Can texts ever be truly representative of groups of people?
Who gets to represent a group of people and who doesn’t?(Who gets to tell what?)
Is the act of representation problematic?
Texts can be truly representative of groups of people but that would depend upon who wrote those texts and their general mindset or perceptions about identity. Most the time we find texts not representing groups of people fully and this is principally because either the people involved are biased or are merely not aware that they have omitted prominent content of other people’s cultures. This can come as a result of the authors not having a considerable experience or full exposure to the cultures they are trying to represent. For instance, in the official trailer for Crazy Rich Asians more of the video was representative of solely one dominating nationality being Chinese, leaving behind other cardinal races of the population being Malay, Indian and some few other assortments of races. The trailer itself does not represent the entire Singaporean society because it definitely contradicts the fact that Singapore is a multi-racial nation.
Often times someone from a certain group gets to represent and focus more on that particular group and ignore the other. This scenario normally applies to regions that are characterised by racial dichotomies. It is never definite whether the authors made the representation based upon prejudice or not. This situation can be closely associated with a twitter video post about an African-American Author who wrote stories only about black people. Reasons behind this might be that Toni Morrison tried to promote the Black race after realising how dominating the whites are in most texts or that the idea itself was instinctive since she was black too. This kind of mindset apparently has the potential to arouse instances of racism and feelings of superiority between the groups concerned.