Ferguson. Power.

Ferguson, Missouri. Nov. 24, 2014. (Photo by Adrees Latif/Reuters)

from "Power" by Audre Lorde:

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds

and a dead child dragging his shattered black

face off the edge of my sleep

blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders

is the only liquid for miles

and my stomach

churns at the imagined taste while

my mouth splits into dry lips

without loyalty or reason

thirsting for the wetness of his blood

as it sinks into the whiteness

of the desert where I am lost

without imagery or magic

trying to make power out of hatred and destruction

trying to heal my dying son with kisses

only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.

(photo by Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

Ferguson, Missouri, USA

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Snowpiercer: Total Cinema

 

Press Play has now posted my new video essay with a brief accompanying text essay about the great new science fiction action movie political parable satire call to revolution Snowpiercer, directed by Bong Joon-Ho, a filmmaker I am especially enamored of. (Memories of Murder is easily among my favorite movies of the last 15 years, and back in 2010 I defended Bong's previous film, Mother, from the criticisms of Richard Brody at the New Yorker.)

As a little bit of extra, below the fold here I'll put some thoughts on elements of the remarkable ending of the film...

"America never was America to me"

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

I thought of my favorite Langston Hughes poem, "Let American Be America Again" while reading Ta-Nehisi Coates's extraordinary new essay at The Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations" (for which we should just give Coates the Pulitzer right now):

If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy?

One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

Read the whole essay. If you're a U.S. citizen, or even not, it's unlikely you'll read anything more important today.

Update 5/23: Coates on how he got to his current position on reparations. Including:

There is massive, overwhelming evidence for the proposition that white supremacy is the only thing wrong with black people. There is significantly less evidence for the proposition that culture is a major part of what's wrong with black people. But we don't really talk about white supremacy. We talk about inequality, vestigial racism, and culture. Our conversation omits a major portion of the evidence.

On 12 Years a Slave

Press Play has now posted an essay I wrote about 12 Years a Slave. It begins:

12 Years a Slave has arrived in theatres already barnacled with expectations. In its festival appearances, it met with critical acclaim, and Oscar odds-makers had already slated it for various awards. Viewers buy their tickets, sit down in their seats, wait for the lights to dim, and expect great things. But viewers also have other, deeper expectations. The dominant cinematic story of slavery has been the story of white redemption and white heroism against an unfortunate institution perpetuated only by the most sadistic of bad white men. Even today, it is exceedingly rare to find a story about slavery that doesn't emphasize how good-hearted white people can be and how inherently just, good, and equal America is. In American movies, black suffering redeems white characters and affirms white nobility. 
 

12 Years a Slave tells a different story, but because the familiar narrative has conditioned us to view “slave movies” as a genre, we — especially white viewers — may find our expectations unsettled. This unsettling is one of the great virtues of the film.

The rest is available here.

Race and Illicit Desire in The Great Gatsby

I don't much care for the novel The Great Gatsby (the lyricism of the writing gets tiresome, the characters are annoying, and somebody ought to take out that damned green light with a sniper rifle), but one passage has long fascinated me:

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?”

“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—”

“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

(Chapter 1)

At its most obvious level, this presents Tom as a racist and elitist, somebody obsessed with power and inheritance. He's a self-satisfied bully. It also hints at the idea that the inherited wealth and power of the "old money" oligarchs may be based on false pretenses — at least for readers now, the reference to eugenics (Tom's words evoke the work and names of Lothrop Stoddard and Henry Goddard) signals that Tom has found a particularly nasty way to justify his wealth and power to himself. A paragraph later, he says, "This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and— [...] And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization — oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?"

Nordics. Fitzgerald didn't know it when he wrote Gatsby, but Tom was talking the language of proto-Nazism, and the "science" he referred to was the science that would in the next decade pave the way for the Final Solution.

Mo-metheus

I had no intention of ever writing anything ever again whatsoever about Prometheus, or even mentioning the movie ever again in my life, but I just read two great pieces about it, so can't resist sending attention to them. (One links to the other, in fact.)

