Wiscon 31: Genre Tokenism Today: The New Octavia
Wed, Jun. 6th, 2007 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterDescription: After the untimely death of the great writer Octavia E. Butler, some have asked who will take her place. A panel of African-descended women currently writing genre fiction addresses this question, talking about Octavia's oeuvre and their own: similarities, differences, market forces, and the pressures to model their contributions to the field on hers. How many ways is this question just plain wrong? Who has a vested interest in there being "an Octavia," new or old? What would "a new Octavia" look like? How does her literary legacy affect the field today, and how might it do so in the future? And how does this legacy relate to this disturbing question?
Panelists: Nora Jemison (mod), Nisi Shawl, Candra K. Gill, K. Tempest Bradford, Nnedi Nkemdili Okorafor-Mbachu
This was my favorite panel of Wiscon;![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coffeeandink mentions the cool factor of seeing a panel entirely composed of black women at an SF con; I agree. Also, like Mely, I hope one day that I'll be so used to seeing many POC at SF cons, on panels, not talking specifically about race, that the coolness factor will wear off.
Note: it's really odd writing this up, because I'm consulting the transcripts and noticing that my memory of themes aren't the same as the actual track of the conversation. But since this is my LJ and because the transcript is available, I'll be organizing more via theme and subject than by time things were said.
Nora Jemison jokingly introduced all the panelists as the "new Octavia;" all of them refuted the notion. I think Nisi Shawl said something to the effect of: "I am the current Nisi Shawl, not the new Octavia." All of them mentioned that their styles were basically nothing like Butler's; Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu wrote fantasy YA, Shawl said her language was not as spare. K. Tempest Bradford said she was the Angry Black Woman -- I was too busy being delighted to tell for sure, but I am certain that other audience members were just as delighted as me that she was at the con.
Jemison began the panel by asking if the question (of who is the "new Octavia") was even appropriate. She mentioned that every time she introduced herself as an SF writer, she would be asked if she liked Butler. Shawl said that it was an embarrassing question, like the questioner had his/her fly accidentally open. She didn't think it was an appropriate comparison at all. Shawl also mentioned that many of her influences include Jones, Chandler and Colette, but that those are basically never brought up.
Candra Gill also said that the why behind the question was inappropriate: people seem to think that there can only be one black female SF writer, which isn't the case. She also pointed out that it was a lazy question. Jemison added to this by saying that usually comparisons are made by looking at style and content, not at race (I believe she said something about Barth Anderson not being compared to Asimov because they were both white men). Shawl added that it wasn't just race, it was race and gender -- no one compared her to Chip Delany.
Okorafor-Mbachu briefly played devil's advocate by saying that it did sort of make sense for people to use Butler as a comparison, since she's fairly widely taught, so that even non-SF-reading people know her. Even so, she made it clear she was playing devil's advocate and not agreeing that it was an appropriate question to ask or comparison to make.
One of the more interesting points was when an audience member (Rosalyn) asked if the question was always from a white person; I think several of the panelists said that they frequently got the question from black people.coffeeandink asked a little later if the panelists thought that the question was being asked out of fear. Shawl made a comparison to Martin Luther King, Jr. and how people kept asking, "Who will be the next King?" after his death. From panelist and audience responses, I got the general impression that black people were asking out of a fear of that one spot (of a black, female SF writer) being squeezed out and out of a desire to keep that spot open.
Bradford said that she knew the question about the "new Octavia" was going to be asked when Butler died, and that it really made her see that they need more black women SF writers out there, that they couldn't let Octavia be the only one.
Okorafor-Mbachu brought up Nalo Hopkinson as the person usually being touted as the "new Octavia" because (sarcastically) "they're so similar" (I suspect this would be a lot funnier to me if I'd actually read Hopkinson...). Shawl followed up a little later by saying that Hopkinson actively rejected tokenism and worked against it as an editor by trying to give attention to other writers of color.
The point was also made that there were black female SF writers out there, but that they weren't very visible. Somewhere in the midde, I asked about non-black women of color and how they fit in; Shawl talked about how Butler's name was also used to represent all women of color and about the black-white race dichotomy in SF/F.
