Yellowfacing. Racial Bias

Nachdem Michael Derrick Hudson unter eigenem Namen lange Zeit keinen Verlag für die Veröffentlichung eines Gedichts fand, wählte er das chinesische Pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou und hatte damit auch Erfolg: Sein Gedicht „‚The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve“ ist derzeit in der Anthologie „The Best American Poetry 2015“ zu finden.

Vor der ersten Veröffentlichung bei einem Verlag sei es unter seinem eigenem Namen Michael Derrick Hudson jedoch 40 Mal abgelehnt worden, erklärte der Dichter nun auf seiner Facebookseite – „wenn es tatsächlich eines der besten amerikanischen Gedichte im Jahr 2015 ist, brauchte es ganz schön viel Aufwand, um es zu veröffentlichen“.

Wegen seines Vorgehens steht Hudson nun aber im Kreuzfeuer der Kritik. Schriftstellerkollege Jeong Min etwa monierte, dass sich hier jemand eine fremde Kultur aneigne, um persönlichen Erfolg zu haben – „für asienstämmige Amerikaner ist der Namenswechsel eine Strategie, um in einem rassistischen und nativistischen Amerika zu überleben“. Der Blog „Angry Asian Man“ bezichtigte Hudson gar des „Yellowfacings“, auch der Vorwurf des „Gedicht-Kolonialismus“ fiel. / Spiegel

In response to the controversy over his [Sherman Alexie’s] decision to include „Yi-Fen Chou’s“ poem in the Best American Poetry anthology even after discovering that Yi-Fen Chou was actually a pen name that a white poet named Michael Derrick Hudson used in order to get published, Alexie admitted that, to him, dumping the poem would have undermined his decision to use racial bias in his selection process. Excluding the poem, he said, „would have cast doubt on every poem I have chosen for BAP. It would have implied that I chose poems based only on identity.“

Of course, Alexie didn’t choose poems based only on identity. He chose them because he liked them. But he also chose to use his status as a big deal writer to champion writers of color, who have to leap over many more hurdles in the writing world than white writers do, a condition that Alexie knows about from a lifetime of being not-white in the literary world. So, in this case, for the sake of equity in publishing, he wanted to lend his power to those who have less.

Alexie’s racial bias in this instance shows a top-down approach to advocating for racial justice within the current publishing system. But there’s a bottom-up reason to use „racial nepotism“ in editorial processes as well.

Readers are clearly hungry for work by non-white voices. Editors can see this hunger on their social media feeds, in articles, in classrooms, etc. (If they’re good editors, then they’re also just plain ol‘ curious about how lots of different people engage with the traditions of poetry. I think of Frank O’Hara buying an issue of New World Writing just „to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days.“) Readers like to buy books and magazines, and so publishers are making an effort to give readers what they want. / Rich Smith, the Stranger