First, Elaine Costello's amazingly rich, provocative, nuanced, thoughtful, beautiful stream-of-theoryness wonderings about the film — about its economies and genders and races and religions, its unsaid saids and said unsaids. ("...which reminded me that the spaceship is a military-industrial [and so imperial-colonial] apparatus...") Here's just a tiny taste of an extraordinary tapestry:

What I wonder about is this: if David really can be read as an anti-colonial and anti-corporate saboteur, why does this progressive message, this transgressive messenger, still have to wear the most Aryan body imaginable? I’m aware that casting an actor of color as the android character would have made the slippages that David animates, between subordinate-saboteur, product-producer, and particularly colonial-colonized, perhaps more difficult to represent. (Though not necessarily; you can have Idris Elba imitating Peter O’Toole, why not? I would have watched the hell out of that, actually, can you imagine how fucked up and interesting that would be, the commentaries you could make on the reversal of racial drag, etc.) What I’m trying to say is that it is still impossible for mainstream Hollywood film to imagine a person of color in a role as potentially complex and subversive as David’s. A character of color who could be plotting to destroy the imperial-corporate complex he was created within, and is forced to work for? That would be too radical. Which is to say, that would be too real.

Idris Elba once said himself, “Imagine a film such as Inception with an entire cast of black people – do you think it would be successful? Would people watch it? But no one questions the fact that everyone’s white. That’s what we have to change.”

Subashini at The Blog of Disquiet picks up on some of Costello's ideas, and others, offering particularly interesting interpretations of the movie's use of body horror, its apparent nihilism, and Idris Elba as the One Black Dude:

I do think that having acrimonious feelings towards the film is the actual point—the film seems to be a stand-in for a certain segment of humanity and its imperialist, ruinous ambitions, though like most films coming out of Hollywood this seems to coexist with its appreciation of capital, technology, and involuntary/reproductive labour. That in itself doesn’t make it inherently unlikeable, not at all. But as Susan Sontag wrote in “The Imagination of Disaster,” “Science fiction films invite a dispassionate, aesthetic view of destruction and violence—a technological view,” and perhaps it’s the nihilist technological determinism of Prometheus that is inherently unsettling. Perhaps it’s this utter lack of meaning in the movie that is its meaning, and consequently the source of my loathing. Maybe a part of me just wants machines and people to get along? I’m not sure.

Trayvon Martin (1995-2012)

A black boy was shot dead in Florida.

His killer is known, but the police refused to arrest him.

The police said they had no probable cause to arrest the killer, who claimed self-defense.

The killer was a Neighborhood Watch volunteer. He saw a black boy walking in the rain. He called 911. The dispatcher told him not to follow the boy. But he did. He approached him. They wrestled. Witnesses called 911.

Trayvon Martin was armed with a bag of Skittles and a bottle of iced tea.

A black boy was shot dead in Florida. His killer walks free.

More information:

• The Trayvon Martin Killing, Explained (by Adam Weinstein, Mother Jones)
• What Everyone Should Know About Trayvon Martin (by Jud Legum, ThinkProgress)
• Coverage at The Atlantic. See in particular the posts by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Re-Nigging on the Promises: #Justice4Trayvon (The Crunk Feminist Collective)
• UPDATE: U.S. Department of Justice, FBI and FDLE to probe Trayvon Martin killing

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The White Savior Industrial Complex

Teju Cole:

The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.

See also Aaron Bady's excellent collection of reading material: "On the genre of 'Raising Awareness about Someone Else’s Suffering'".

Alternate History

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Ron Paul's insistence that "compensated emancipation" would have prevented the Civil War:

We are united in our hatred of war and our abhorrence of violence. But a hatred of war is not enough, and when employed to conjure away history, it is a cynical vanity which posits that one is, somehow, in possession of a prophetic insight and supernatural morality which evaded our forefathers. It is all fine to speak of how history "should have been." It takes something more to ask why it wasn't, and then to confront what it actually was. 

For more, see his first post in this series.

Suffrage and Race

Over at Daily Kos, Denise Oliver Velez has posted a helpful overview of the complex history of civil rights struggles in the U.S., particularly the 19th century.

Just as the abolition movement spawned a struggle for women's suffrage, and the civil rights movement was the impetus for both second wave feminism and LGBT rights, the historical role of black women in the context of the suffrage movement is a key to understanding the founding of black women's clubs, sororities and political organizations. That history also explains the roots of the racial contradictions of second and third wave feminism and the development of black feminism.

She goes on to discuss the rift between Frederick Douglass and some of the most prominent white women's suffrage activists after black men were enfranchised, as well as some of the later conflicts and complexities -- a history that had some eerie resonances during the 2008 election (for a good account of which, see Rebecca Traister's Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women [a book far better than its hyperbolic subtitle might suggest]).

I was particularly interested to discover, via Velez, a review by Rebecca Edwards of the PBS documentary Not for Ourselves Alone in The Journal for Multimedia History. In the Feminism in America course that I sometimes teach, I use a few of the resources and documents from the program's website, but not the documentary itself because of exactly the limitations Edwards points to -- the oversimplification of complex and contradictory historical figures. The history is more interesting than Not for Ourselves Alone shows.

