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Global Diversity SFF Thread


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Speaking of.

In Japanese Manga, Jewish mysticism is frequently referenced. I've seen plenty of examples of it, e.g. the missing 13th Hebrew tribe, Kabala, etc. When I saw those, I always felt that it was cultural appropriation in a bad way. It didn't feel like that the authors just failed at research, but rather, it was used because they thought it sounded exotic, and they read like 2 articles in a magazine about it, and they think their audience will also find it exotic and fitting and mysterious. Bleargh.

I'm not sure I've ever seen an accurate portrayal of Jewish mysticism in anything.

eta: I almost said Promethea, but that's clearly and deliberately not the case.

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Honestly, thats the kind of thing I find I don't mind. Tossing some stuff in there so it sounds cool/exotic/sets a place/whatever is a totally legit thing to do in my book. I mean, if I was reading it and could see it was total nonsense* I might not enjoy it very much, but I wouldn't be offended. (again, unless they'd also managed to work blood libel and holocaust denial and the evil Jewish communist bankers in there somehow.)

I think it's that, well, I can talk, because i'm not really in the kind of cultural group where portrayals are historically, inherently offensive and racist. (well, I'm jewish, but that sort of classical anti-semitism has kind of gone out of style, and theres really a dearth of Israelis in SFF) I was kind of scratching my head at the stuff about offensive appropriation of Russian culture, because I couldn't figure out what the offensive western stereotype of Russians even was. Russia was never colonized, hasn't been exoticized for a while, and doesn't really have a sense of needing to fear the west. Sure, theres stereotypes - drunkeness, violence, snow? - but they're the kind of thing I at least would roll my eyes at (same as with Israeli stereotypes - rude, er, violent...) since theres no real imbalance of power. Ok, white people think we're rude. Whatever. It's an eyeroll, it's not offensive.

OTOH, when an anglophone writer is trying to evoke, say, Africa, the particular bag of tropes and images and settings and whatver that they've got to work with is racist right from the get go, because that bag was built up on an imbalance of power and was used to maintain that imbalance. But, they still want to evoke Africaness, like the manga writers want a bit of exotic jewishness in there. So they often seem to stumble because they can't untangle out the racist from the literarily useful. (and that gets harder and harder the worse the historical - and modern - racism is. Theres nothing inherently offensive in snow and a samovar, I don't think, (or about Kabbalah) but how about coconuts and a monkey?)

*Or someone, not actually me. I know fuck all about Kabbalah or the 13th tribe. Actually, they might be Asian, so maybe the Japanese have as much claim to them as anyone.

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Paying homage to another culture is difficult to critisize. Portraying it in stereotype is.

But the notion that one person not of a culture cannot use that culture as a model is ridiculous. People do not own their history enough that they can cease fiction. If there is gross and overt racism, then sure, speak out. Otherwise shut up because you don't own fucking jack shit.

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But the notion that one person not of a culture cannot use that culture as a model is ridiculous. People do not own their history enough that they can cease fiction. If there is gross and overt racism, then sure, speak out. Otherwise shut up because you don't own fucking jack shit.
It's not about ownership. It's about speaking from ignorance combined with speaking as if they are an authority. It's done very often from a position of patronage and acts as this shitty view into culture in a way that combines the worst aspect of tourism ("I went to Brazil for a week and all the Brazilians are so nice and friendly!") with some of the worst parts of privilege. And it's almost never done in a value-neutral way; it is almost always done in a way that illustrates the differences front and center, often while casting aspersions.

I think it can be done, and sometimes it can probably be done well. But it's very easy to make it complete shit, and ultimately you should ask yourself - is there a reason that you need to use this actual real culture to do this instead of some made up shit?

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Fuck i hate this site sometimes. It times out randomly and i lose my post.

Ultimately, i don't care. No one owns culture, or history. Patriotism, jingoism and pride along with a healthy dose of religion often result in the worst that nations have to offer. I don't have a great deal of respect for nation's cultures, or for their history, not as something intrinsically worthwhile of its own merit and sacrosanct enough that it cannot be questioned or copied.