The conversation about that went in two directions: one on how black people are generally excluded from SF/F, one on how the black community rejects the white SF/F community (which is often believed to be THE SF/F community).
For the first, Bradford said that any time people tried to mention diversity (or, mostly, the lack thereof) in SF/F, there was always a chant of "Delany, Butler, Hopkinson, Barnes," as though those four names somehow proved that there was diversity in the market. (Jemison, sarcastically, "We're not racist! We have four! FOUR!")
Someone in the audience asked how you could tell from just the author's name -- I remember the implication (or actual question) being that magazine editors and etc. couldn't tell race from names, and therefore couldn't be racist by picking mostly white stories (and I suspect, readers choosing only to read white authors as wel). Jemison said that that argument of no discrimination came up a lot, but also that she thought there were some common themes for black authors -- alienation, slavery, otherness -- that wasn't intrinsic to being black, but was often in the black experience. I thought this part was very interesting. I don't think any of the panelists were arguing that there was such thing as an intrinsic black experience, so I hope no one takes that as a point. And I think it's a very nuanced thing, to look at how racism affects a group of people and how that affects their writing (obviously, different people to different degrees), and I do think it sort of applies to Asian authors as well (common themes of immigration, of language difficulties, of being caught in the middle, of family that is spread out over continents). But again, not in a "there is an intrinsic Asian experience" way.
Bradford agreed to this and said she could often tell if the author was white or not, and Jemison added that when she read Butler's Dawn (I think?), even though the cover showed Lilith as white, five pages in, she knew Lilith and Butler were both black.
Shawl brought up another way that black writers were often pigeonholed; she said that she couldn't sell a non-black story. She talked about the expectation from editors that she (and other black writers) would write "black content" and that those editors would determine exactly what that content was. As a side note, this reminds me of the discussion in the Cultural Appropriation panel re: minstrel shows and how the dominant group "granting" authenticity often ended up as broad caricatures of race. Jemison added that it wasn't just SF/F that did this; Zora Neal Hurston's race-neutral work was nowhere near as well-known as her "black" work.
Later on, Gill brought up the fact that what counts as SF for POC often doesn't get counted as SF by the (white) SF/F community. I think she brought up Hopkinson's new book with mention of First Nations people being categorized as "magical realism" as opposed to urban fantasy. Shawl noted that "not all science deals with metal" andconiraya from the audience talked about how black SF writers, particularly ones from Africa, were pushed to write "magical realism" instead. Jemison labeled this as snobbery; Okorafor-Mbachu labeled it as marketing.
Someone in the audience said that her (black) friend couldn't sell a fantasy novel because of the stereotype that black people didn't read fantasy.
All the panelists rejected that stereotype. Bradford said that the cause-effect was backwards: black people often didn't read SF/F because they weren't represented in SF/F. She said that the only way to counter that was to burst out into the field and to show black people that they were there, that they were being represented, and then they might buy more.
Jemison talked about SF/F supposedly being subversive, being about the future, that black people had futures too, and that they should be there in the future.
Okorafor-Mbachu said that she previously might have agreed about the stigma in the black community about SF/F, except she had gone to the Gwendolyn Brooks conference and saw tons of black people there, all worshipping Butler's feet. Jemison also mentioned her experience at a black literature conference, full of black people who loved speculative fiction. She also mentioned that these people probably only came out at the conference because it was coded as a safe space for black people. Shawl talked about being at a talk at Smith College and walking around with four other black women SF writers ("I felt like the Monkees").
Gill said that there was also a difference between engaging with SF/F at home and engaging with it in public: "We are engaged with the material but we don't necessarily, I'm sorry, want to go hang around with a bunch of white folks." I can't remember if she elaborated about how the treatment differed, but I personally remember sticking out like a sore thumb at Norwescon for being Asian and still feeling out of place at Wiscon every so often.
