Links
- mariness on Readercon and disability
- Readercon 2010 programming suggestions
- Justine Larbelestier on the whitewashing of the cover of her book Liar, as well as whitewashing in YA covers in general. Noted also: Mary Ann Mohanraj in comments on SE Asian Diaspora covers, and Neesha in The Brown Bookshelf comments:
What I don’t understand is this: this cover could have been an image of *anything*. Heck, it could’ve been a truncated body the likes of which many, many South Asian novels are presented with. The reason I’ve seen given, over and over, for not showing a face on a South Asian novel cover is because people “can’t relate” to it if it is a brown face. So, we have many, many sari-clad bellies and henna-ed feet and hands, mangoes, spices, and yes, coconuts gracing South Asian books. But rarely any faces.
I find this a really chilling pocket encapsulation of neocolonialism in general, actually. (Also see Simon Winchester's bizarrely nostalgic review of Richard Bernstein's The East, the West, and Sex ["This idea - of the East as the center of a “harem culture” so enticingly different from what is parodied as our own Judeo-Calvinist dreariness - has captivated Westerners since the first imperialists planted their flags in the heat and dust of far away. In recent years, however, it is a notion that has spiraled frighteningly out of control. Nowadays there is precious little that passes for romance about the picture: the charming 19th-century image of Kipling’s temple girl at the old pagoda in Moulmein, the “neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land,” has been replaced by today’s obese American pederast trolling for catamites in the bars of Zamboanga, or of middle-aged sex tourists buying infants in Phnom Penh or on the beaches outside Colombo."] or better yet just skip to Bitch Magazine's brief list of women of color who have been writing about these issues for at least twenty years.)
cups brewed at DW