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Still reading bell hooks
Mar. 29th, 2007 01:37 pmIt is taking me a really long time to get through this book (Killing Rage: Ending Racism) because one essay at a time is a brainful. The book isn't long, but it is dense and requires self-reflection. Of course, as I mentioned, I am using it for my own (exploitative? decolonizing?) ends, as I grapple with the weirdo social structure I set up in my novel.
Wait a minute. It's not a weirdo social structure. I'm trying to work out how magic and slavery would have overlapped in late medieval Europe. They were both there as part of the mindset. They're both parts that, when we look back on the period, we tend to elide. So I don't know why trying to imagine them together should make my brain try to push off at the edges, but it does.
Anway, one of the things I find most interesting in Ms. hooks's essays is her use of this phrase "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" which is always used slung together like one long noun.
As far as my story goes, I struggle with how much writing down how things seem to have been, based on history books, is racist or not. I honestly can't think of many fantasy books set in a Europe like setting that grapple with slavery. The literary convention is that slavery is something that happens in an "other" space - our hero journeys to this "other" space, confronts the psychological horror of white involvement in and benefit from slavery, and then journeys back. The historical fact that the slavery was at home too tends to get worked around. And the weird sexualization of black slaves by white owners, the commodification and pseudoscientific study of every aspect of their bodies - all of this seems racist just even to talk about. And then you bring in the magic and remind the reader that magic and science were radically overlapped in the middle ages (Newton the alchemist, anyone? and that was even later). So of course in a medieval fantasy story where magic works, there would be magicians involved in slavery, magicians making spells on or with slaves, etc. And if magic worked, then the slaves would have magic too, and what would that mean to their confrontation with the slave-owners? If you've got the internal ability to burn others with magical fire, what does your slavery look like? What keeps you captive? How do you rebel, and how successful is your rebellion?
Wait a minute. It's not a weirdo social structure. I'm trying to work out how magic and slavery would have overlapped in late medieval Europe. They were both there as part of the mindset. They're both parts that, when we look back on the period, we tend to elide. So I don't know why trying to imagine them together should make my brain try to push off at the edges, but it does.
Anway, one of the things I find most interesting in Ms. hooks's essays is her use of this phrase "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" which is always used slung together like one long noun.
As far as my story goes, I struggle with how much writing down how things seem to have been, based on history books, is racist or not. I honestly can't think of many fantasy books set in a Europe like setting that grapple with slavery. The literary convention is that slavery is something that happens in an "other" space - our hero journeys to this "other" space, confronts the psychological horror of white involvement in and benefit from slavery, and then journeys back. The historical fact that the slavery was at home too tends to get worked around. And the weird sexualization of black slaves by white owners, the commodification and pseudoscientific study of every aspect of their bodies - all of this seems racist just even to talk about. And then you bring in the magic and remind the reader that magic and science were radically overlapped in the middle ages (Newton the alchemist, anyone? and that was even later). So of course in a medieval fantasy story where magic works, there would be magicians involved in slavery, magicians making spells on or with slaves, etc. And if magic worked, then the slaves would have magic too, and what would that mean to their confrontation with the slave-owners? If you've got the internal ability to burn others with magical fire, what does your slavery look like? What keeps you captive? How do you rebel, and how successful is your rebellion?