If everyone appropriates everyone else's shit maybe we'd all get along better instead of thinking that our shit is better than the shit in the stall of the guy sitting next to us.

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I think the question is if the portrayal is inaccurate, and people reading the text think this is how it really is. Best example I can come up with is Song of Kali. Basically, the issue of the book isn't that it is overtly racist, but what it does is ignore any and all alternative arguments to the book's thesis - that a good dose of secularism and Westernization is exactly what India needs.

Now, you have writers like Rushdie who strongly believe in the secularism introduced by the British Empire, but Rushdie is obviously a better writer than Simmons as he manages to weave a tale of complexity.

Now, for wholly fictional worlds taking trappings from the real world - I can't say I always like how its done but to try and stop people from doing that opens bigger cans of worms that Arthmail points to. Will have to chew that one.

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I think the question is if the portrayal is inaccurate, and people reading the text think this is how it really is. Best example I can come up with is Song of Kali. Basically, the issue of the book isn't that it is overtly racist, but what it does is ignore any and all alternative arguments to the book's thesis - that a good dose of secularism and Westernization is exactly what India needs.

Now, you have writers like Rushdie who strongly believe in the secularism introduced by the British Empire, but Rushdie is obviously a better writer than Simmons as he manages to weave a tale of complexity.

Now, for wholly fictional worlds taking trappings from the real world - I can't say I always like how its done but to try and stop people from doing that opens bigger cans of worms that Arthmail points to. Will have to chew that one.

There are always inaccurate portrayals, all of the time, about a myriad of different things. Idiots are now questioning the violence of Batman because of the theatre attack as if that is the reason for gun violence. Until a person cares to actually learn about a culture or people on their own all they will see is the views of others for right or wrong. But as i have repeated before, two people from the same place can see different things. Which is right, and who gets to decide?

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I think the question is if the portrayal is inaccurate, and people reading the text think this is how it really is. Best example I can come up with is Song of Kali. Basically, the issue of the book isn't that it is overtly racist, but what it does is ignore any and all alternative arguments to the book's thesis - that a good dose of secularism and Westernization is exactly what India needs.

Thats, y'know, dumb. A work of fiction isn't meant to serve as a 101 to the history of secularism in India. (Or Slavic linguistics. Or Jewish mysticism, Stalinist historiography or whatever else we're dealing with in a given work.) If someone is taking stuff they pick out of fiction as a replacement for genuine knowledge about the world, well, I can't help them. There's an onus on the author to not be an idiot, but it's not their responsibility to be a substitute for the education system either.

I can see that a novel containing an argument that India should get more westernized is offensive, but then it's an offensive opinion contained within a book, (same Ender's Game or Goodkind or whomever) it's not an inherently incorrect mode of writing said book. Without having read it, it sounds like one side of an argument to me, which is well and good to argue back, butnot actually say the book should have been written a different way.

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Without having read it

I'm not really sure what argument I can give in light of this fact.

@Artmail:

There are always inaccurate portrayals, all of the time, about a myriad of different things. Idiots are now questioning the violence of Batman because of the theatre attack as if that is the reason for gun violence. Until a person cares to actually learn about a culture or people on their own all they will see is the views of others for right or wrong. But as i have repeated before, two people from the same place can see different things. Which is right, and who gets to decide?

I was actually thinking about this when I saw people complaining about the article in FP in which a Middle Eastern woman bashes treatment of women there. I though people were too quick to say "oh look at our own lawns", "this is just biased", and the like.

It's just as ridiculous, to me, to not listen to a voice b/c it disagrees with the standard position.

So yeah, people can disagree. I think the concern groups have is when there isn't a balanced look or much of a look at all, so the voices that get heard are always the ones involved with negative stereotyping.

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There is also the issue of who is doing the stereotyping and arguing. Rushdie making an argument for secularism is very different from an American white guy arguing the same thing, even if the opinions are functionally identical. Or, even worse , a British white guy.

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Paying homage to another culture is difficult to critisize. Portraying it in stereotype is.