Over the past couple of decades, a lot of good work has been done to add complexity and nuance to our view of the struggle for suffrage. I'm particularly fond not only of the book Velez draws a lot of information from, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote by Roselyn Terborg-Penn, but also such books as White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States by Louise Michele Newman (pretty academic and bit tough going at times, but worth the effort -- I don't know of another book that shows the connections between racism and imperialism in the suffrage struggle so well), Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves by Deborah Gray White (among other virtues, this provides plenty of challenge to the naive view that black women somehow all have the same opinions about everything), Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull by Barbara Goldsmith (spiritualism, free love, utopia, drugs, internecine struggles -- this book has it all!), Ida: A Sword Among Lions by Paula J. Giddings (a comprehensive biography of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, which is to say: a really fascinating book), and Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland by Linda J. Lumsden (Lumsden is particularly good on contradictions of class in Milholland's life, and it's a fascinating life). That list is just some favorites I could think of off the top of my head, and it's not at all comprehensive, but just glancing at any of those will show that suffrage in the U.S. is an amazingly rich history -- and Denise Oliver Velez's post does a fine job of showing some of that richness.

A Stranger Comes to Town...

Via Tempest Bradford I read the call for stories for a proposed anthology called Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations. The title and description are utterly screaming out for submissions filled with casual, ignorant, and textually-inherited exoticization and racism.

The "lost race / lost civilization / lost world" story derives from an imperialist history and view of the world, but at its most benign it's a version of the old "a stranger comes to town" story, with the stranger as the explorer and the town as the "lost" place. ("Lost" only to the stranger; to the inhabitants, it's been there all along and this "lost" talk is very odd, though maybe helpful if you're seeking to build a tourist industry.)

On Twitter, Cheryl Morgan wonderfully suggested, "What you need is an anthology full of brown people discovering the lost society of the USA. Gods of Mt. Rushmore?" David Moles said he'd already written that story with one of his Irrational Histories: "9th baktun, 9th katun, 2nd tun (AD 615)". I piped in suggesting Zakes Mda's Cion, a marvelous book about a South African who comes to the U.S. in 2004 and discovers it to be full of strange rituals and bizarre, fascinating people.

And then I thought of a few more such stories, and came up with a potential and vastly incomplete reading list for potential contributors to Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations, should they desire to try to avoid unfortunate implications in their stories. So, in addition to David's story and to Cion, I would suggest...

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes
• Wild Seed by Octavia Butler
• In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waberi 
• Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo
• Gone Primitive by Maria Torgovnick
• Gunfighter Nation by Richard Slotkin
• 1491 by Charles C. Mann
• The African City: A History by Bill Freund
• Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction by John Rieder

Lists can get overwhelming, so I'll stop there, with five books of fiction and five of nonfiction. Any one of those books would be informative for somebody trying to write about strangers and towns, I think, and a few of them together might create some interesting resonances.

I'm pretty ignorant of Asian fiction and histories, so that's an obvious lack in the list.

Any suggestions to add to my list are welcome, and I'd especially love to learn about books that expand and complexify our understandings of civilizations we might otherwise consider "lost".

Best American Rich White People

What this man needs is a good short story...

Roxane Gay at HTML Giant:

I recently read Best American Short Stories 2010, edited this year by Richard Russo who is one of my favorite writers. Straight Man? Amazing. Empire Falls? Amazing. My expectations were high. I generally enjoy reading BASS because it gives me a sense of what the literary establishment considers “the best” from year to year. I may not enjoy all the stories in a given year’s anthology but I am always impressed by the overall competence in each chosen story. I don’t think I’ve ever read a story in BASS and thought, “How did that get in there?” At the same time, I often find the BASS offerings to be shamefully predictable. The stories are often sedate and well-mannered even when they are supposedly not. I don’t see a lot of risk taking and more than anything else, I don’t see a lot of diversity in the stories being told. This year, though, BASS really outdid itself. Almost every story in the anthology was about rich or nearly rich white people to the point where, by the end of reading the book, I was downright offended. I know people will disagree with my thoughts here and that’s fine, but I really think shit is fucked up in literary publishing. That’s coarse but I cannot think of a better way to convey my frustration. Anytime I talk about this issue, that’s the best way I can encapsulate my feelings. This issue has been on my mind for a couple weeks (and years) and two things triggered my… current pre-occupation with whose stories are or are not being told.