The panel ended with the audience and the panelists all giving out suggestions for how to improve the situation: Join the Carl Brandon Society, support the CB society (Shawl mentioned a challenge grant running through 6/22 that would effectively double your contribution for no extra cost to you), read the shortlist for the CB awards, write to your magazine editors, buy SF/F from black bookstores, create more art that includes POC, suggest books for your reading group or to your library, add books by WOC to courses you teach, use the marketing name if it works (Okorafor-Mbachu: "I hid stuff as 'magical realism' for years!"), donate books to prisons.
Cultural appropriation and the panel
One of the things that's particularly interesting to me now is looking at this panel and looking at some discussions on cultural appropriation popping back up again this year. I got this sense from both of the posts and the comments to the post that there is a feeling among white writers of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" (though I could also be completely misreading) with regard to being white and writing a non-white culture. And I know I saw that a lot in the cultural appropriation discussions last year.
So I thought it was very interesting to write up this panel on black women writers and all the things they deal with, from tokenism to being pigeon-holed to being not read to being not seen, and that they are dealing with this no matter what they choose to write.
And I do hope that some of the cultural appropriation discussions have problematized issues for white writers as well (Hi! Join the club! I think we're all damned if you do, damned if you don't, though POC writers are often dealing with some different issues from white writers). This includes white writers choosing to write all-white universes AND white writers choosing to write minority cultures, because, as noted above, I think no matter what POC authors write, they end up in a quandry as well. I note here that when I say "problematize" or "problematic," I do not mean "morally wrong" or "bad" or "evil" or "racist." I mean "has a host of complicated issues and questions and potential problems involved."
Also, I would greatly appreciate it if all the discussion to this post didn't end up being all about white writers, because that would just be really ironic for a panel that focuses on black women SF writers.
As a comment-starter: I haven't read Nalo Hopkinson! Horror! I must remedy this at once, so tell me where to start!
Links:
- FSFWiki's page (includes transcript and links to other write ups)
Panelists: Nora Jemison (mod), Nisi Shawl, Candra K. Gill, K. Tempest Bradford, Nnedi Nkemdili Okorafor-Mbachu
This was my favorite panel of Wiscon;
coffeeandink mentions the cool factor of seeing a panel entirely composed of black women at an SF con; I agree. Also, like Mely, I hope one day that I'll be so used to seeing many POC at SF cons, on panels, not talking specifically about race, that the coolness factor will wear off.Note: it's really odd writing this up, because I'm consulting the transcripts and noticing that my memory of themes aren't the same as the actual track of the conversation. But since this is my LJ and because the transcript is available, I'll be organizing more via theme and subject than by time things were said.
Nora Jemison jokingly introduced all the panelists as the "new Octavia;" all of them refuted the notion. I think Nisi Shawl said something to the effect of: "I am the current Nisi Shawl, not the new Octavia." All of them mentioned that their styles were basically nothing like Butler's; Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu wrote fantasy YA, Shawl said her language was not as spare. K. Tempest Bradford said she was the Angry Black Woman -- I was too busy being delighted to tell for sure, but I am certain that other audience members were just as delighted as me that she was at the con.
Jemison began the panel by asking if the question (of who is the "new Octavia") was even appropriate. She mentioned that every time she introduced herself as an SF writer, she would be asked if she liked Butler. Shawl said that it was an embarrassing question, like the questioner had his/her fly accidentally open. She didn't think it was an appropriate comparison at all. Shawl also mentioned that many of her influences include Jones, Chandler and Colette, but that those are basically never brought up.
Candra Gill also said that the why behind the question was inappropriate: people seem to think that there can only be one black female SF writer, which isn't the case. She also pointed out that it was a lazy question. Jemison added to this by saying that usually comparisons are made by looking at style and content, not at race (I believe she said something about Barth Anderson not being compared to Asimov because they were both white men). Shawl added that it wasn't just race, it was race and gender -- no one compared her to Chip Delany.
Okorafor-Mbachu briefly played devil's advocate by saying that it did sort of make sense for people to use Butler as a comparison, since she's fairly widely taught, so that even non-SF-reading people know her. Even so, she made it clear she was playing devil's advocate and not agreeing that it was an appropriate question to ask or comparison to make.
