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lolaraincoatOkay, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, naraht has been saving up links here. Go browse.
So in my own browsing, I have come across two assertions that I know to be factually incorrect. Certainly other claims that are Wrong On The Internet have been made, but here are the two that I want to argue about.
Wrong Idea #1: "Until recently, all readers of genre fiction/visible fans of SFF have been white." No. That is a lie.
I joined my hometown's SF fan group in 1977, when I was 14, because my best friend invited me, which she did because her mom ran it. And neither of them were white. Most of the people who attended regularly were white, but not all. We were all happily reading and discussing the then-new SF dealing with race and/or gender - Delaney! LeGuin! Tiptree! Russ! My friend's mom took her and her older sister to Boskone every year (she took me too, a couple of times; she was a great mom to a lot of people to whom she was not related) so it's not like they were invisible - at least in the non-metaphorical sense - to the white fen who now are claiming that my friend and her family didn't exist. This claim about the whiteness of SF's Good Old Days is a flat-out lie, and an excuse for present-day racist speech or behavior based on this claim is no excuse at all.
Wrong Idea #2: Alternate Timestream stories
I actually meant to say something like this about Elisabeth Bear's pseudo-Elizabethean fantasy series, with apologies to friends who I know really liked the books, so now I will say it about them and about the premise for P. Wrede's new book (which I haven't read, sorry) as well: Please leave the past alone. Just make up crap about the future! You will keep the historians from rending their garments and smacking their foreheads! Thank you!
More specifically, Wrede's new book is based on the premise that in some other universe, our planet's history was basically the same except that 1. there was such a thing as magic and 2. the big animals of the Americas did not die out when the glaciers receded and 3. the Americas were never populated until Columbus arrived. And yet the story is set in a recognizable version of 19th-century Minneapolis. Well ... okay, if there was enough magic to do all the work of clearing the land that was, in our universe, accomplished by swidden agriculture practiced by native people in some places or by herds of large animals managed by native people in others. Buffalo, sheep, cows, goats: whether or not the animals came with Columbus, it was local people whose uses of them changed the landscape. And there would have to be enough magic to come up with a suitable replacement for manioc, the food staple invented by Andean people that right now provides more calories than any other food eaten in Africa, because I guess Wrede's story does include African slavery, and all those enslaved people had to eat, right? Whereas here in North America, we are as we have been for millenia the People of Corn, and so I guess magic would have to replace corn as well (since it was bred up in the Valley of Mexico by native people there.) And if there weren't pre-existing gold and silver mines, what would have motivated the Europeans to bother with conquest at all? They had been following the cod stocks across the north Atlantic for centuries before 1492 and never troubled themselves with settlement or exploration, after all.
The general point is that the past is more tightly woven together than you think, and no amount of "world-building" can salvage a project that starts with such sweeping assumptions but ends up in such a familiar place anyway. I'm not usually all that much of a materialist, as historians go, but jeeze, you can't just ignore the interconnectedness of everyone's material existence, either.
The best description of how dependent Europe was on the Americas, in material terms, and of the relationship between demographic catastrophe in the post-conquest Americas and changing forms of labor is still to be found in Alfred Crosby's sadly outdated The Colombian Exchange. (Just say no to Jared Diamond and that silly-ass 1491 book, all right? Thank you.)
eta I realize that I should have pointed out that the most important thing about Wrede's three assumptions is that she (fictively) erased all the peoples of the Americas, which is to put it very gently an erasure with uncomfortable relationship to the needs and desires of writers and readers who sit at the top of the racial hierarchy in the anglophone world, and would prefer not to have to notice that the hierarchy exists at all - much less that non-white people exist. But, um, you know all that already, right? and you know I know that. So.
naraht has been saving up links here. Go browse.So in my own browsing, I have come across two assertions that I know to be factually incorrect. Certainly other claims that are Wrong On The Internet have been made, but here are the two that I want to argue about.
Wrong Idea #1: "Until recently, all readers of genre fiction/visible fans of SFF have been white." No. That is a lie.