I've had similar thoughts about many volumes of BASS.  I don't think it's the guest editors' faults entirely -- putting the question of the stories' diversity aside for a moment, there seems to be a systemic force pushing the books toward the sort of stuff published by The New Yorker and Harper's and the best-known of the lit mags.  The guest editors change, but it's rare that a volume is published where the guest editor's taste seems especially different from her or his predecessors'.  The exceptions are volumes like those of Michael Chabon and Stephen King, but even there the exceptions are a few stories, not the whole -- and it's the whole that's really the issue.  Individually, the stories in the books are 99% of the time unimpeachably "good": aesthetically accomplished (but not "difficult") and emotionally affecting (but not in any uncomfortable or challenging way), fitting a very mainstream idea of what "literary quality" means.  And occasionally they're a whole lot more than that.

But an anthology isn't just a collection of good stories.  There are more good stories published in a year than can fit in one book (or, if you're particularly critical, no single year produces an entire book's worth of good stories).  An anthology's meaning and purpose, its implication and effect, derives from its selection.

I glanced at the table of contents for the Russo volume when it came out, and it seemed to me unadventurous, so I didn't read it.  Previously, I'd been very excited when Salman Rushdie was announced as a guest editor, but when I saw his volume last year -- a volume that could have been called Best American Short Stories from Harper's and The New Yorker, Plus a Couple Extras -- I was appalled.

I've long been fond of John Gardner's 1982 BASS for two reasons: 1.) he wasn't much interested in fiction from the "slicks", and 2.) he said he'd read a lot of science fiction, but nothing much struck his fancy that he saw -- he clearly would have loved to have included at least one SF story, if he'd found one that fit.  It's not that I hate the slick magazines -- I subscribe to them! -- but that they don't really need more exposure, at least not in the way that little magazines do.  And in some ways, including a bunch of their stories feels like cheating: they pay so well and are so prestigious that they're able to attract the world's best writers, leading to a certain general level of quality.  If you don't feel like exposing yourself to the whole range of American short fiction, sure, you can get plenty of entertainment, and occasionally even some enlightenment, from the slicks.  But you're getting a very narrow vision of what American short fiction is and can be.

In some ways, Richard Russo's apparent preference for stories about rich white folks gives a good focus to the anthology.  I mean, it's not a book I have any interest in reading (I don't even like The Great Gatsby, the rich white fantasy novel to rule them all!), but at least it's got some coherence, and the choice of fiction from the usual sources especially makes sense, since generally those are publications aimed at rich white folks (if their advertising is anything to go by, at least).

How about this, Powers That Be At Houghton Mifflin: Next year, get a guest editor who isn't a rich white guy, and encourage her or him to choose stories that aren't about rich white people and don't come from magazines primarily sold to rich white people.  Sure, some of the best American short stories of that year will be excluded, but every guest editor always bemoans the fact that there were too many good stories to choose from, anyway.  Encourage the guest editor to make a really individual selection, a selection that maybe nobody else would make.  That's why you have guest editors in the first place, right?  (No, probably not.  The reason why you have them is for marketing, so that you can put a famous person's name in big letters on the cover.  Nothing wrong with that -- if you don't sell books, the series will die.  [Oh, do I know that!]  But one of the main reasons you have guest editors is for the individuality of their selection, the personal vision, the independent taste.  Right?  Yes?  Maybe?)

Remember the short-lived Beacon Best series?  I loved those books, and they opened a whole world of literature to me.  They were edited by Ntozake Shange, Edwidge Danticat, and Junot Diaz.  The goal of the series was to show the diversity of of writing out there -- they didn't limit themselves by region or by form (the anthologies contained all types of "creative writing") -- and they certainly had a different feel from BASS and even The Pushcart Prize (which also includes a wide variety of types of writing, and only draws from small presses).

I don't know why the Beacon series only lasted three volumes, but I suspect it had something to do with sales.  Sigh.  As marketing strategies go, aiming for rich white folks isn't a bad one.  With continued growth in the income gap, ever-rising Wall Street bonuses, and the U.S. government's utter subservience to corporations and businessmen, in the future the only people who will be left with any discretionary income for books are likely to be exactly the people Russo's BASS is all about.

And hey, somebody has to provide books for all those nice people in gated communities...

The Naked Prey

Actor, director, and producer Cornel Wilde seems mostly to have been forgotten these days -- indeed, a variation on that statement can be found in most of the notices and reviews of the Criterion Collection DVD of Wilde's 1965 film The Naked Prey, but though that disc was released in 2008, the movie's profile still seems astoundingly, and unjustifiably, low.

