QOTD: China Miéville on RaceFail
Jul. 13th, 2009 03:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyYes, 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?
Link 'ere. Hat tip:
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bcholmes
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Date: 2009-07-13 07:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 07:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 08:00 pm (UTC)i'm gonna take another crack at it when i finish "memoir from antproof case" and "house of leaves"
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Date: 2009-07-13 08:15 pm (UTC)I mean, by all means if you think you should like his writing, keep trying. I've given up on most of his books, but still admire his political commentary. Contrariwise, I still really love Wagner's Seigfreid Idyll despite thinking his politics abhorrent.
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Date: 2009-07-13 08:20 pm (UTC)also, i usually see abhorrent politics in those genres anyway so it doesn't really surprise me that their real life politics are just as bad.
i've never really experienced this separation of art and politics, since politics are reflective of a level of understanding and a belief system that shines through in any genuine work of art.
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Date: 2009-07-13 08:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-14 02:36 pm (UTC)Also, I think there may be a difference for some people between more representative art forms (much fiction, a lot of visual art, much drama), and less representative art forms (chamber music, for example). It's really difficult for me to swallow the overt misogyny in say, Piers Anthony's novels, or graphic depictions of senseless violence against women in film or visual media; but I really don't know anything about Arvo Pärt's politics, and don't find that I consider them when I listen to his music (I can surmise, from the nature of his compositions, that he's at least broadly humanistic, but more than that I would not care to infer).
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Date: 2009-07-14 03:34 pm (UTC)For me, even with the operas of Wagner, where you do find some textually very clear antisemitic figures, I just...I tend to say "Wagner didn't kill any Jews," which is a little bit flippant, but I do think his ideology in no way fuels present hateful/harmful ideologies. Ok maybe there's a neo-nazi somewhere who loves Parsifal (going to guess not many) but the music and even the libretto aren't the problem, just things compatible with the problem.
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Date: 2009-07-14 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 07:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 07:42 pm (UTC)That said, I'm a little hypersensitive to judgments of genre work that don't take into account the conventions of the genre. This angle needs to be at least considered when we get into deconstructing narratives.
Can't think of a good racially-based example of this, but fresh in my mind is the excruciating current dialogue on the excruciating Babble, where for the millionth time some hack is citing 'Run For Your Life' as proof that the Beatles were murderous misogynists, without acknowledging (because they do not know) that the lines 'I'd rather see you dead little girl/than to be with another man' are lifted word for word from Elvis' "Baby Let's Play House", which to my mind single-handedly transforms the whole thing into a perfectly self-conscious burlesque on gender relations in blues-based pop, vilified because it's delivered with the usual peppy cheer, which to me just means that they understand something about art.
Which takes us back to Star Wars and the critique I read in Z around Phantom Menace time that Chewbacca was a stand-in for the One Nice Black Character in 70s action films - which isn't even accurate; in my experience this strategy was most typical of blaxploitation films that included one nice WHITE character.
Contrast this with Walter Murch's assertion that Star Wars happened because Lucas couldn't sell an early draft of Apocalypse Now, so he just transposed it to outer space. I couldn't believe it either, but Murch should know and superficially it makes sense: the Rebel Alliance are the North Vietnamese, Vader is Nixon, and good-evil are presented along a continuum.
All of which was truly out the window by the time the new trilogy rolled around, of course.
And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? Sorry. I'm onside with everything you wrote, I'm just riffing because right now I'm hypersensitive to self-righteous bluenoseing in activist circles and anxious to maintain the distinction.
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Date: 2009-07-13 07:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 08:04 pm (UTC)there were 70s action films that were not blaxploitation films and vice versa
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Date: 2009-07-13 08:08 pm (UTC)And either way, applying it to Chewie still strikes me as a bit of a stretch...?
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Date: 2009-07-13 08:10 pm (UTC)lando was better anyway as the shifty minority of inscrutable loyalties
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Date: 2009-07-13 08:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 08:07 pm (UTC)'Cause if that's what you're saying, I call bullshit.
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Date: 2009-07-13 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 08:29 pm (UTC)That depictions must be evaluated individually and in detail, with actual industrial conditions in some way taken into account within the methodology of the reading? Something like that.
The Orc thing causes me some hangups I admit. I mean I get it. But how much weight do I place on that reading? To what extent is the 'othering' a product of an even broader reactionary tendency of 'good guy/bad guy'? And who are we as activists to cast stones on THAT formulation?
I guess I'm now obliged to follow the links and determine what this thread I dumped on is actually ABOUT. Bad blogger.
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Date: 2009-07-13 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 10:39 pm (UTC)What he's saying about Orcs is, in my opinion, totally spot-on. It doesn't matter that our favourite fantasy genres have repeatedly reproduced the logic of racism, and that we enjoy that so much that it's become a convention of the genre. The point is that we clearly seem to enjoy seeing that racism reproduced and that enjoyment is something that I think stands to be interrogated.