I joined my hometown's SF fan group in 1977, when I was 14, because my best friend invited me, which she did because her mom ran it. And neither of them were white. Most of the people who attended regularly were white, but not all. We were all happily reading and discussing the then-new SF dealing with race and/or gender - Delaney! LeGuin! Tiptree! Russ! My friend's mom took her and her older sister to Boskone every year (she took me too, a couple of times; she was a great mom to a lot of people to whom she was not related) so it's not like they were invisible - at least in the non-metaphorical sense - to the white fen who now are claiming that my friend and her family didn't exist. This claim about the whiteness of SF's Good Old Days is a flat-out lie, and an excuse for present-day racist speech or behavior based on this claim is no excuse at all.
Wrong Idea #2: Alternate Timestream stories
I actually meant to say something like this about Elisabeth Bear's pseudo-Elizabethean fantasy series, with apologies to friends who I know really liked the books, so now I will say it about them and about the premise for P. Wrede's new book (which I haven't read, sorry) as well: Please leave the past alone. Just make up crap about the future! You will keep the historians from rending their garments and smacking their foreheads! Thank you!
More specifically, Wrede's new book is based on the premise that in some other universe, our planet's history was basically the same except that 1. there was such a thing as magic and 2. the big animals of the Americas did not die out when the glaciers receded and 3. the Americas were never populated until Columbus arrived. And yet the story is set in a recognizable version of 19th-century Minneapolis. Well ... okay, if there was enough magic to do all the work of clearing the land that was, in our universe, accomplished by swidden agriculture practiced by native people in some places or by herds of large animals managed by native people in others. Buffalo, sheep, cows, goats: whether or not the animals came with Columbus, it was local people whose uses of them changed the landscape. And there would have to be enough magic to come up with a suitable replacement for manioc, the food staple invented by Andean people that right now provides more calories than any other food eaten in Africa, because I guess Wrede's story does include African slavery, and all those enslaved people had to eat, right? Whereas here in North America, we are as we have been for millenia the People of Corn, and so I guess magic would have to replace corn as well (since it was bred up in the Valley of Mexico by native people there.) And if there weren't pre-existing gold and silver mines, what would have motivated the Europeans to bother with conquest at all? They had been following the cod stocks across the north Atlantic for centuries before 1492 and never troubled themselves with settlement or exploration, after all.
The general point is that the past is more tightly woven together than you think, and no amount of "world-building" can salvage a project that starts with such sweeping assumptions but ends up in such a familiar place anyway. I'm not usually all that much of a materialist, as historians go, but jeeze, you can't just ignore the interconnectedness of everyone's material existence, either.
The best description of how dependent Europe was on the Americas, in material terms, and of the relationship between demographic catastrophe in the post-conquest Americas and changing forms of labor is still to be found in Alfred Crosby's sadly outdated The Colombian Exchange. (Just say no to Jared Diamond and that silly-ass 1491 book, all right? Thank you.)
eta I realize that I should have pointed out that the most important thing about Wrede's three assumptions is that she (fictively) erased all the peoples of the Americas, which is to put it very gently an erasure with uncomfortable relationship to the needs and desires of writers and readers who sit at the top of the racial hierarchy in the anglophone world, and would prefer not to have to notice that the hierarchy exists at all - much less that non-white people exist. But, um, you know all that already, right? and you know I know that. So.
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Date: 2009-05-12 03:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-12 01:35 pm (UTC)It's saddening because some of my best internet friends have been fans of Wrede, of Bujold (her big supporter), and for that matter of Elizabeth Bear (who kicked off the first iteration of RaceFail '09.) And I am, and remain, a fan of Jo Walton's books, but her review of Wrede's book is where this whole mess started.
Also I am not in a good position to write about most of these authors because, Walton aside, I find them unreadable. But mileage varies, as we know ...
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Date: 2009-05-12 03:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-12 01:28 pm (UTC)The people make the land and the land makes the people; peoples and landscapes change over time, and so does their relationship. That's why the field of environmental history exists (because some of us can't just look out our windows and figure this out.)
no subject
Date: 2009-05-12 04:16 am (UTC)(And, yes, how on earth she could have not just written this book but gotten it through the whole publication process without anyone pointing out that disappearing all the peoples of the western hemisphere is just a tad problematic? Also makes me boggle.)
