N.K. Jemisin, a African American writer of fantasy fiction, heard from a reader that her books were in the African American Fiction section of the local public library, and she had
this and much more to say:
I hate the “African American Fiction” section. HATE. IT. I hate that it exists. I hate that it was ever deemed necessary. I hate why it was deemed necessary, and I don’t agree that it is. I hated it as a reader, long before I ever got published. And now that I’m a writer, I don’t ever want to see my books there — unless a venue has multiple copies and they’re also in the Fantasy or General Fiction section.
“But Nora,” I hear (some fictional respondant) saying. “You’re black. You write about black people, among others. Doesn’t that mean you belong there?”
My answer: “No. And the next person who rolls up in my blog talking about where black readers, writers, or characters belong is going to get popped in the mouth.”
I have to think that when an author calls herself "N.K." she is signalling right there that she wants to be known by what she has written, not anything else about her identity. Plus her fantasy novels include people of many different skin tones, but none of them are African American:
On the micro scale, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms doesn’t belong in the AAF section because it Contains No Actual Black People.
Race is just a hard problem in America, and the question of how to think and speak about an African American writer is can be complicated in the same way as all our other race questions. But I think that we have black authors of science fiction, vampire fiction, high fantasy, and every other genre is a great thing and a good sign about where we could end up in a generation or two.
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