#sry i just watched what's love got to do with it (the new jemima khan produced movie) and like yeah it's not perfect by any means

[roobylavender]

on one hand i do tend to be more critical of non-white produced media than white produced media but on the other hand within paki and more specifically paki muslim circles there's this constant tendency to look at a diaspora work and read it first and foremost to see if it has a positive portrayal of pakis or muslims. and it's like okay i get it we've been terrorized a lot and our rep in media at large is not particularly stellar but i also think there's a difference between critiquing that in media produced by white people versus critiquing that in ownvoices stories that are largely written as a reflection of these authors' lived experiences. like at some point you gotta understand how insulting it is to tell a diaspora author "you should be ashamed that you're making us look bad and giving white people more reasons to stereotype us" like first of all i don't think white people are their concern if what they're writing about is truly traumatic to your perception of culture outside of the bubble you live in. these are people trying to unpack their own experiences and yes maybe there is something to be said of trying to sell it off as an easy product (rupi kaur) but that is not to say every diaspora creative is like this and esp not the authors who are from smaller labels or who even self publish. like they have no grand white audience to which to pander and are often working off of word of mouth to get their story into people's hands. and admittedly this is a dynamic that changes as you move into tv and film but i nonetheless am not one to really embrace the idea that bc of white people's ignorance and bigotry we have to stick to telling "good" paki or muslim stories. like why? what is so bad if our current generation is questioning certain things and expanding their world view? if anything this constant focus on "good" portrayals of paki muslims leads to the obscurity of critiquing anything else in a review. i can't count how many times i've read books where that's all other reviews talked about meanwhile i had concerns like: well the mc's best friends felt underdeveloped, or i can respect that the mc felt suffocated by the idea of an arranged marriage but her white boyfriend didn't have enough personality to really feel like his own character, or the book painted parents as one dimensional villainous caricatures rather than fully realized people who are as much victims of abuse as they are perpetrators of it, etc. those are the kinds of things i'm thinking about when i dissect diaspora media. not whether what they've portrayed is close to an ideal that combats all pre-existing bigotry but whether they've given me a complete and fleshed out story with which to engage, rather than a collection of stereotypes that is never actually afforded any real analysis. this is where our critiques need to go if we want to get anywhere