Some of the reviews I've glanced at also state that the film is good but "not politically correct", which is at best a lazy thing to say about it. Part of what makes The Naked Prey interesting is that it struggles with conflicting meanings and implications within its representation of colonial and native encounters in 19th century southern Africa. It dutifully includes a checklist of Hollywood clichés about safaris and hunting and "man in the state of nature" (literally, in this case, as the protagonist is known only as Man) and a mythical "Africa" full of "savages". (The trailer condenses the film into nothing but these clichés, naturally.) Yet it is also very much a movie about the indifference of nature to the struggles of human beings and about both the perils and possibilities within encounters between people of vastly different cultures.

It's kind of like Tarzan goes with the Macombers on the Last Safari and ends up in The New World.

Basic Black

Last night I stumbled onto a great program on Boston's public tv station WGBH, "Basic Black", where host Kim McLarin talked for half an hour with Tavis Smiley and Cornel West about life in the Obama era (I was particularly taken with West's suggestion that Obama himself is "reluctant to step into the Age of Obama" and with the discussion of the meaning and implications of the terms "black" and "negro".)  The entire show is available as a streaming video.  (I've only recently discovered my tv gets WGBH, so I'm sure some regular viewers are thinking, "What, Cheney, have you been living under a rock?!"  Until a year ago, I hadn't ever owned a tv, so, well, yes...)

The website includes past shows as video or audio podcasts, and scrolling through the archives, I see lots of programs I'll be looking at soon, because the topics and guest lists are of the sort that are rare on U.S. television: thoughtful conversations with artists and intellectuals.  A roundtable on black theatre in Boston.  Poets Elizabeth Alexander and Major Jackson.  The great dancer Bill T. Jones.  Anna Deavere Smith.  Sweet Honey in the Rock.  Patricia Williams.  Wole Soyinka.

And lots more.

District 9

District 9 gave me qualms. And then my qualms got qualms. So now I'm all qualmed up.

Because more than being a well-made action movie, more than being a sometimes clever and often allusive sci-fi summer blockbuster, District 9 is also a South African movie about aliens, a movie with more than a hint of metaphorical intent. Andrew O'Hehir's piece about the film and its director, Neill Blomkamp, is even titled, "Is apartheid acceptable -- for giant bugs?"

My first set of qualms began when I tried to view the movie within the context of South Africa's apartheid history, but it didn't work. The premise isn't about a native ethnic majority that is segregated and oppressed by an ethnic minority of more recent arrival. The premise is about refugees -- and, this being a sci-fi movie, the non-native aliens are really non-native and really aliens.

Thus, the District 9 of the title is a slum full of refugees (obviously, there are some echoes of District 6, but again the apartheid connection is problematic). In the O'Hehir piece, there is this exchange:

[Q:] There's a very dark comic side to this story, in which blacks and whites come together to treat another group worse than blacks were ever treated under apartheid.

[Blomkamp:] I was pretty aware of that. I thought that was a pretty funny concept. Another part of recent South African history that isn't world news is that the collapse of Zimbabwe has introduced millions of illegal Zimbabwean immigrants into South African cities. So you have impoverished South African blacks, hoping for a better life in their own country, faced with an influx of millions of impoverished Zimbabweans who have come to South Africa to build a new life for their families. Now you have this powder-keg situation, with black against black, which is highly bizarre.

When we started filming the movie, we had this terrible situation where we woke up one morning to find out that Johannesburg was eating itself alive. Impoverished South Africans had started murdering impoverished Zimbabweans, necklacing them and burning them and chopping them up. That's a very serious piece of contemporary South African society that also finds its way into the film: some impoverished citizens wanting other impoverished citizens out.

Blomkamp's choices of words here are odd -- blacks and whites together oppressing aliens who look like giant insects is a "pretty funny concept" (hey, let's end racial strife -- give us an enemy we can all agree is repulsive! It'll be a laugh riot!) and violence between people who come from different places and are impoverished is "highly bizarre" (only if you think "black people" is a monolithic category -- violence between people who have been systematically forced to scrounge for a living amidst awful conditions is, alas, historically the opposite of bizarre, and the forces that encourage and benefit from it can generally be pretty well defined and analyzed). The important point, though, is the connection to the politics and sociology of refugee situations rather than, primarily, to apartheid.

It's possible to see District 9 as a purely science fictional story: What if aliens landed in Johannesburg and weren't able to leave? Blomkamp said that's, in fact, where he began--

I wanted to see science fiction in that city. I mean, I lived there, and you don't come across cities like that much, especially not in the First World. They don't exist.

