chinese workers enlisted in the British army during World War I. While so doing she deliberately erases “unnecessary backstory”, like the “lingering in rural Chinese landscapes for long, unrelated chapters”, and switches "one of the white bullies to a Chinese character”, all the while sprinkling heroic white characters to balance out the number of white villains in Athena’s original story. June praises herself for creating a “new version (…) a universally relatable story, a story that anyone can see themselves in.”
The book traces June’s (reborn under the racially ambiguous pen name Juniper Song) rise as an acclaimed literary star after publishing The Last Front, and how, as a white woman, she has to ultimately wade through the accusations of cultural appropriation and plagiarism that haunt her both online and offline. Yellowface reads like a manic diary, a stream of consciousness of a hyper-aware white woman, who is trying hard to prove how performatively “woke” she is without reflecting on the harm and danger she represents.
White Feminism and appropriation
A lot of reviews I have read mentioned that June felt like a caricature pulled out from a Karen playbook but I actually do feel like she is pretty representative of the white feminists online (and in the publishing industry if we’re narrowing it down to the book’s scope) who sincerely believe that they are “allies” and somehow believe that their voices should be centred in a conversation that does not concern them.
Back when I started writing this piece, I had an interesting conversation with Nana, an Afrofeminist who writes and thinks about racism, white supremacy, feminism, classism and how they manifest in different areas of society (publishing, within mainstream white feminist groups, tech, etc).
Nana has been observing, for some time now, a phenomenon, a WFem (term she coined for white feminists) modus operandi that they fall back onto to absolve them of all accusations of racism.
They reach out to Black/Brown/POC feminists, she explains, talk to them using their “white woman voice”, a sweet, syrupy, overly soft voice that can even be felt via messages. They punctuate with as many exclamation points and smileys to seem as harmless as possible. They earnestly pretend that they want to be friends, emphasise that they love and support your work, re-post your anti-racist stories with a pale fist emoji. They create lists and tag you in it, a token of appreciation for your work, which you should obviously be grateful for. They validate you. And, suddenly, one day you see your words, your work, your thoughts that are the product of a lifetime of enduring racism and misogyny, of research, of community building, repackaged in a pastel coloured book with a trendy font, in an article, on a blog post.
But the credits aren’t given, the checks aren’t distributed, the names are whitewashed and the story is stolen. Then, as Nana explains, they self-immolate when you dare claim that they leeched off your work, triggering an entire arsenal of Karen-weaponry to discredit you, invoking the sacrosanct tears and their fragile mental states.
How many Junipers are out there, ready to appropriate, steal, and gaslight?
Yellowface and Blackface, Twitter edition
Many, in fact.
Procrastinating this newsletter piece actually “worked in my favour” this time around, because an actual live discourse around academic Yellowface and Blackface broke out respectively on North American and French Twitter in June 2023.
Yellowface refers to stealing from, plagiarising, imitating without giving credit, and banking off the work of East Asian, which is the whole premise of R. F. Kuang’s book. It’s a story of theft of intellectual and cultural property and labour. It just so happens that in June 2023 a renowned Chinese-English writer and translator Yilin Wang discovered that her translations of Chinese revolutionary Qiu Jin’s poems were being used in a British Museum exhibition without her expressed permission, and thus without any form of compensation (she reached a settlement in August 2023 after two months of struggle with the British Museum).
One important tweet gained traction in her Twitter thread, a perfect illustration of Yellowface’s premise (and, as one Twitter user pointed out, an actual perfect crossover between Babel and Yellowface??).
Back here in France, an important court case played out between Zaka Toto, an author and researcher from Martinique and French historian Laurence de Cock. Toto accused De Cock of plagiarising his series of articles called Le Sucre, published in a review that he owns. De Cock admitted to “appropriating” and “erasing” his work but took offense to the word “plagiarism” and decided to sue him, leading to a three-year battle which ended in September 2023. Zaka Toto, thankfully, was found not guilty on all counts. It was a gruelling experience for Zaka Toto, which he documented as much as he could on his Twitter account. De Cock was virulent, throwing her money and reputation in the mix to discredit Zaka Toto’s work and person, nitpicking on semantics despite admitting that she had actually used his work without crediting him, without his permission (I think there’s a word for that?).