Yes, indeed.

But would you accept that the bar that separates "homage" from "stereotype" is going to be set at a different place depending on whether you have intimate knowledge of the group being used?

By way of example, we have a recent case involving The Help wherein some black Southerners raised the complaint against the book and the movie, precisely along the line of a dominant culture appropriating a social phenomenon and stripping it of the genuine voice of the people most directly affected (you do not have to agree with this criticism to see the point, I think).

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I had begun to write a post about that since I first saw the topic, but here is what came out of my panderings. It's more of an intuition, so I may be incorrect, and I will be a bit rambly, but I think you the issue that is being danced around here is that of the relative relationship of people with the culture they are being brought up in and other cultures. And, therefore, of the legitimacy of dealing with a culture and a history that is not directly your own.

Obviously belonging to a group with a certain culture doesn't mean you always know it in and out, nor that you are always going to be right about it. It means however that this person will have a particular relationship and emotions with that culture, because as it has contributed to define the cognitive frame in which s/he was brought up, it participates of her basic identity. Whereas a person from another culture may learn extensively about this one, and even develop a relationship with itand have it become part of her identity, but nonetheless because of the fundamental way this culture has been approached differently, the relation is not the same. One is a direct, instinctive relation, the other is adopted and acquiered. And that is taking the case of someone who would develop an intimate relationship with another culture, so imagine the difference when talking about someone who is just discovering another culture and then borrowing some elements to put in fiction.

Culture and history are to a group what habits, ways of thinking and memories are to a person: they are part of the group's identity, participating in turn into defining individual's identity, through the relation they have with it. I think that when appropriation and/or stereotyping of another culture goes particularly wrong is when in creates a sense of dispossession in people from that culture, a negation of the fact it is part of their identity. For example when someone from another culture takes a caricatural trait, or misrepresents something from your culture, and then presents it as if it was what you are and what you should conform to. The second aspect is crucial in situations of cultural imperialism, or simply when there are tensions between a dominant culture and another, since because of it's influence the dominant culture is prescriptive, including in the other culture. That sort of dispossession is what goes wrong when there is a disrespecful or mindless appropriation of elements from a culture into another.

For example, when nation-states in western Europe began to develop, and modern popular culture influenced by the center began taking the place of old regional cultures and traditions (also the beginnings of tourism), it was also the time when a lot of regional elements were fixed as folkloric (with a derogatory nuance of archaic), difformed to please the new cultural prescriptor's tastes, or banned. E.g., the cultural uniformisation of France generated their lot of rancors in peripheral regions, and led to the de facto death of regional languages and dialects that had lived on until the XIXth century. In our colonies it was even worse: not only were children in school there were fed the same national tale than in the mainland, but the colonised people's culture was mostly seen under an orientalist angle and the very existence of the history of some of these people would be negated, an aspect continuing to have an influence on the attitudes of today. Even though nowadays we also feel, with more or less urgency, the pressure of another dominant culture, from the US, and the impression that some of its aspects are taking over without us really having a say in it, so we need to protect ourselves from that. I won't say it's ironic because the two historical situations are not comparable, but the feeling is there, if not always well articulated.

In short, borrowing aspects of other cultures, and integrating their influence in our own and in our creations, even when they are simplified and erroneous, is one thing. When it is done while dismissing the people's relationship with their own culture and history is another entirely.

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Here's a piece -- a review -- that has some interesting things to say on the topic (and, I think, quotes Said with nuance and understanding). Note -- I have not yet read the book being reviewed. (And I am not Irish, I am a US American of black Caribbean descent.)

Blood and Honey

Edit: (This reminds me of "Liar" by J. Larbalestier -- reading this, I now see what an extremely good job Larbalestier, who is a white Australian married to a white American man, did with writing teens of color in "inner" New York City. In the entire book I only caught one arguable misstep -- she has a boy use the phrase "You're a piece of work." That's it; that's all I found that was really jarring. She did her research.)

