Cultural Appropriation, Authorship Ethics, and Identity Politics in the Literary Marketplace: A Socio-Literary Analysis of R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface

Abstract

R.F. Kuang’s novel, Yellowface (2023), carries the issues related to plagiarism, cultural appropriation, and identity commodification. All of these problems are within the publishing industry. This paper discusses literary theft as a meeting point of structural racism, cancel culture and the commodification of "diversity" as evidenced by the novel’s structural white first-person narrative (using the pseudonym June Hayward, renamed Juniper Song). With the help of Stuart Hall’s conceptualization of the representational theory, Critical Race theory and Bourdieu’s theory on Cultural Capital, the study confines itself to the investigation of authorship ethics by textual analysis of the novel. The findings of the study indicate that Yellowface “uncovers the industry gate keeping system, which allows white privilege to appropriate narratives and eradicates diverted voices of colour. In particular, the novel illustrates how social media magnifies (but does not solve) inequality through online harassment that leads to vengeance and reputational destruction. Implications include rethinking publishing practices in the real world and the practice of tokenistic diversity initiatives, and the importance of ethical storytelling. Restating the question of the “ownership” of stories in today’s neoliberal marketplace, the analysis offers a valuable and relevant addition to the current debate in cultural sociology and literary studies.

Keywords: Cultural Appropriation, Authorship Ethics, Publishing Industry, Racial Identity, Cancel Culture, Representation Theory, Literary Marketplace