So that was the primary reason for making "District 9." No allegories, no metaphors, nothing. Just science fiction in Joburg.

The problem is that there is no such thing as "just science fiction" when the story includes such resonant imagery as that of slums -- in a media environment where images of slums are, for many audiences, racialized and politicized, creating a story about aliens in slums will explode with meanings beyond the immediate narrative.

What we have in District 9 is a story about beings who are (according to the information we are given) monomorphic, monocultural, monolinguistic, physically repulsive to most humans, grotesque in their habits, barbaric in their behaviors, and mostly quite stupid.

In other words, every xenophobe's and racist's worst caricature of a refugee or immigrant.

It could be that this is part of the point. The humans who have jurisdiction over the aliens are shown to be mostly violent, scheming, greedy, ruthless, and contemptible. They are, themselves, mostly quite stupid and barbaric in their behaviors. They are not, though, grotesque in their habits, physically repulsive to most other humans, monolinguistic, monocultural, or monomorphic. (Or at least not so to us, a human audience.)

I had qualms about this, but as I thought about them, my qualms got qualms. At first, I was thinking about the excellent post by Mely from last year concerning metaphorical/allegorical uses of race -- uses which horrendously simplify the idea of race in a biologically deterministic way and which have the unfortunate effect of positing that people who are not members of whatever hegemony is in question are, actually, just like a different species. Mely wrote: "As in nonmetaphorical racial stereotyping, whiteness is treated as the human default and differences from whiteness are treated as aberrations, flaws, signs of violence, inhumanity, lack of control, and threateningness."

That, though, is not what's going on in District 9, exactly, though I was tempted for a few moments to believe it was. The key thing to consider is how the film manipulates our sympathies.

It's an action movie, remember. We need at least one good guy to sympathize with and care about so that we can ignore any concerns about enjoying the ghastly havoc any such film is rich with. How such a film creates and sustains sympathy for a character or group of characters and creates and sustains antipathy for other characters is vitally important.

In the first ten or twenty minutes of District 9, it's hard to figure out where our sympathies belong. The humans are doing things that remind of us Stuff We Know Is Wrong, but the aliens are really gross. We might even begin to wonder if, heck, maybe what the humans are doing isn't even totally unjustified...

Soon enough, we realize that the nebbish and not-very-self-aware Wikus van der Merwe (played by Sharlto Copley) is our hero. It's nearly impossible to sympathize with him at first -- he's pathetic.

[Pause to let folks who haven't seen the film know that I'm now going to reveal some of the major plot elements.]

But then comes the black fluid. (Yes, black.) It causes Wikus to turn into one of Them and forces him to fight against nearly every human in the film.

The more humans Wikus kills, the more we root for him.

Our sympathies are also manipulated through the character of Christopher Johnson and his son (and I love that the humans are so uninterested in trying to pronounce the aliens' names that they just use ordinary English ones for them -- it's worth noting that for most of an American or British audience, at least, a name like Wikus van der Merwe is more alien-sounding than Christopher Johnson). At first, they are repulsive and threatening and very alien -- Wikus makes the mistake of thinking the son is cute and ends up getting a tin can thrown at his head -- but soon enough they seem as cuddly as E.T.

The film then becomes a buddy picture -- the human/alien hybrid Wikus teamed with the aliens Christopher and his son against every human they encounter.

We move from a reluctant sympathy with unsympathetic humans who, at least, are human ... to a sympathy with a man who is becoming ever more alien and his alien companions. We root for them to succeed in returning to the ship and in getting it operational so they can get the hell away from this crazy, threatening planet -- our planet. When a gang of aliens show up toward the end of the film to fight against the corporate soldiers, we root for the aliens. We laugh and cheer when the soldiers are bloodily obliterated with the aliens' awesome weapons.

Creatures that had seemed stupid and barbaric now seem more complex than we gave them credit for being. We don't know everything about them -- we know, in fact, hardly anything at all -- but we do know that we underestimated them, and that what we took for understanding was anything but.

The final image is, in such a reading, haunting and powerful -- it represents the full journey of our sympathies and the ache within sentient beings for connection.

What was previously alien is now a source of comfort and safety; what was comforting and safe is now threatening and alien.

Being a man of qualms, I still have a few. The Nigerian gang in the slum is the biggest source of qualms for me -- Blomkamp justifies them by saying that Nigerian gangs in Johannesburg are at the center of much of the drug and prostitution traffic, but that ignores the issue here, which is not that there are no gangs of violent black people doing awful stuff in reality, but that images of such people in pieces of mass entertainment deserve a lot of careful thought. When pictures of Barack Obama as a "witch doctor" are circulated by anti-health care reform activists, it may not be the greatest thing in the world for a popular movie to have scenes focused on stereotypically savage black guys who are specifically said to be believers in muti and who think that eating parts of the aliens will give them power. Maybe it would be good to, you know, think about such representations a little bit more before employing them....