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There is also the issue of who is doing the stereotyping and arguing. Rushdie making an argument for secularism is very different from an American white guy arguing the same thing, even if the opinions are functionally identical. Or, even worse , a British white guy.

I find this notion intellectually repugnant. Thought, for good or ill, should be unrestrained by race or nation. Noam Chomsky is just another white dude, but his understanding of US foreign policy in regards to the ME is fairly involved. There is a common thread, and i have certainly seen it a great deal more on a blog that shall not be mentioned, that basically white people shouldn't say jack shit because we're all descendents of colonizers. To fuck with that. If people have something to say, articulate and cogent or not, it should be judged on the merits of what is being said and not on who is saying it.

Yes, indeed.

But would you accept that the bar that separates "homage" from "stereotype" is going to be set at a different place depending on whether you have intimate knowledge of the group being used?

By way of example, we have a recent case involving The Help wherein some black Southerners raised the complaint against the book and the movie, precisely along the line of a dominant culture appropriating a social phenomenon and stripping it of the genuine voice of the people most directly affected (you do not have to agree with this criticism to see the point, I think).

I can see their point, in regards to the Help. Here's the problem. I don't give a fuck. Literature is not limited to white people, or anyone. If someone wants to write a better book on the same subject, from the "genuine voice" - whatever that is worth, which, intrinsically, is nothing - then they should do it. Stop complaining because someone else did it. If they have represented it wrong, write something that is not. Now, i recognize that the money is not often there for black authors or themes about black people (see George Lucas and Red Tails as a quick for instance), but what can i say to that? That white people should stop writing stories set in times that might involve people of other ethnicities or genders?

This entire notion is antithetical to further understanding problems as they relate to historical events, and perhaps in how we releate to each other.

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I find this notion intellectually repugnant. Thought, for good or ill, should be unrestrained by race or nation. Noam Chomsky is just another white dude, but his understanding of US foreign policy in regards to the ME is fairly involved. There is a common thread, and i have certainly seen it a great deal more on a blog that shall not be mentioned, that basically white people shouldn't say jack shit because we're all descendents of colonizers. To fuck with that. If people have something to say, articulate and cogent or not, it should be judged on the merits of what is being said and not on who is saying it.

Only whites can be racist, because of privilege and Tolkien and elves or something, remember?

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I don't think anyone here is saying The Help shouldn't have been made - it's probably better that stuff like this gets made, gets criticized for what it does wrong + praised for what it does right.

But the problem isn't who made it, but rather the final product. For example, if I made a movie about India just using my own personal awareness of the country it would probably end up with unintended issues and stereotypes.

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I don't think anyone here is saying The Help shouldn't have been made - it's probably better that stuff like this gets made, gets criticized for what it does wrong + praised for what it does right.

But the problem isn't who made it, but rather the final product. For example, if I made a movie about India just using my own personal awareness of the country it would probably end up with unintended issues and stereotypes.

But thats OK, because you're not white and only whites are racist.

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I don't think anyone here is saying The Help shouldn't have been made - it's probably better that stuff like this gets made, gets criticized for what it does wrong + praised for what it does right.

But the problem isn't who made it, but rather the final product. For example, if I made a movie about India just using my own personal awareness of the country it would probably end up with unintended issues and stereotypes.

I know what you are saying. I just don't agree. If an author misrepresents, or misunderstands, a given culture, the choice always remains to simply not read it. Telling them they should not, or cannot, write their work because you disagree with the outcome just makes no sense to me. Again, too many diverse opionions exist.

It reminds me of a time i got into a heated discussion with a university friend of mine who is East Indian. She was from a fairly affluent family and tried to say that a great many of the problems that i had been learning about in India, during a course i was taking, were factually wrong. I mean, it was basically information taken directly from the news. Her experience was different than what i had read. She spoke the language, had returned home any number of times, and still she tended to look at her people with rose coloured glasses. She changed her opinion a little because she looked for the problems i had talked about when i got home. It did not make me right, i've never been to India and my poor white boys stomach would get destroyed by the food. But there was a perspective that i had that was relevant and true despite that.

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