Hari Kunzru on race, politics and the blues

As Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33-year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive. 

Hari Kunzru is an award-winning novelist and journalist whose work often deals with the effects of racism and the struggle for identity.

He's written seven novels, including White Tears, which​ explores the issues of white privilege and cultural appropriation through the lives of Seth and Carter, two New Yorkers bound by their obsession with blues music. White Tears is a ghost story that illuminates the uncomfortable truths about racial politics and the abuse of power in America.

His most recent book is Blue Ruin, which tells the story of a once-promising artist's trajectory from art school in London to delivering groceries in upstate New York and facing the pandemic on an ex-lover's property. 

Eleanor Wachtel spoke with Kunzru in 2017, following the publication of his novel White Tears.

​Learning about black history through music

"There is a long and ignoble history of African-American musical culture being appropriated and profited from by people other than the people who made it. I started to collect Black American music at a very early age, before I had any sort of coherent idea of the culture that these records came out of. Music was my way into learning about Black history.

Music was my way into learning about Black history.- Hari Kunzru

"But there comes a certain point when you have to ask yourself, 'Do I own this in any real way? In what sense is this mine or in what sense does my love for this grant me any rights?' And then you get into this whole very fraught area about appropriation and about ownership, about who gets credit, who gets paid, who has the right to interpret these things.

"And that's one of the things I really wanted to pick over in this book because it's not a simple set of questions by any means."

America's haunted past

"There are a lot of stories around magic and ghosts that turn up around music. There is something strange and ghostly about recording music, and I wanted to tell a ghost story. I wanted to try and approach this material through that particular genre because I think the more I understand about America, the more I feel that it's a country that is haunted by race and by its past.

"Ghost stories are always about something that's repressed, something that comes up from the past and insists on invading the present. The classic North American site for any ghost story is an old Indian burial ground. That's the repression. It's the previous people who were there, the people whose genocide founded the country and in this way, it seemed to me like quite a good way to talk about race and politics in America."

The value of inauthenticity

"I think people fetishize authenticity and I think it can be a very toxic way of looking at the world.

It's a very interesting exercise to go against that, to think about what the value of inauthenticity is- Hari Kunzru

My joke about myself is that I'm the most inauthentic person I know, and I suppose my own racial history is part of that. I have an Indian father and an English mother, so I was never quite white enough or brown enough.

But also people are constantly searching for a kind of guarantee of their own authenticity, a sort of stamp of approval or a certificate. I think it's a very interesting exercise to go against that, to think about what the value of inauthenticity is.

Hari Kunzru's comments have been edited and condensed.