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Date: 2009-05-12 01:08 pm (UTC)Novik is playing a more complicated game on a longer timescale. But I'm impressed with how she limited the dragons' powers by making them dependent on humans for transoceanic travel, plus susceptible to disease. So it ... kind of works. Sort of. I would be happier if I knew how recently dragon-based warfare had arrived in Europe, in Novik's universe - did it come along with gunpowder? But I can make her universe work if I pretend that there were dragons with relationships with humans for centuries in Asia, but that Europeans only developed warlike uses for dragons after, let's say, the French Revolution. This no doubt contradicts some of what Novik has implied or stated in the books or elsewhere, but, um, please don't tell me. Because I love those books.
And then there's KS Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt. Now that is what comes of taking a huge (but plausible) demographic change seriously. The poor guy had to drag in reincarnation to get the timescale to work at all while still telling a half-way coherent story. Well, sort of a half-way coherent story. I love that book too.
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Date: 2009-05-12 04:34 am (UTC)And so clear and good, just like you.
My now 4 racefail posts are none so clear and specific, and none done. but they will be eventually.
In terms of this post, I'll be scratching my head awhile over the injunction not to fuck with the past. It seems to me that this focus, while admirably simple, has the disadvantage of being somewhat legalistic and maybe rejecting too much. Before considering new books to be set in the past/otherwhere, we might consider old ones. (also: is the future so easy to get right? Which is why books set in the future are so plausible in terms of diversity and women...)
Wow I've taken Ambien and I'm not thinking too clearly. But say The Aeneid and The Tempest. Objectionable on factual and moral grounds. But not texts we want to get rid of, or even change (except in fan fiction, leaving the donor intact). Does that mean we want to make more of them? Well, definitely! actually. We just want the new ones not to make the same mistakes. The new ones can make their own mistakes. And even if the new ones make mistakes that are really bad, bad enough for the authors to be told to STFU, they will just be floated in a shiny happy diverse internet where people will say "oh no you may not" and the bad books will crawl under the bedding and hide, while better books are told "welcome! you need a beta," or spawn discussion, or just be embraced with passionate glee by all the eager robot FOC offspring spawned by the internet.
Personally, I'm looking for a lesbian martial arts/taiko romance set on Sado Island in the 17th Century. Exiled female fighter (for justice!) falls in love with Taiko master. But the dangers on the main island have not been resolved. OMG INJUSTICE! She must fight her way back - no one has ever done it, not for a thousand years. But can she do and still be with the woman she loves? Now, there are a billion things wrong with this and hideous pitfalls. A white author of such a story would have to be prepared for criticism, do reasearch, and get advice. But is this story and so many others something that shouldn't be attempted? Or maybe just not at Tor?
God I'm stoned.
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Date: 2009-05-12 01:21 pm (UTC)That's the main thing. Otherwise, um, yeah, I may have overstated things a bit here (see my response to Ellen F., above.) but really I am not saying "nobody is allowed to write fiction about the past, or make stuff up about the past." I am saying "if you make stuff up about the past, you are very likely to cause historians to gnash our teeth and howl woefully." Sadly, the fear of upsetting historians is not much of a motivator for most writers.
And, you know, leaving aside great lit, I do enjoy some fictions about alternate pasts. I'm a big fan of one novel which starts by assuming the near-total destruction of the population of a continent: in Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson kills off the Europeans shortly after the fall of Rome. But he thought very hard about what that would mean over a long timescale - he had to drag in reincarnation in order to do it - and he's about a zillion times smarter than your average writer-of-urban-fantasy, so.
Enjoy that Ambien! Also, mwah!
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Date: 2009-05-12 01:23 pm (UTC)I wonder about this too--should white authors just never try to talk about the experiences of people from other cultures, or who are a different color? Is that the logical conclusion we could get from all this?
*ponder* I was recently told I was "derailing" when I paraphrased/synthesized commentary from several people of color about their experiences with the police. In the context, the accusation was hardly rational or fair, and so I'm a little extra sensitive about this whole "off-limits" thing at the moment.
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Date: 2009-05-12 12:02 pm (UTC)*nods* A North America without Native Americans prior to European settlements would have ended up more Mad Max than Minneapolis. With cannibalism.
The kind of conceit this author is indulging in is not only far beyond the ability to suspend disbelief, its targeted erasure of the first Americans (They would have eaten all the mammoths! The Magikal Europeans had better manners than that! Oh, look, the Statue of Liberty! With a wand!) is rather vile in its unspoken message.
