Fantasy & imperialism

[mirrorshard]

Somewhat incoherent - reaction-dumping. Context:

• http://deepad.livejournal.com/29656.html
  
• http://seeking-avalon.blogspot.com/2009/01/open-letter-to-elizabeth-bear.html
  
• http://truepenny.livejournal.com/625351.html?style=mine
  

Writers (and fans, by extension) are caught on the horns of a dilemma (or possibly a gazebo): on the one hand, we don't get to write honestly about other peoples' cultural experience, because it isn't ours to write about. On the other hand, other peoples' cultural experience is really fucking cool and interesting. On the gripping hand, most of these Interesting Cultures are actually really poor and deprived and don't have luxuries like time to write, a thriving publishing industry, or even a corpus of work in their own language and cultural idiom to grow up with. Which means that if it isn't written about by privileged white people (or coconuts, or bananas) then it isn't written about at all.

Poor us, what a problem we have.

Except...

We don't. It's not our problem. Seriously. The cultural experience of imperialism is not about the imperialists. I don't give a flying fuck what keeping someone in chains, whether steel or economic or both, does to your soul. Angsting about that makes you sound like Cordelia. [Edit: That's as in Buffy, not as in Lear or Vorkosigan.]

It's really tempting to assume that a) for every problem, there's a solution somewhere, if we only work hard at it with good intentions; and that b) that solution is more likely to be arrived at by smart educated people in developed countries.

But I don't see anything to support those assertions in these cases. Problems come in a lot of different domains, which often don't share anything with each other. And I appreciate that Not Doing Anything is a) hard, b) morally problematic when you think you might have an answer, and c) a whole barrel of No Fun.

(No, I don't have a consistent, coherent answer, or a manifesto to set out, or a program of things to be done. I'm neither that naive or that arrogant. Besides, I'm a privileged white Westerner myself, and the nearest thing to an oppressed minority in my bloodline is Welsh.)

Comments

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

What is "Not Doing Anything"?
- Not writing fiction?
- Only writing about your own culture?
- Writing about whatever you want to write about but ignoring the debate?
- Reading the debate without contributing to it actively, and then trying to write in the way you think the majority of BME people participating it would like you to write?
- Participating in the debate but only to ask questions so you can do the previous thing more effectively?
- Reading the debate without contributing to it actively, and not trying or not succeeding to find a consensus among BME participants and then writing whatever you think it's good/OK/right to write about, having considered the issues?
- Something else?

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I dislike your expression, "We/you/they don't get to do such-and-such." It sounds as little as if you're forbidding it, on authority which you trivially lack. Authors can write about whatever they like. Whether they write honestly (whatever that means in the context of fiction) is largely a matter for them. Whether they write perceptively or interestingly is a matter for us: if their books are rubbish, we won't read.

Fiction (and especially fantasy) necessarily involves the author in describing what they haven't themselves experienced. (Which is one reason why I'd be very bad at it: I have to constantly remind myself that other people's perspectives don't coincide with mine.)

"Most of these Interesting Cultures are actually really poor and deprived and don't have luxuries like time to write, a thriving publishing industry, or even a corpus of work in their own language and cultural idiom to grow up with."

I realise that you are not intending to be entirely serious here, but I do feel it reflects an uncomfortable perception that people "over there" are "poor and deprived". There are no countries at all where everyone is poor and deprived. In the case of India, which is where we started, they have more billionaires than the UK, and a large class of people who are as prosperous as you or I. I know plenty of people who have been to Mumbai and report that it's just like the City of London (only hotter). Of course, we know (and they know) that there's another India, but it's a mistake to think that one is more real than the other.

This relates to my discomfort with the terms "developed" and "developing". Surely we're all developing? And we've all developed in the past? I've seen people recently referring to China as developing, and really, it's the third richest country in the world.

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

I thought of this reading this column (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/24/oscars-india-slumdog-millionaire-ian-jack) by Ian Jack. Although I don't agree with Mr Jack on many issues, I think he makes some good points here. Firstly, I think he is right to observe that poverty everywhere has nearly always been written about by people who were not themselves poor. If Indian poverty is usually (as Jack suggests) written about by rich, anglophone Indians, then the problem is not so much one of imperialism as one of class.

Secondly I think the following is spot-on (and props to Jack for his self-awareness):

Still, even as I write that sentence I see in it an old-fashioned attitude, dating from the time when India was filled with conversations about what could be done, when the poor were fretted over and documentarians such as Malle put anger into their work. Much good did it do.

I can put it no more simply (and here I think I am agreeing with you) than to say that Indians are perfectly capable of solving Indian problems, and are best placed to do so.