Stop telling authors what they can write. The only limit is imagination | Kenan Malik
Condemning a white novelist for writing on Mexican migrants is to create gated cultures
‘What insults my soul,” Zadie Smith has written, “is the idea… that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally.”
Both as novelist and essayist, Smith is one of the most subtle guides to the fraught terrain of culture and identity. The problem of – writers and artists being called out for having stepped beyond their permitted cultural boundaries to explore themes about people who are not