Nope. Do. Not. Want.
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Date: 2009-05-12 01:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-12 12:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-12 01:49 pm (UTC)I felt a bit awkward writing in this voice of "on behalf of all historians everywhere" but on the other hand, arrrgggggghhhh.
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Date: 2009-05-12 01:56 pm (UTC)Your last paragraph was like a wake-up call. I feel embarrassed that I needed one. Thanks for pointing that out.
(Note: I started this before I finished the reply to your comment, whoops.)
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Date: 2009-05-12 04:35 pm (UTC)But yeah, making stuff up in the future tends to be a lot better for peeps like this.
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Date: 2009-05-13 01:28 am (UTC)Hey, that reminds me: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies actually is a very smart AU. Add "great world-building" to its other virtues!
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Date: 2009-05-12 04:36 pm (UTC)But while we are of one heart, mind, and soul when it comes to our evaluation of Jared Diamond, manioc, corn, and the relationship between landscape and culture . . . I do like AU speculative fiction that messes with the past in an intelligent fashion. Not sure you can call it sf, usually. But I enjoyed Phillip Dick's Man in the High Castle, fersure. And I like some of Harry Turtledove's alternate histories, although maybe that's because I don't know enough classical and Byzantine history to see where he might not be accurate. But I've still enjoyed them.
OTOH, I have little interest or use for all the alternate timeline U.S. Civil War fic that's out there, or the AU military history speculative fiction. There's a whole different sort of gender politics going on there that just doesn't pull me in. Sort of like the speculative fiction version of historical military re-enactors.
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Date: 2009-05-13 01:52 am (UTC)I'll have to try Harry Turtledove. I know much less classical and Byzantine history than you do, I'm sure.
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From:here via link roundup
Date: 2009-05-12 04:47 pm (UTC)Re: here via link roundup
Date: 2009-05-13 03:00 am (UTC)1. How much of the literature on the Atlantic slave trade have you read? Start with Paul Lovejoy. If you don't have a sense of the scope and importance of the slave trade, nothing else will make sense. Oh, yeah, and look at Mintz's book on sugar production and consumption, Sweetness and Power to get a sense of how one slave-labor industry was connected to so many others which relied on waged labor.
2. Then, um, for environmental change related to the conquest and its aftermath, I'd go for Elinor Melville on Mexico, Warren Dean on Brazil, and ... crap, there's this really great book on the New England forests, but I can't remember who wrote it. And add Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism to his Columbian Exchange.
3. Okay, then you need to think about change over time in the social, political, and cultural interactions among local peoples (conquered or not), European settlers of various sorts, enslaved Africans, free Africans, and their mulato/mestizo/miscellaneous descendants. On who ate what and why in Mexico - a great window onto this larger question - see Jeff Pilcher, Que vivan los tamales (in English despite the title, and a fun read.) On how people remembered and used those experiences, try Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (but be warned: it's difficult to follow) and the collected works of Richard Price, but especially Alabi's World. John Demos has a great (and very readable) book about the French and British colonies to the north and their relations with local people, a little out of your time period, called The Unredeemed Captive. Cami Townsend's biographies of Pocohantas and la Malinche are great for thinking about how gender fits into these interactions among groups of people. Irene Silverblatt's Modern Inquisitions draws some useful connections between the past and present. Oh, and William Taylor on Nauhua-speaking people ("Aztecs" you might say) under colonial rule, and Nancy Farriss on Mayan people under colonial rule, what a great book that is, and Alan Durston's new book on religion and linguistic change in the Andes, it's hard to read unless you're really into philology, but it's super-important and then of course you should look at some of the interpretations of Poma de Ayala's narrative, maybe starting with Rolena Adorno's version, and for plantation life in Brazil there's Stuart Schwartz ... Wow, I could go on and on in this category, and this is sort of scattershot, and ... sorry.
4. The big civilizations that were there before the Europeans arrived ... oh boy. I like Clendinnen's "Aztecs: An Interpretation" but lots of scholars I trust do not. There's so much out there, especially in English, that's just lurid and terrible. Oh! but look up the Tedlocks' translation of Popul Vuh, that's a good place to start for highland Guatemala. For the Andes ... sorry, I got nothin'. Too far outside my field. It used to be that I would recommend Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches but the author has disavowed parts of her own argument, so maybe not.