One of the more interesting points was when an audience member (Rosalyn) asked if the question was always from a white person; I think several of the panelists said that they frequently got the question from black people.
coffeeandink asked a little later if the panelists thought that the question was being asked out of fear. Shawl made a comparison to Martin Luther King, Jr. and how people kept asking, "Who will be the next King?" after his death. From panelist and audience responses, I got the general impression that black people were asking out of a fear of that one spot (of a black, female SF writer) being squeezed out and out of a desire to keep that spot open. Bradford said that she knew the question about the "new Octavia" was going to be asked when Butler died, and that it really made her see that they need more black women SF writers out there, that they couldn't let Octavia be the only one.
Okorafor-Mbachu brought up Nalo Hopkinson as the person usually being touted as the "new Octavia" because (sarcastically) "they're so similar" (I suspect this would be a lot funnier to me if I'd actually read Hopkinson...). Shawl followed up a little later by saying that Hopkinson actively rejected tokenism and worked against it as an editor by trying to give attention to other writers of color.
The point was also made that there were black female SF writers out there, but that they weren't very visible. Somewhere in the midde, I asked about non-black women of color and how they fit in; Shawl talked about how Butler's name was also used to represent all women of color and about the black-white race dichotomy in SF/F.
The conversation about that went in two directions: one on how black people are generally excluded from SF/F, one on how the black community rejects the white SF/F community (which is often believed to be THE SF/F community).
For the first, Bradford said that any time people tried to mention diversity (or, mostly, the lack thereof) in SF/F, there was always a chant of "Delany, Butler, Hopkinson, Barnes," as though those four names somehow proved that there was diversity in the market. (Jemison, sarcastically, "We're not racist! We have four! FOUR!")
Someone in the audience asked how you could tell from just the author's name -- I remember the implication (or actual question) being that magazine editors and etc. couldn't tell race from names, and therefore couldn't be racist by picking mostly white stories (and I suspect, readers choosing only to read white authors as wel). Jemison said that that argument of no discrimination came up a lot, but also that she thought there were some common themes for black authors -- alienation, slavery, otherness -- that wasn't intrinsic to being black, but was often in the black experience. I thought this part was very interesting. I don't think any of the panelists were arguing that there was such thing as an intrinsic black experience, so I hope no one takes that as a point. And I think it's a very nuanced thing, to look at how racism affects a group of people and how that affects their writing (obviously, different people to different degrees), and I do think it sort of applies to Asian authors as well (common themes of immigration, of language difficulties, of being caught in the middle, of family that is spread out over continents). But again, not in a "there is an intrinsic Asian experience" way.
Bradford agreed to this and said she could often tell if the author was white or not, and Jemison added that when she read Butler's Dawn (I think?), even though the cover showed Lilith as white, five pages in, she knew Lilith and Butler were both black.
Shawl brought up another way that black writers were often pigeonholed; she said that she couldn't sell a non-black story. She talked about the expectation from editors that she (and other black writers) would write "black content" and that those editors would determine exactly what that content was. As a side note, this reminds me of the discussion in the Cultural Appropriation panel re: minstrel shows and how the dominant group "granting" authenticity often ended up as broad caricatures of race. Jemison added that it wasn't just SF/F that did this; Zora Neal Hurston's race-neutral work was nowhere near as well-known as her "black" work.
Later on, Gill brought up the fact that what counts as SF for POC often doesn't get counted as SF by the (white) SF/F community. I think she brought up Hopkinson's new book with mention of First Nations people being categorized as "magical realism" as opposed to urban fantasy. Shawl noted that "not all science deals with metal" and
coniraya from the audience talked about how black SF writers, particularly ones from Africa, were pushed to write "magical realism" instead. Jemison labeled this as snobbery; Okorafor-Mbachu labeled it as marketing. Someone in the audience said that her (black) friend couldn't sell a fantasy novel because of the stereotype that black people didn't read fantasy.
