links for 2009-05-08
May 8, 2009-
Mark the day. It's almost impossible to believe, but the Express has a positive story about the British Muslim community today. It may be a first.
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massive gorgeous photo galleries of non-white/POC celebrities and public figures.
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So, you know, complicated. I'm not going to stop reading POB any time soon, especially as I think he's one of the best Age of Sail authors when it comes to racial diversity and sympathetic portrayal of other cultures. But I do recognise that that's largely because the competition are so very, very awful.
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So what’s up with white fantasy? At the heart of it is the white normative- around which the whole universe must revolve.
In fantasy, you can find societies that have room for dragon people, demon guys, 20 kinds of elves, etc, which function in this incredibly cosmopolitan fashion- yet ironically and most sadly, there’s no actual significant space for characters of color.
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Why does this anachronism persist in this blessedly irreligious country? For all their whining that they are "persecuted", the religious minority in Britain are in fact accorded remarkable privileges. They are given a bench-full of unelected positions in the legislature, protection from criticism in the law, and vast amounts of public money to indoctrinate children into their belief systems in every school in the land.
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What I found in Blackburn is that those working in the community feel that the government should place more emphasis on addressing issues of poverty, education and health, rather than on flagship schemes for tackling extremism. And this ties in with what the Iranian-American writer Reza Aslan argues in his new book How to Win a Cosmic War – Global Jihadists rely on creating a "master narrative" for disaffected young Muslims, in which "the global grievances to which they have been exposed are connected to the local grievances that they themselves experience every day". It therefore follows that if you can address those local grievances, you can break that link between local and global, you can reduce the likelihood of young people turning to extremism.
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If I continue to have a problem with the word, it’s that it implies one is both hetero- and homosexual in a way that encourages people to refer to a bisexual’s “queer portion” or “straight half”. As far as I’m concerned bisexuality is a complete identity in and of itself, not a mishmash of other things. It doesn’t look like a pie chart unless you want it to. But, while it’s something to keep thinking about, I can deal with that for now. I don’t think any of the other words at my disposal are much better.
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That's not to say that the idea "What if America had been empty when the Europeans got there?" isn't a legitimate one to write on–it is. Apparently, you can even write some damn good fiction on it. But then, you're not writing of America any more, are you? It's not the Matter of America any longer. You're writing something else. So, for the sake of common decency, have the respect to make it be some place else, too, would you? I mean, at least that way, your readers won't have to trip over the bones of all those erased Indians.
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I read that description and I stopped dead in my tracks. How can one even imagine creating "American fantasy" without Native Americans? How can one possibly disentangle the mythology of the American frontier from the steady drumbeat of encroachment, threat, and loss? The story of the American frontier is not, cannot be made a story only of human vs nature. This is only an alternate version of "our" world with a very narrow understanding of the pronoun.
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For now, though, I'm just sad. I love LMB's work, I really do, but propaganda? Seriously? Oh, I wish she hadn't done that. It was a shit thing to say.
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Every time I see some homophobe say bigoted things, they always justify it the same way — they cite their beloved gay friends.
Who are these people? I can’t imagine there are many lesbian and gay people who are uncloseted enough to have come out to Joe the Plumber, yet self-hating enough to say friends with someone who says this:
