Criticism and Debate
Though Kingston's work is highly acclaimed, it has also received criticism, especially from some members of the Chinese American community. American playwright and novelist Frank Chin has severely criticized Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, claiming that she had tainted the purity of Chinese tradition in reinterpreting stories and myths. Chin has accused Kingston of "liberally adapting to collude with white racist stereotypes and to invent a 'fake' Chinese-American culture that is more palatable to the mainstream."
Kingston commented on her critics' opinions in a 1990 interview in which she stated that men believe that minority women writers have "achieved success by collaborating with the white racist establishment," by "pander to the white taste for feminist writing... It's a one-sided argument because the women don't answer. We let them say those things because we don't want to be divisive."
Read more about this topic: Maxine Hong Kingston
Famous quotes containing the words criticism and, criticism and/or debate:
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Abject flattery and indiscriminate assentation degrade, as much as indiscriminate contradiction and noisy debate disgust. But a modest assertion of one’s own opinion, and a complaisant acquiescence in other people’s, preserve dignity.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)