All the panelists rejected that stereotype. Bradford said that the cause-effect was backwards: black people often didn't read SF/F because they weren't represented in SF/F. She said that the only way to counter that was to burst out into the field and to show black people that they were there, that they were being represented, and then they might buy more.
Jemison talked about SF/F supposedly being subversive, being about the future, that black people had futures too, and that they should be there in the future.
Okorafor-Mbachu said that she previously might have agreed about the stigma in the black community about SF/F, except she had gone to the Gwendolyn Brooks conference and saw tons of black people there, all worshipping Butler's feet. Jemison also mentioned her experience at a black literature conference, full of black people who loved speculative fiction. She also mentioned that these people probably only came out at the conference because it was coded as a safe space for black people. Shawl talked about being at a talk at Smith College and walking around with four other black women SF writers ("I felt like the Monkees").
Gill said that there was also a difference between engaging with SF/F at home and engaging with it in public: "We are engaged with the material but we don't necessarily, I'm sorry, want to go hang around with a bunch of white folks." I can't remember if she elaborated about how the treatment differed, but I personally remember sticking out like a sore thumb at Norwescon for being Asian and still feeling out of place at Wiscon every so often.
The panel ended with the audience and the panelists all giving out suggestions for how to improve the situation: Join the Carl Brandon Society, support the CB society (Shawl mentioned a challenge grant running through 6/22 that would effectively double your contribution for no extra cost to you), read the shortlist for the CB awards, write to your magazine editors, buy SF/F from black bookstores, create more art that includes POC, suggest books for your reading group or to your library, add books by WOC to courses you teach, use the marketing name if it works (Okorafor-Mbachu: "I hid stuff as 'magical realism' for years!"), donate books to prisons.
Cultural appropriation and the panel
One of the things that's particularly interesting to me now is looking at this panel and looking at some discussions on cultural appropriation popping back up again this year. I got this sense from both of the posts and the comments to the post that there is a feeling among white writers of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" (though I could also be completely misreading) with regard to being white and writing a non-white culture. And I know I saw that a lot in the cultural appropriation discussions last year.
So I thought it was very interesting to write up this panel on black women writers and all the things they deal with, from tokenism to being pigeon-holed to being not read to being not seen, and that they are dealing with this no matter what they choose to write.
And I do hope that some of the cultural appropriation discussions have problematized issues for white writers as well (Hi! Join the club! I think we're all damned if you do, damned if you don't, though POC writers are often dealing with some different issues from white writers). This includes white writers choosing to write all-white universes AND white writers choosing to write minority cultures, because, as noted above, I think no matter what POC authors write, they end up in a quandry as well. I note here that when I say "problematize" or "problematic," I do not mean "morally wrong" or "bad" or "evil" or "racist." I mean "has a host of complicated issues and questions and potential problems involved."
Also, I would greatly appreciate it if all the discussion to this post didn't end up being all about white writers, because that would just be really ironic for a panel that focuses on black women SF writers.
As a comment-starter: I haven't read Nalo Hopkinson! Horror! I must remedy this at once, so tell me where to start!
Links:
- FSFWiki's page (includes transcript and links to other write ups)
(no subject)
Wed, Jun. 6th, 2007 10:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 04:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Jun. 9th, 2007 07:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Wed, Jun. 6th, 2007 11:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 04:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Wed, Jun. 6th, 2007 11:26 pm (UTC)My point being that... shit, it was 1998 or so, and we're only just now getting around to publishing this kind of thing? That's fucking disturbing. And just disappointing as hell.
It would be an interesting thing to read Brown Girl and Emma Bull's Bone Dance and talk about the uses of mythology and characters of color in them. I don't recall anyone at the time it was published having anything in particular to say about her use of Caribbean mythological figures (Baron Samdi, etc). But then Bull is white, and Hopkinson isn't. (I love Bone Dance, but I'm rereading it now with a different eye, in light of the CADoD. *g*)
(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 04:43 am (UTC)Oh man, yes. Also, I don't know how widely known Hopkinson is in SF/F? I feel like I have been reading around the SF/F fandom for a while and I never heard of her prior to last year's Wiscon. Or possibly that is me being bad with names too?
