Lionel Shriver Puts On a Sombrero

No matter your opinion on cultural appropriation, you can be certain that many people think you are wrong. The novelist Lionel Shriver thinks that fear of it threatens to extinguish literature, and, last Thursday, at the Brisbane Book Festival, she gave an instantly controversial keynote speech to that effect. She spoke while wearing a sombrero, a nod to a dustup at Bowdoin College, this past February, in which a tequila-themed party involving miniature sombreros became a campus flashpoint. Shriver recounted the events scornfully, poking fun at Bowdoin students and administration, and their talk about empathy and safe spaces. “What does this have to do with writing fiction?” she asked. “The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats.” That night, the writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied posted a piece on Medium, later republished by the Guardian, about Shriver’s speech. The speech, Abdel-Magied wrote, “dripped of racial supremacy,” and she had been prompted to walk out.