"James said this bias towards the archetypal female reader was “probably” a factor in his famous 78 rejections for his first novel, John Crow’s Devil. He blamed the popularity of “cultural ventriloquism” in fiction, where white authors write in a “palatable” way about countries and cultures of which they have no experience.
“It is a literary gold mine, this idea of a white adventurer in a black hell,” James said. “That voice will never go away, because it makes a lot of money. I toyed with it for a while, because I am convinced that as dark a novel as I wrote, I think it would have done a lot better if it was done through that cultural ventriloquism. We don’t have a scene where a well-meaning and emotionally bloodied white dude decides to have a drink with the jokey black dude and they watch the sunset. I was not going to do that and I think that is why a lot of people passed on it.”"
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/30/marlon-james-writers-of-colour-pander-white-woman-man-booker-event-brief-history-seven-killings#img-2
Cultural Ventriloquism
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