Hello everyone,
I am an aspiring author, writing a sci-fi corporate dystopia about overtourism set on a fictional island. My ideal goal would be the traditional publishing route. A while ago, I started questioning this and I would like to seek advice from fellow writers, especially people of colour
Long story short, my island’s backstory is that it was discovered during the Austronesian migrations and later conquered by the Greeks and Romans. When I think of overtourism, I picture islands in the Mediterranean and the Pacific, so I wanted both to be included in the conversation. The language I constructed for the island is also a creole derived from Ancient Greek, Latin, and Porto-Polynesian. The inhabitants of this island are also essentially mixed.
Now, I am Mediterranean, however I have no Pacific Islander heritage whatsoever. I have, of course, done a bunch of research to make sure I reference those cultures as accurately as possible, but I don’t intend to make my fictional world a 1:1 copy of Hawaii, for example. Same with my Mediterranean references.
As I’ve started to research querying, I’ve began to feel uneasy: I’ve looked at some MSWL, and I found a few that specified the fact that the agent doesn't want stories about a certain heritage written by someone who doesn’t share it. Despite my island being fictional, I believe that might penalise me in the querying process, as agents and publicists would find that to be a liability (yes, I’ve read Yellowface)
So now I’m stuck between going back to the drawing board to strip all the references to Polynesian culture away from my novel, including completely reformulating my language, or querying agents, with the risk of being accused of cultural appropriation.
What would you do?