race and reading
Jun. 14th, 2013 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliOne thing I notice about the treatment of race in modern works of SF and fantasy is that it tends to assume that all current racial distinctions are the Laws of the Medes and Persians that altereth not. It does not take much reading even in the early 20th century to have that belief knocked sideways and upside down. Even just SF and fantasy reading, perhaps, though there is the issue of recognizing what you see.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, for instance. Different tribes of blacks would have their physical differences enumerated with care. If you know your turn-of-the-century racial theories, it's not difficult to decipher this:
even though he has them consider whites to be an inferior sort of being, many of them slaves, and living in the poor quarters when free.
Even writers not moved to use those distinctions as a kind of short-hand for character would nevertheless deploy them to describe. In one Time Patrol story, Poul Anderson's characters know that history has changed, because in all the millennia they cover, New York City never was occupied by a mix of brachycephalic whites and American Indians, using steam-powered cars. He also used it to indicate new and different humans; "Time Lag" has a planet inhabited by a race of blue-eyed blonds -- with slanted eyes.
To be sure, reading the straight stuff gets some details that never make it into the fiction, where you can have unquestionably superior and inferior races and set up history accordingly. It can be interesting to watch the attempts to depict one's race as superior in defiance of historical fact. Italy would point to the grandeur that was Rome, but there was no denying it had gone down in the world since then. Teutonicists had the opposite problem; much as they might claim that the patrician class in Rome was actually Germanic invaders -- as were the Greek aristocrats -- and those countries had declined when they stopped maintaining their racial purity, and well as Germany was doing in the modern world, there was no denying that the Germans in classical times had hardly been impressive. English Teutonicists, wishing to give their own country priority, would claim that the pure Nordic breed was all but wiped out in the Thirty Years' War, leaving its superiority to England alone. (American ones often claimed that there had been some remnants after the war, but they had all emigrated, to America.)
Robert E. Howard had his three races, of blonds, red-heads, and black-haired men, a distinction thought eminently important in the era.
And that, mind you, is in the 20th century. Pushing the matter back farther brings even stranger things to the racial questions. Yet the characters of a work of fiction seldom slice up the human race into divisions much different than modern day ones.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, for instance. Different tribes of blacks would have their physical differences enumerated with care. If you know your turn-of-the-century racial theories, it's not difficult to decipher this:
The Abyssinians themselves are a fine looking race of black men—tall, muscular, with fine teeth, and regular features, which incline distinctly toward Semitic mold—I refer to the full-blooded natives of Abyssinia. They are the patricians—the aristocracy. The army is officered almost exclusively by them. Among the soldiery a lower type of negro predominates, with thicker lips and broader, flatter noses.
even though he has them consider whites to be an inferior sort of being, many of them slaves, and living in the poor quarters when free.
Even writers not moved to use those distinctions as a kind of short-hand for character would nevertheless deploy them to describe. In one Time Patrol story, Poul Anderson's characters know that history has changed, because in all the millennia they cover, New York City never was occupied by a mix of brachycephalic whites and American Indians, using steam-powered cars. He also used it to indicate new and different humans; "Time Lag" has a planet inhabited by a race of blue-eyed blonds -- with slanted eyes.
To be sure, reading the straight stuff gets some details that never make it into the fiction, where you can have unquestionably superior and inferior races and set up history accordingly. It can be interesting to watch the attempts to depict one's race as superior in defiance of historical fact. Italy would point to the grandeur that was Rome, but there was no denying it had gone down in the world since then. Teutonicists had the opposite problem; much as they might claim that the patrician class in Rome was actually Germanic invaders -- as were the Greek aristocrats -- and those countries had declined when they stopped maintaining their racial purity, and well as Germany was doing in the modern world, there was no denying that the Germans in classical times had hardly been impressive. English Teutonicists, wishing to give their own country priority, would claim that the pure Nordic breed was all but wiped out in the Thirty Years' War, leaving its superiority to England alone. (American ones often claimed that there had been some remnants after the war, but they had all emigrated, to America.)
Robert E. Howard had his three races, of blonds, red-heads, and black-haired men, a distinction thought eminently important in the era.
And that, mind you, is in the 20th century. Pushing the matter back farther brings even stranger things to the racial questions. Yet the characters of a work of fiction seldom slice up the human race into divisions much different than modern day ones.
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no subject
Date: 2013-06-15 06:06 pm (UTC)Or that, say, medieval European women were not universally or even mostly treated as mere soulless chattel -- they owned businesses, ran abbeys where they commanded male clergy and laity, ruled nations sometimes, etc. But no, 'everyone knows better'.
Heck, go and read some of Zora Neale Hurston's essays on what she referred to as "Our White Northern Friends (and yes, you can hear them use the capital letters)" and their utter dismay at finding Southern blacks living in real houses on real streets with real cars parked in front of them. Show that in a modern story and you'd probably be accused of being an apologist for racism.
Yes, you're right, but how much real history do people actually know?
no subject
Date: 2013-06-16 12:08 am (UTC)It's like being caught in the middle of the park, near no shelters, when the clouds opens. You will get wet no matter what you do, so there's no use trying to figure out what will stop your getting wet.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-16 08:16 am (UTC)It won't help the people who bale out after chapter 1 because they prefer their vision of the world to yours, and people will probably quibble with the afternote - but at least that way you stand a fighting chance of it not being completely dismissed as fanciful.
I think some writers manage to make a version of history sound so real and compelling that it doesn't *matter* to many readers if it fits their mental model: they start to want it to have been that way. Easier to describe than to do, perhaps - and doesn't work for all readers. I was desolated to discover from Amazon that there are even people for whom Ursula Le Guin's world-building clearly doesn't work - to which my reaction was like this:
=:-OOOOO
no subject
Date: 2013-06-16 03:07 pm (UTC)Though it does smart when they come to inflict their vincible ignorance on you. sigh The life of a writer, who needs to be like a snail -- very tender and sensitive on places, hard as a rock on others. The trick is mastering the art of pulling into the shell.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-16 04:12 pm (UTC)This does seem to work for Bernard Cornwell and Conn Iggulden
no subject
Date: 2013-06-16 05:13 pm (UTC)