Welcome to International Blog Against Racism Week!
Note: I don't do icons. So, instead of adopting one of the icons floating about for this week, I have elected to have no icon at all. Thus may you project your fears and hopes onto a blank screen, and find it shows you whatever is already in your own head.
I'm not the cleverest person in the world when it comes to race and racism, since it's easy for me to ignore (being quite blend-in-able to the dominant paradigm). (That means I'm white.) Ignoring race is, theoretically, a utopia of race- and culture-blindness and happy day. Ignoring race is, in practice, a way of letting bad stuff go down without saying anything about it.
Because I don't have any Deep Thoughts yet -- just you wait, my pretties; I'll go haul out my copy of Ngugi and blast you all with Kenyan socialist righteousness -- I would like to start the week with a recommendation: a short story collection called Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers. Edited by Shyam Selvandurai, and featuring several Greatest Hits names (as well as several people I've never heard of) from all over the world, this collection serves the purpose all collections serve: to get attention to high-quality stories and argue for their inclusion in a syllabus, a treasure chest, a canon.
Why a collection of South Asian writers? Why not just pick good short stories for an overall omnibus of world short stories, or short stories in English? Here is why: because every other collection on the planet will give you one Jhumpa Lahiri story or one Salman Rushdie story (the same one, by the way), and you will never ever hear of the rest of the authors in this book. Put together like this, with a Trinidadian and a Briton and a Pakistani who identifies with multiethnic Bombay and fifteen others, you get to see some breadth of experience and some diversity within that big dumb category, "South Asian." Because, you might find perspectives you've never encountered before, and you might find situations strikingly like your own but in a completely different context and you might find that "South Asian" also means "I grew up in California."
One short story by one writer, shoehorned into a giant overarching compendium? Doesn't mean diversity. It kind of smacks of tokenism. Many short stories by many writers, in their own collection, with the stated purpose of showcasing their spicy brains and enriching the spiciness of your own brains? Yummy.
Why am I recommending this book, though I haven't read it yet? Because I picked it up yesterday (at the Booksmith, for interested locals), and it was cheap ($6) because it has been remaindered.
I'm not the cleverest person in the world when it comes to race and racism, since it's easy for me to ignore (being quite blend-in-able to the dominant paradigm). (That means I'm white.) Ignoring race is, theoretically, a utopia of race- and culture-blindness and happy day. Ignoring race is, in practice, a way of letting bad stuff go down without saying anything about it.
Because I don't have any Deep Thoughts yet -- just you wait, my pretties; I'll go haul out my copy of Ngugi and blast you all with Kenyan socialist righteousness -- I would like to start the week with a recommendation: a short story collection called Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers. Edited by Shyam Selvandurai, and featuring several Greatest Hits names (as well as several people I've never heard of) from all over the world, this collection serves the purpose all collections serve: to get attention to high-quality stories and argue for their inclusion in a syllabus, a treasure chest, a canon.
Why a collection of South Asian writers? Why not just pick good short stories for an overall omnibus of world short stories, or short stories in English? Here is why: because every other collection on the planet will give you one Jhumpa Lahiri story or one Salman Rushdie story (the same one, by the way), and you will never ever hear of the rest of the authors in this book. Put together like this, with a Trinidadian and a Briton and a Pakistani who identifies with multiethnic Bombay and fifteen others, you get to see some breadth of experience and some diversity within that big dumb category, "South Asian." Because, you might find perspectives you've never encountered before, and you might find situations strikingly like your own but in a completely different context and you might find that "South Asian" also means "I grew up in California."
One short story by one writer, shoehorned into a giant overarching compendium? Doesn't mean diversity. It kind of smacks of tokenism. Many short stories by many writers, in their own collection, with the stated purpose of showcasing their spicy brains and enriching the spiciness of your own brains? Yummy.
Why am I recommending this book, though I haven't read it yet? Because I picked it up yesterday (at the Booksmith, for interested locals), and it was cheap ($6) because it has been remaindered.