Comments | alanajoli: YA Whitewashing redux? (an open letter to Harper Teen)

alanajoli

YA Whitewashing redux? (an open letter to Harper Teen)

Aug 18, 2010 20:43

Dear Harper Teen,

Do you remember the controversy that surrounded Justine Larbalestier's Liar? It had a white girl on the cover of a book that was about a mixed-race teen. Bloomsbury withdrew that cover with apologies and changed it to one that more accurately represented the novel's heroine after fans spoke out against the whitewashing of the ( Read more... )

reading, cindy pon

Comments 9

oneminutemonkey August 19 2010, 00:36:52 UTC

Oh, ugh. That's a damned shame.
I personally couldn't get into Silver Phoenix at the time I tried to read it, but I thought it had a stunning cover. The repackaged one is so... eh. Generic, and I hate the way the girl has no face.

The repackaging suggests -more- than whitewashing, it seems to suggest to me that what the audience supposedly wants to see is a faceless, generic, non-entity of a cover model. Body parts without an identity. So not only is the cover stripping the girl of her ethnicity, but it's taking away her unique identity as well.

And THIS is what works in marketing?

Pfaugh. Give me the first cover anyday.

alanajoli August 19 2010, 17:22:47 UTC

Wow, the objectification angle totally deserves an academic paper. Maybe it's about being able to insert yourself as the heroine, which a partial body view allows, while a full image is more distinct?

It is a weird trend, though, and I'm getting tired of it.

(The comment has been removed)

alanajoli August 19 2010, 17:23:49 UTC

Thanks, Tiffany. Even if I'm wrong (see Diana's comment below), I do think it's good for publishers to know that readers are at least *thinking* about these issues.

biguglymandoll August 19 2010, 02:04:07 UTC

Wow, I remember the Bloomsbury SNAFU hitting the fan - you would think in this real-time social media age, most publishers would have gotten that message by now - The Public, the ones who're paying attention, aren't going to sit still for that kind of crap. And since "the ones who're paying attention" very often coincides with "the ones who're paying for books"... Yeah, I'm surprised. Someone at Harper needs to start paying more attention.

Good post!

alanajoli August 19 2010, 17:24:33 UTC

It's nice that we live in an age where responses on the internet and via social media have the potential to make a difference!

dpeterfreund August 19 2010, 13:12:43 UTC

I gotta say, I don't see it this time. The lower half of the face on the girl on the FURY OF THE PHOENIX cover looks exactly like the lower half of the face of my sister in law, who is Chinese. In fact, when I first saw it, I sent a pic to my brother to ask if his wife was posing for book covers. The chin, the nose, the line of the mouth and cheekbones -- it's totally her.

alanajoli August 19 2010, 17:21:03 UTC

Wow, Diana, thanks for the dissenting voice. It's easy to get caught up in the internet hubbub with things like this -- I still feel the covers are misrepresenting the books, but maybe the assumption of mine (and many others) that the cover model is white says something about us, rather than about Harper Teen.

dpeterfreund August 19 2010, 18:10:43 UTC

I know whitewashing is a real problem, but I wonder some times in our attempts to address it we may not be jumping on the wrong targets. I feel weird saying anything too much because I am a Harper author (though I think that the girls on my covers could be Astrid -- on perhaps her best hair and make up day EVER ( ... )

lyster August 19 2010, 19:29:11 UTC

dpeterfreund has a point about the second cover. While the suggestion of the eye visible beneath the e in 'the' on the cover looks non-Chinese to me, the jawline and mouth are very Maggie Q (Maggie Q herself is half-Vietnamese by extraction, not Chinese, but the face shape is common enough on the mainland), though admittedly with collagen injections. The slight cleft in the chin and the nose on the first of the new covers, though, scream Christina Hendricks, who's about as non-Chinese as you can get.

The costuming gives me the most pause. I haven't read the books, but the excerpts on the internet are Jin Yong-esque medieval Chinese Fantasy. If so, what the heck is the main character doing wearing a low-cut blouse (in the first cover) or a rhinestone-studded dress in the second? I've seen Tang dynasty lingerie with necklines more conservative than the first cover, and as for the second, it's not even trying. Here are a few resources for Ming Dynasty clothing, for comparison ( ... )