Why are there bombs?/China Mieville!
Just watched a very harrowing documentary on the bombings, and the aftermath, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, White Light Black Rain. Much of the movie was comprised of survivors telling their stories, showing their wounds and scars, and one says near the end that he has shown the scars on his body so that 'we' can know this must never happen again. After hearing and seeing the survivors experiences, I would think duh, that would seem common sense! Of course we can't let war and mass killings go on...right?
Goodreads.com had a 10 question interview with one of my favorite authors today, weird fiction writer China Mieville. I found this exchange on the politics of fantasy writing particularly interesting (click on Mieville's response for all 10 questions and answers):
GR: In January 2009, the blogosphere erupted into a heated discussion about race, racism, and cultural appropriation in science fiction and fantasy (a flame war so vast it is now dubbed RaceFail '09). Inevitably, a writer must create characters with identities and experiences different from his or her own. If writing within a fantasy world, should the writer maintain politically correct standards established by our real world? How do you address race (in relation to human or nonhuman sets of characters) in your work?
"Yes, I heard about RaceFail '09 some time after the event, and rather regret not having been there while it was going on. The category of Political Correctness is so nebulous that it's rarely very helpful, particularly because it is often used disgracefully as a stick with which to beat anti-racists or progressives. In the broader sense, I absolutely do think that the implicit politics of our narratives, whether we are consciously "meaning" them or not, matter, and that therefore we should be as thoughtful about them as possible. That doesn't mean we'll always succeed in political perspicacity-which doesn't mean the same thing as tiptoeing -but we should try. So for example: If you have a world in which Orcs are evil, and you depict them as evil, I don't know how that maps onto the question of "political correctness." However, the point is not that you're misrepresenting Orcs (if you invented this world, that's how Orcs are), but that you have replicated the logic of racism, which is that large groups of people are "defined" by an abstract supposedly essential element called "race," whatever else you were doing or intended. And that's not an innocent thing to do. Maybe you have a race of female vampires who destroy men's strength. They really do operate like that in your world. But I think you're kidding yourself if you think that that idea just appeared ex nihilo in your head and has nothing to do with the incredibly strong, and incredibly patriarchal, anxiety about the destructive power of women's sexuality in our very real world. These things are not reducible to our "intent"-we all inherit all kinds of bits and pieces of cultural bumf, plenty of them racist and sexist and homophobic, because that's how our world works, so how could you avoid it?
So I'd suggest that one should be open-eyed about the facts that the categories with which we think and write and read, are not innocent, and that we should do our best not to use them to replicate the worst aspects of the cultural bumf that put them in our heads in the first place. Does that mean being politically correct? If that is deemed to mean being conscious of and careful about the political ramifications of our writing, then surely that's the only decent way to proceed."
Goodreads.com had a 10 question interview with one of my favorite authors today, weird fiction writer China Mieville. I found this exchange on the politics of fantasy writing particularly interesting (click on Mieville's response for all 10 questions and answers):
GR: In January 2009, the blogosphere erupted into a heated discussion about race, racism, and cultural appropriation in science fiction and fantasy (a flame war so vast it is now dubbed RaceFail '09). Inevitably, a writer must create characters with identities and experiences different from his or her own. If writing within a fantasy world, should the writer maintain politically correct standards established by our real world? How do you address race (in relation to human or nonhuman sets of characters) in your work?
"Yes, I heard about RaceFail '09 some time after the event, and rather regret not having been there while it was going on. The category of Political Correctness is so nebulous that it's rarely very helpful, particularly because it is often used disgracefully as a stick with which to beat anti-racists or progressives. In the broader sense, I absolutely do think that the implicit politics of our narratives, whether we are consciously "meaning" them or not, matter, and that therefore we should be as thoughtful about them as possible. That doesn't mean we'll always succeed in political perspicacity-which doesn't mean the same thing as tiptoeing -but we should try. So for example: If you have a world in which Orcs are evil, and you depict them as evil, I don't know how that maps onto the question of "political correctness." However, the point is not that you're misrepresenting Orcs (if you invented this world, that's how Orcs are), but that you have replicated the logic of racism, which is that large groups of people are "defined" by an abstract supposedly essential element called "race," whatever else you were doing or intended. And that's not an innocent thing to do. Maybe you have a race of female vampires who destroy men's strength. They really do operate like that in your world. But I think you're kidding yourself if you think that that idea just appeared ex nihilo in your head and has nothing to do with the incredibly strong, and incredibly patriarchal, anxiety about the destructive power of women's sexuality in our very real world. These things are not reducible to our "intent"-we all inherit all kinds of bits and pieces of cultural bumf, plenty of them racist and sexist and homophobic, because that's how our world works, so how could you avoid it?
So I'd suggest that one should be open-eyed about the facts that the categories with which we think and write and read, are not innocent, and that we should do our best not to use them to replicate the worst aspects of the cultural bumf that put them in our heads in the first place. Does that mean being politically correct? If that is deemed to mean being conscious of and careful about the political ramifications of our writing, then surely that's the only decent way to proceed."