5. Finally, a couple of big-picture books, both *really* out of date: Eric Wolf, Sons of the Shaking Earth and Europe and the People Without History. Please note: no actual pictures involved.
Re: here via link roundup
From:Re: here via link roundup
From:Here from naraht's link roundup
Date: 2009-05-12 05:50 pm (UTC)Re: Here from naraht's link roundup
Date: 2009-05-13 03:07 am (UTC)There might be something a bit more detailed in a review in, say, CHAHR (that's a journal) or HAHR (another journal) but they don't always bother assigning reviewers to books that normal people read.
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Date: 2009-05-12 06:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-13 03:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-12 07:46 pm (UTC)Not thinking through the implications of a culture, or a particular environment, or a certain magical system etc etc, coupled with uninterrogated internal prejudices (the white privilege, it burns...) are not excuses good enough for the modern writer (no, no even Tamora Pierce who still owes me a book set in Carthak...). Fantasy writers should not be let off any more than 'mainstream' writers are and it's depressing and ridiculous how they often are.
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Date: 2009-05-13 03:10 am (UTC)Grrrr. Argh.
Could be
Date: 2009-05-12 09:44 pm (UTC)It is somewhat fantastic and would make for a very large number of universes, an uncountable infinite number.
I am not saying I believe in it but it is, IMO, possible and no more fantastic than the existence of a God, again IMO.
Fun stuff to think about, however.
JJake
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Date: 2009-05-12 09:51 pm (UTC)THIS, YES. This is what has been killing me in even just the little that I have read so far in this imbroglio. I mean, what an exposure of utter ignorance about how history works, or maybe just a refusal to think deeply in general, I guess. Excusing herself from deep thinking because it's YA, maybe? I don't know. And really, what utter ignorance of the history of colonialism and imperialism and how that translates into present reality for non-white peoples all over the world. I've been thinking a lot about what an essential piece that is for white folks to understand in order to decenter whiteness in our worldviews, and this situation is pretty instructive in that regard. *sigh*
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Date: 2009-05-12 10:19 pm (UTC)OTH our history is what it is and can not be changed, and in that context it should be taught to all people interested in learning it. Unfortunately history has often been written to suit the writer and sometimes over time these sullied versions of history have become what some or even most of the people accept for truth. That is unfortunate.
I also take exception with your comment that seems to indicate that only non-white (what ever that is) peoples have been affected. I would point out such things as the Roman Emperor Constantine, rewriting a good share of the history of Christ most of which is believed by most people and which effects a fairly large part of the population of many different ethnic origins.
Jake
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Date: 2009-05-13 09:59 pm (UTC)I'm also a social scientist with a certain amount of knowledge of the history of a small portion of the Americas, and a fan of alternative history (I hate the term "alternate history", and agree with Brian Aldiss's comment that it makes it sound as if they take turns). I see nothing wrong with stories or novels that ask "What if X had happened/had not happened?" And that includes unpeopled Americas. Or Americas where the humans aren't our kind of human (http://www.sfsite.com/~silverag/different.html). Yes, I'm aware that manioc (I call it cassava, by the way; I find people who spell it "cassave" pretentious) is a staple in Africa. It wasn't before the sixteenth century. And people didn't eat tomatoes in Italy before then, either; they do now. And I've planted and reaped sweet cassava, and tomatoes as well. Not to mention sweet potatoes, white potatoes, yams, and taro (we called that "coco", not, mark you "coco-yam").
All that was the result of colonialism, moving plants as well as people around. In the process, the original people of the corn (actually, people of the cassava who lived on the land were forced out of existence, in part by the Africans who were forcibly brought over to supplement and replace them.
What's most interesting in your post, by the way, is the rather odd way that you make the modern European interest in the Americas entirely dependent on the gold and silver mines. That's not exactly the case. Columbus found little gold. And the settlers who followed him found very little, but they had nonetheless established permanent settlements, and continued exploration for years before encountering the silver mines of Mexico and Peru.
I find explorations of what might have been fascinating, in short.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-18 03:58 pm (UTC)Please leave the past alone. Just make up crap about the future!
It's so much easier to write alternate history than it is to make up _good_ future worlds. ^_^;;;