Taylor Swift’s fans are asking for an explanation as to the singer’s engagement in the movie adaptation of Delia Owens’s novel Where the Crawdads Sing.
Singer-songwriter, Taylor Swift, has recently returned to music, in the form of a new song for the movie adaptation of Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens’s novel. Fans were initially excited about Swift’s announcement, yet their excitement was quickly dampened upon closer inspection.
Her Instagram post garnering over two million likes states Swift’s enamoration with Owens’s book saying, “I got absolutely lost when I read it years ago.” Crawdads’ official trailer only allows us snippets of Swift’s new single, Carolina, though Swift describes the new song as “haunting and ethereal.”
Where the Crawdads Sing released in 2018, reaching to the top of The New York Times Best Sellers List for Fiction in 2019 and 2020. Reese Witherspoon introduced Owens’s work to her Hello Sunshine Book Club in September of 2018.
Crawdads features the main character, Kya, or “marsh girl” as she is referred to by many of the other characters. Kya tends to keep to herself in the bogs of North Carolina during the fifties and sixties. Tensions rise when Kya is fingered as a suspect in the murder of her love interest.
This is all well and good, but the similarities between Kya’s plotline in the story is eerily similar to her creator’s, Delia Owens. Owens and her then-husband, Mark, visited Africa back in 2010, with the intention of “resettling Africa” and “human population control” as described by New Yorker reporter, Jeffery Goldberg.
TikTok user, @canysnmoons, brought up the singer’s unfortunate string of “performative white feminism.” Many people in her comments agreed, stating things like, “Taylor’s involvement is no[t] surprising at all when u really think about it. she’s the epitome of only caring about politics when and if it benefits her”
We’ve seen all too much the willful ignorance of white women in influential positions. Things like Delia Owens’ actions during her time in Africa are something that I would consider to require a bit more thought. “So many people aren’t aware of the author’s actions but Taylor’s PR team DEFINITELY should be. I’m so disappointed :/”
Crawdads is set to release in June this year, and along with it Swift’s new single, Carolina. Taylor Swift and her team, Reese Witherspoon and her production company, as well as Delia Owens have yet to speak publicly about the controversy.
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