On the whole, though, my qualms have settled into admiration of District 9, at least for today.

Mindblowing!

For certain reasons, I've been musing on some of the science fiction stories that, over the years, at one time or another, I might have classified as "mindblowing". Just a little personal list, one made very quickly...

"The Lost Kafoozalum" by Pauline Ashwell
"Blood Child" by Octavia E. Butler
"Fool to Believe" by Pat Cadigan
"Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang
"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" by Samuel R. Delany
"The Start of the End of It All" by Carol Emshwiller
"The Faithful Companion at Forty" by Karen Joy Fowler
"Midnight News" by Lisa Goldstein
"The Violet's Embryos" by Angélica Gorodischer
"Out of All Them Bright Stars" by Nancy Kress
"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin
"Tiny Tango" by Judith Moffett
"No Woman Born" by C.L. Moore
"Rachel in Love" by Pat Murphy
"A Scarab in the City of Time" by Marta Randall
"The Food Farm" by Kit Reed
"Souls" by Joanna Russ
"The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet" by Vandana Singh
"Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled with of Light!" by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)
"The Mile-Long Spaceship" by Kate Wilhelm
"The Last of the Winnebagos" by Connie Willis

(Some of those writers, I could have put many stories on the list, but I decided to limit it to one story for each writer, choosing the one that most immediately stood out in my memory.)

Update 8/7/09: And here's a collection of online stories you can actually read now:

The Mammoth e-Book of Mindblowing Mars SF (2009) presents 20 of the finest examples of mind-expanding, awe-inspiring, 21st-century Martian science fiction that are free and ready-to-read on the Internet. The storylines range from a spunky young bride-to-be truding across Red Planet sands, to a classical concert on Earth interrupted by unannounced guests, to a brutish psychic that roams the twisting urban alleys of the north face of Mars. These are works that take you across time and space -– from today’s top-name contributors, including Camille Alexa, Kage Baker, Terrie Leigh Relf, Patricia Stewart, Mary A. Turzillo, and Liz Williams. So sit back, adjust your glasses, and prepare to have your mind blown!

(via SF Signal)

Race and Culture and Writing and Stuff

Those of you who read science fiction blogs already know about the massive discussion of race, "cultural appropriation", etc. that's been going on. I've been watching from the sidelines for the past week or so -- work of various sorts kept me away from blog reading for some time, and I stumbled unwittingly on it all after there had already been thousands of posts and comments made, feelings hurt, bizarre and even reprehensible behavior displayed, and lots of battle lines drawn. For various reasons, I felt shellshocked reading it all, but every now and then would come upon a post that seemed really insightful and helpful, and I want to point to a few of those here.

Not by design, but purely by where my interests seem to lead me, I write a lot about race and gender -- not out of any sense of authority, but rather its opposite. I am attracted to questions of identity because identity is such a compelling question for me: how do we create it, value it, judge it, display it, use it as a tool and a weapon and a curse and a blessing and a scream against all the uncertainties of the universe? I'm a white guy from New Hampshire, so it may seem particularly weird that race, gender, and sexuality interest me so much, but various experiences fairly early in my life made me hyper-aware of my own ignorance, and when, as an adolescent, I first came to grips with my own unwitting racism and sexism and heterosexism (despite my own queerness), and with the systemic racism and sexism and heterosexism of my society, I did so through reading, because it was what I knew best. Once I got to college, I was able to start throwing myself into situations where white people were not in the majority, and I did and said things that seem astoundingly naive to me in retrospect, and I'm sure I did and said things I don't remember that were at best ridiculous but perhaps even offensive to the people around me. Live and learn. I keep trying to.

So when I read Deepad's "I Didn't Dream of Dragons" post, I thought: Wow. Cool. Interesting. Helpful. Well said. This should lead to some great discussion. I followed some links and discovered it had been part of quite a discussion, indeed, though not exactly the one I was hoping to find.

There are now a variety of ways to get summaries of what happened, and some of them are linked to in the first part of Mary Ann Mohanraj's excellent two-part post at John Scalzi's Whatever blog. Here's part one. Here's part two. Follow Mary Ann's links if you're curious, but be sure to read her posts. They are extraordinarily lucid and thoughtful and reader-friendly meditations on what it means to write and read in a multicultural society. There's tons of discussion in the comments, too.