The example that stands out in my mind was the movie of Sin City. When many people pointed out that it has some pretty sucky gender politics, all kinds of purists were screaming "But it's true to the comic!" (not a great defense, in my opinion) and "It's a convention of the noir genre!" (again, not a great defense).
My experience of people's love of "conventions of the genre" is to silence discussion of sucky politics in stories.
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Date: 2009-07-13 10:59 pm (UTC)As I said I'm responding to sab's orc comments, not the source. Haven't seen Sin City and don't remember LOTR well enough to comment in any detail. I think source and genre are both potential defenses, subject to close reading. But I am totally sensitive to the reactionary potential for this argument and don't want to feed into that.
I think I'm just guilty of thread drift here.
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Date: 2009-07-13 11:47 pm (UTC)So yeah I'm wasting time, I agree with everything he said, I'm hurling trivial modifiers around based on my own petty obsessions. Carry on.
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Date: 2009-07-14 01:31 am (UTC)Good point. I don't know how one can call this the "replication of the logic of racism" without some kind of a failure to fully understand that the logic of racism is at its root the same binary logic people use for every other damned thing. Us vs. Them, Hero vs. Adversary, Right vs. Wrong, Good vs. Bad, Truth vs. Lie, Golden Age vs. Present Decadence, After the Revolution vs. Present Decadence, Edible vs. Disgusting, Beautiful vs. Ugly, Virtuous vs. Corrupt, Progressives vs. Reactionaries, People Who Look Like Me vs. People Who Don't, People Who Fuck Like Me vs. People Who Don't, People Who Live Like Me vs. People Who Don't, it's all ripples of I vs. Not I radiating ever outwards. You can't throw out I vs. Not I (except perhaps in some limited cases by the application of ecstasy or wretchedness, non-sustainable extrema, or radical centering (as of a Zen monk, who then isn't much good for anything but meditation). You can get beyond it, of course, and becoming an enlightened fully-realized human is a series of exercises in nuancing and fuzzyfying the logic of distinction.)
What matters is what you do with this logic, this tool, this double-headed axe. Sometimes it chops heads, sometimes it chops wood. Orcs don't spring into our minds ex nihilo, but what does? Yes, they are the Menacing Other in a way which is congruent with the way racists view people of other races, but they are also the Menacing Other in a way which is congruent with the way cricket fans view futbol hooligans, New Yorkers view Texans (and vice versa), Tutsis view Hutus, gays view gay bashers, women view rapists, kindergarteners view elementary school bullies and monsters under the bed. (I pick these dyads not because they are all important, timeless or comparable, but precisely because they are not, to show the breadth of the logic's application). The essential quality of the fictional Orcs is not the green colour of their skin, it's that they represent irrepresible, unreasoning, uncontrollable violence. When I started to play D&D, you want to know what I thought they stood for? Fear of the Soviets. Cossacks. That's because racism wasn't salient in my childhood mindscape. It would have never occurred to me, though it seems so obvious to people here, and might have been completely obvious to Tolkien and Gygax, that Orcs were essentially black.
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Date: 2009-07-14 12:17 am (UTC)"When talking about the song Getting Better, he confessed in All We Are Saying, his last major interview: “I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically — any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn’t express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women . . . I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster.”"
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Date: 2009-07-14 02:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 08:09 pm (UTC)and that was in like '01 or so
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Date: 2009-07-13 08:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 08:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-14 12:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-14 12:33 am (UTC)The bug/human relationship in Perdido isn't really exploitative. I mean, there are obviously power dynamics because of race, class, gender, and species differences, but both of the characters are progressives and try to transcend those barriers. It [spoiler] ends extremely badly, particularly for the bug, but this goes for every relationship in that series. [/spoiler]
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Date: 2009-07-13 09:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 10:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-13 09:27 pm (UTC)tangentially
Date: 2009-07-13 10:08 pm (UTC)Re: tangentially
Date: 2009-07-16 01:46 am (UTC)Some people use "anti-racist" as a synonym for "good person". Some of them use "anti-racist" as a synonym for "trying to do one particular flavor of right thing." Some of the people in Blog Against Racism are self-righteous. Some of them are trying to improve the world. Some of them are both self-righteous and trying to improve the world. Can't tell 'em apart even if you have a scorecard (and I've lost mine.)
I'm not sure how somebody like
Goody Osburn with the devil
Date: 2009-07-16 02:43 am (UTC)Re: Goody Osburn with the devil
Date: 2009-07-16 03:55 am (UTC)That said, I have a hard enough time judging the intricacies of my own heart to claim to be able to guess at anybody else's. Some of the people in the Late Unpleasantness were motivated by righteousness; others by right. I can't tell which.
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Date: 2009-07-14 12:37 am (UTC)<3