Ohh, good point re: Brown Girl and Bone Dance. I've only read the first chapter or so of the Hopkinson, but I can sort of see it.
(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 12:50 am (UTC)I've read a few of her short stories too, and have liked them fine, but I think I prefer her in novel-length. (Haven't picked up her latest yet.)
(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 04:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 12:59 am (UTC)>She talked about the expectation from editors that she (and other black writers) would write "black content" and that those editors would determine exactly what that content was.<
Ouch.
(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 04:50 am (UTC)But the sense that I got from the panel wasn't one of despair, but of hope, of things sloooowly changing, of all these people like Shawl and Gill and Bradford and Okorafor-Mbachu and Jemison and Hopkinson pushing for change, agitating, and making a difference despite all the people who probably tell them to just stop and wait and things will change themselves (ha!). Seriously, throughout the panel, I wanted to admire everyone's shiny brains as well as hug all of them and tell them how much awesome they were made of.
(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 05:41 pm (UTC)>all the people who probably tell them to just stop and wait and things will change themselves<
Ha. Yes. I think the assumption a lot of people--I include myself in this--grew up with was that somehow we’d reached the point of enough momentum that change would carry itself. But then you read Tatum’s Can We Talk About Race?, where she talks about how schools are getting *more* segregated when people aren’t actively pushing for integration, or (albeit this was very informal and not-statistical) the thing I was asking about in my journal last week, where women of color seem to have been pushed *further* to the sidelines when it comes to leading roles on TV, and the danger isn’t just that progress will stall but that it will regress.
(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 09:37 pm (UTC)Very with you on the fear of regression -- I see it a lot on LJ for feminist issues, particularly given the govt. we have now, and I think it applies to a lot of other things as wel.
(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 01:14 am (UTC)(She is similar to Butler in that they are both awesome, anyway.)
My writeup for The New Moon's Arms is over here: http://buymeaclue.livejournal.com/369121.html
(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 04:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 01:56 am (UTC)I would like to see a time when no spec-fic writers are treated differently because they belong to a minority -- any minority. I don't expect to, I'm afraid.
(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 03:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 04:59 am (UTC)Yay for tiny cracks in the system.
(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 04:53 am (UTC)Oh me too. For both. But one of the other things I got from the panel (and from Wiscon 31 in general) was to keep pushing and to keep talking, to buy books by POC and read them and rec them, to blog about these things, because nothing will change unless we do that.
(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 03:30 am (UTC)i'm leaving my default icon not because it's appropriate for the rest of this comment but so you can all look at my pasty pasty self.
Someone in the audience asked how you could tell from just the author's name -- I remember the implication (or actual question) being that magazine editors and etc. couldn't tell race from names, and therefore couldn't be racist by picking mostly white stories (and I suspect, readers choosing only to read white authors as wel). Jemison said that that argument of no discrimination came up a lot, but also that she thought there were some common themes for black authors -- alienation, slavery, otherness -- that wasn't intrinsic to being black, but was often in the black experience.
i have a small amount of sympathy here for the editors and the questioner here-- the "how can you tell from the names?" is how some of the panels, especially the ones about race, the years i ran program at wiscon ended up being, uh, interestingly peopled. in the bunch of pasty white people talking about things they have no experience of sort of way. [wince] (as a note, i think that the current program heads have done fabulous things on this front, and i am so excited about it.)
however, it's only a small amount of sympathy, because i believe that nora is right, and it does seem likely to me that a lot of black writers would write about things that weren't part of the (white) editors experience, and that the editors might not want to buy the stories because of that.
please note that i am saying this about sf markets; like alien possession and spaceships *are* part of anyone's experience. [rolls eyes at self]
i'm also looking for nalo hopkinson recommendations, so i must come back here to check. i have a hard time with books where the characters speak a substantially different dialect than i do, and the first book of hers (i am not remembering the name, foo) that i was told that i *had* to read was written in something very different than standard minnesotan. so, i had trouble with it and haven't picked up anything else of hers, even though i know she's great.