There's much in those posts to highlight, discuss, argue with. I want to add a particular highlight to something Nalo Hopkinson said that Mary Ann quotes:

It’s pretty tough to live in a system and be unaffected by it. That’s like floating in a pool of shit and claiming that you don’t smell. So whenever you have the urge to silence people by shouting, “I’m not racist!” it’s probably a good idea to take a long, hard think and ask yourself how in the world is that possible? Really, it isn’t. Not until a whole lot more about the world changes.

Those words belong on billboards.

At the end of part two, Mary Ann raises a point that may have come up in the immense discussion, but I didn't read enough to come upon it. It's vital:

I’ve encouraged white writers here to write about other cultures, other ethnicities. But sometimes we run into the problem that most, or all, the representations of a culture are coming from outside the culture. It’s so much easier for you or I to get published in America than it is for local Sri Lankan writers to get published, I can’t tell you. The difference of scale between the American publishing industry and Sri Lankan publishing is enormous. There’s only one major Sri Lankan press that I know of, and when they applied for the rights to publish my book in Sri Lanka, they couldn’t afford the $600 HarperCollins asked, because that translated to effectively $6000 in Sri Lanka, which would have destroyed their annual budget. If I’d realized that was the issue at the time (I didn’t figure this all out until much later), I would have paid the damn $600 myself. But that’s a side issue.

The point is, given this discrepancy, I feel that it behooves me, as an American author who benefits from Sri Lankan material, to do everything I can to promote Sri Lankan authors. Primarily, that means buying and reading their books, posting reviews, spreading the word. I also try to help bring the good ones to America to give readings, and put them in touch with my agent, in the hopes that it might help them get published here.

It's easy for those of us who live in places where there is a publishing infrastructure to forget that plenty of writers face nearly insurmountable challenges to finding an audience (Charles Larson's The Ordeal of the African Writer gives useful insight into some of these challenges). The internet has been a big help to some writers who would otherwise have no way to get their work out to people, but it's not a replacement for what an actual publishing industry (and a culture of reading/ community of readers) can provide.

Despite the plethora of posts,there are important questions that still remain to be discussed. Mary Ann did a good job of showing that some of the tension in various discussions came, as it often does, from people using different definitions of words such as "racism". I'd love to see more discussion of other words, as well -- for instance, "culture" and "appropriation" (there may be wonderful posts about this that I am simply unaware of). Strategic essentialism is, I think, vital to combatting a systemically racist, sexist, heterosexist, etc. society, but I'm still such a postmodernist that I'm wary when I see words for vast abstractions used without admitting how vast, abstract, overdetermined, paradoxical, and just plain difficult they can be.

Really, though, all I wanted to do was exhort you to read "I Didn't Dream of Dragons" and Mary Ann's two posts. They're some of the best things I've encountered via the Internet for a while.

"Hard-Working White People"

Driving home from work today, I heard Hillary Clinton on the radio. I hear lots of people on the radio, when I choose to listen, though much of the time these days I just throw in a CD, because whenever news of the U.S. election comes on, I lose a bit more respect for humanity. Or at least for Americans. And I know I shouldn't blame us for the awfulness of our politicians. I mean,yes, we haven't risen up and created the anarcho-communist utopia I dream of now and then, but it's not like I'm out there doing anything to help it along, either, so I haven't got any right to blame everybody else.

But even as awful as they are, I expect politicians sometimes to at least try to pretend they're not the amoral, arrogant, asinine, avaricious -- and I'm still at the beginning of the alphabet here -- monsters that we all know them to be.

Or maybe it's just that I never expected Hillary Clinton, for all her dreadfulness, to be courting the David Duke vote.

But there it was, her voice on my radio. And she said the same thing USA Today reports her as saying:

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

I'm looking forward to the Clinton/Buchanan bumper stickers...

Cultural Appropriation

I have never gone to WisCon, and so I am always grateful afterwards for the many detailed reports on discussions from the convention, and the extensions of those discussions. The one I've been enjoying (and sometimes cringing) reading recently grows out of last year's panel and follow-up discussions of cultural appropriation. There are already a bunch of blog posts involved, but here are the paths in that I've been following:

• Transcription of this year's panel
• Oyceter's description and discussion of the panel and the following discussion session
• K. Tempest Bradford's discussion

Separate from the discussions of cultural appropriation (but valuable to look at alongside them), I discovered Robert Philen's post on "Talking About Race" via Reginald Shepherd, who also recently wrote a long and thoughtful post titled "Some Thoughts on Race and Academia".