TFA is a comprehensive compendium of cliche tropes, skilfully crafted.
What could a similarly resourced effort produce written without tongue in cheek?
I’d like to read that.
What could a similarly resourced effort produce written without tongue in cheek?
I’d like to read that.
The author was Binyavanga Wainaina, who won the Caine Prize for African Writing, so perhaps the list of other winning stories would be a good place to start.
Would you also like to read "How to write about America", or "How to write about Europe"?
You can still write about vast heterogenous places (or continents) - and give accurate information about the conditions there, without the cliches.
Europe: "Firms across sub-Scandinavian Europe are refusing to deliver to addresses in reclusive island kingdom of Britain citing concerns over possible tribal violence as ongoing implementation of AU-brokered Brexit peace agreement raises ethnic tensions in the oil-rich nation."
this thread goes on for a while: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1326988782600663047.html
If we were to use the sort of clichés people actually use about the US and the UK in regular writing, it'd be a fun article to read (and include quite a few stereotypes that are a long way wide of the mark) but probably a touch less patronising than some of the Africa clichés and stereotypes.
On one hand it's a review of Bernard-Henri Lévy's French travelogue "American Vertigo." On the other hand it's a take down of all the cliches of all these American travelogues that visit the same places and say the same things.
Here's a telling bit from the beginning.
> You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.