(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 7th, 2007 05:01 am (UTC)please note that i am saying this about sf markets; like alien possession and spaceships *are* part of anyone's experience.
Hee! It's like the whole "I can't write Gunn! He's black!" thing that somehow manages to overlook that the person in question is already writing about 200-year-old vampires having gay sex.
(no subject)
Tue, Jun. 12th, 2007 08:03 am (UTC)Actually, my height is pretty average; 5' 5." Octavia was 6' tall by age 14. She may have kept on growing after that; I don't know. And I can't ask her now.
apostle_of_eris asked: "Of the blacks who read science fiction, what proportion actively notice which writers are black or POC, and then, how many actively seek them out?"
In my experience? Most. I've had people buy my books even though they prefer some other type of SF/F/H, simply because they'd been hankering for so long to see themselves reflected in SF literature. As to actively noticing which writers are black or POC, that's a very good point to raise. I find that when white people in SF talk about this stuff, many of them assume that the only perceptible difference between a POC writer and a non-POC one is skin colour. But that's like assuming that a hearing person won't recognise a tune being played if s/he can't see the band. The markers of culture, language and experience ring as loudly as any visual marker -- which is to say, they're so fluid that you can't make any hard-and-fast assumptions. For instance, Michelle Sagara's writing doesn't identify her as either Canadian or of Japanese background. Nevertheless, the markers are there often enough in many people's writing to make some generalisations. If I didn't know Toby Buckell, I might from looking at his features mistakenly guess that he's white. But to read his work is to get some powerful indications that whatever racial configuration he is, and whether born there or naturalized, he's Caribbean. Similarly, the cultural contexts from which white writers from white-dominant cultures write most of the time aren't invisible or featureless to the rest of us at all; they're very clearly white. (Again, a generalisation, and only useful so far as generalisations go. But don't buy it when people tell you that it's insignificant.)
oyceter, thank you so much for writing that summary! I wasn't there this year, so it's good to get my Wiscon fix.
Okay, running away now. If anyone's inclined to feel sheepish that they said that they couldn't get into my writing, don't. It means you at least *tried* my writing, and for that, I'm grateful.
(no subject)
Tue, Jun. 12th, 2007 02:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Tue, Jun. 12th, 2007 10:10 pm (UTC)YES! Well, for me, it is with Asian people, and especially women. Though honestly, I am pretty happy any time there is a significant character of color in the book that isn't a horrible trope of some sort. And now I've been trying to look more for books that features places that aren't the standard pseudo-European or even American setting (particularly for fantasies).
Also, I'm glad you are finding the summaries helpful!
(no subject)
Tue, Jun. 12th, 2007 01:25 pm (UTC)When the subject includes a culture/language I'm unfamiliar with, I start searching for audio versions.
One reason why audiobooks are so wonderful (in addition to letting me bead and read simultaneously) is how the narrators are (hopefully) chosen for their familiarity with the dialect, or at least the culture from which the dialect was invented.
This gets me over that initial confusion where the eye-dialect is snagging my brains away from the content.
(no subject)
Fri, Jun. 8th, 2007 01:36 pm (UTC)One of the things which struck me about this year's Wiscon was that I seemed to see noticeably more black women than I recall in the past.
I was sorry Nalo didn't make it, even before these discussions.
This long post refers to a large number of communities and demographics, and some real or attributed expectations of each. I think that breadth is important.
There is the vaguely outlined "science fiction community", which has long been aware that it's overwhelmingly white, but not sure why.
There are various fractions of the publishing world, from editors who have one-on-one relationships with authors to publicists who have strong notions of category, etc.
There are the writers and aspiring writers, individually and in various groupings, social or just professional.
And there is the public and its many fractions. Of the blacks who read science fiction, what proportion actively notice which writers are black or POC, and then, how many actively seek them out? (I have no idea.)
But these issues are spread across a lot of points of view, and more different activities than may be immediately obvious. I appreciate the acceptance of complexity.
(disclaimer - I've used several shorthand expressions. I know they're too simplistic for many uses, but this is a brief note, and I don't anticipate serious misunderstanding among the intended audience.)