Welcome to Overtink.

The podcast where two friends who are also professors, think about the connection between ideas and, in this case, lived experience.

I am Dr. David Pena-Gusman.

And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

There's been so much discourse in recent years about who is entitled to tell which stories.

Should Steven Spielberg have directed West Side Story?

And how about that one movie in which Scarlett Johansson played an Asian woman?

Or do you remember that white woman who wrote a novel about Latin American immigrants?

What was the deal with that again?

Oh, yes.

No, the name of the book is American Dirt.

And the author got a seven-figure advance for a book about Mexican immigration that was basically trauma porn. And needless to say, she's not Mexican.

Dang. And Arke seems like an obvious one. Like, she was not the person to write about this. Because by all account,

she actually knew very little about the situation she was writing about. In addition to not being

Mexican, it's funny, David, that we're doing this episode right after our cultural appropriation

episode as well. It's a very similar, no? Yeah, we'd like been thinking about some of these

things in similar yet different ways.

But there are a lot more cases here where the ethics are very blurred. For instance, let's say

you're a white male writer who wants to write a novel with a strong protagonist. And you know that

novels in English have tended to prioritize white male characters. Do you try and disrupt this

history by writing a woman of color as the protagonist?

Even if you do all the research in the world on the positionality of your character, are you just

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