A case of academic Blackface, where a white, privileged historian tried to pass the work of a Black academic as her own, and tried to get away with it. There’s another well-known French author from La Réunion who excels in academic (and physical) Blackface, and has been accused of plagiarising the work of a Black PhD student in France, but that’s a story for another day (you can check out Nana’s Instagram stories La Pilleuse on the topic).
Female rivalry
One of other books that I read in 2023 that made me think of Yellowface was Racha Belmedi’s Rivalité, nom féminin, a thorough essay in which she explores how female rivalries have been fabricated, amplified, internalised and manipulated to divide women and lessen the bonds of solidarity between us. It’s pretty ironic that a French journalist (a white woman) essentially plagiarised Belmedi’s (a woman of colour) book during the airtime of Quotidien, a popular French news show on which she presents a daily segment, without quoting Belmedi once. I swear I am not making this up - it just goes to show how OFTEN this kind of appropriation happens.
Once again life imitates art and I was reminded of the rivalry between June and her frenemy Athena in Yellowface. The jealousy that June expressed felt relatable - in an age where we’re all quick to show the highlights of our lives on our Insta stories, who hasn’t felt their heart clench (a little bit) on seeing people succeed where we have failed, multiple times? But the rivalry between June and Athena wasn’t just one based on pangs of envy that can naturally occur - it was something deeper, rooted in June’s belief that “…taking Athena’s manuscript felt like reparations, payback for the things that Athena took from me.” It was steeped in racism. June sincerely believed that Athena had a leg up on her in the publishing industry because “…if anything, it’s easier now than ever to be Asian in the industry…”. This belief that authors of colour are now part of a hype that helps them sell more books, and artificial, is a contrived belief that sadly does not reflect reality of book sales and of who actually gets million dollar book deals.
Now do you understand why I’ve been procrastinating on this piece? I still have so much to say on female rivalries and on the publishing industry (a HarperCollins strike was underway during the production of Yellowface). I might cover them in another newsletter piece. But I also want to write about the other books I’ve read since then, and maybe write about something other than books? I have so many ideas but I’ve been very lazy lately and I cannot muster the energy to write after work. I think I should delete Instagram, Twitter and TikTok on my phone - I need my attention span back. But you know I won’t (unless y’all come over here and read my hopefully more regular rants here).
Books I’ve read lately
2023 wasn’t a great year of reading for me (in terms of numbers), especially in the last quarter where I couldn’t keep off my phone with the unfolding genocide happening in Palestine. I’ve been multi-reading (reading several books at once), and the ones that have stood out are:
The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein (I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to write a review because I’ve literally highlighted chapters at a time, it’s that good)
Ten Myths about Israel by Ilan Pappé (it’s a very heavy, not the smoothest book to read, but it’s a very important lesson in historical fact-checking and is a good guidebook for whenever you feel the need to school Zionists)
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim (non-fiction, a pretty good read, might write up a review soon!)
Décolonisons-nous by Frank Lao (a really important read, in French, because Lord knows the French need to be EDUCATED on their racist history, don’t get me started, need to write a review)
I have the thoughts, I just need to write them! No broken promises in 2024, but I swear I’ll be back. Till then, keep protesting, keep writing to your reps, keep talking about Palestine, eat your veggies to make your gut happy, and put your phones on DND after 11pm.
S.
Sources:
"Rivalité: Le nom féminin" by Racha Belmehdi - Éditions Favre
New York Times - "The Diversity of the Publishing Industry":
CNN Style - "Yilin Wang: Translator's Settlement with British Museum":
Zist - "Le Sucre":
Zist - "L'Affaire Laurence de Cock: The End":