caitri | Entries tagged with history

How often do men think about ancient Rome? Quite frequently, it seems.

I asked the boys:

Scott: Um, probably once a day when I think of quotes by Marcus Aurelius.

Todd: Okay. Probably every few weeks, or once a month, when I teach about the Vindolanda tablets.

Current Mood: amused

We lucked out and got walk-in tickets to the new African American History Museum on the Mall. (They just opened in September, and its a timed ticket thing, and they are booked up for months and months, BUT if you go to the side-entrance starting at 1pm you can get walk-in tix on a first-come first-serve basis.) When we went in and got maps, they said it would take maybe a floor to do each level. Um, no. In the five hours we had we only covered 2 floors, because we're the kind of museum-goers who look at and read everything. The two floors we saw were 1400-1865 and Reconstruction-Civil Rights era, so we missed the floors on contemporary cultural impact and so on. They do it a lot like the Holocaust Museum, there's a forward narrative going on and you're meant to start at one point and finish at the other.

We saw some really brilliant stuff: There's a whole section on Jefferson with a statue of him in front of bricks that have the names of the families he owned on them. They have the manuscript pages of the first draft of the Declaration of Independence which ~does talk about slavery, but those parts were removed because so politically controversial at the time. There's a sample correspondence between Jefferson and Benjamin Banneker, a free black man who basically wrote to call him on his bs. They also had a really effective audio element throughout the display areas playing different loops of audio recordings, and in the 1800s section they played excerpts from recordings made in the 1930s with surviving former slaves who talked about what they had seen and survived. In the Civil Rights section, they had shards from the bombed Birmingham Church, a stool from a sit-in, Rosa Parks' dress, and so on. My A&M peeps will appreciate that in the Black Colleges section that there are several images and also cornerstones from the Prairie View campus, which made me happy.

My only nitpicks were that I thought that the galleries' design impeded traffic flow, which they clearly knew going in because there are several informational placards that are duplicated, like they didn't expect people to read everything. *huff* But for instance, in the opening gallery the narrative starts in a hallway labeled "1400" with Europe on one side and Africa on the other, so if you read one side and want to read the other you have to go against traffic to do so. There were also a number of labels that were placed at angles within the cases, which meant that unless you stood at a very specific part the edge of the case meant you couldn't read it, which is kind of lame because of the aforementioned traffic issue. And let's be real, with timed tickets and the way it's set up, there is always going to be a traffic issue, you simply can't dart in and out the way you can with the other history museums. That said, I understand why they did it, they wanted to create a whole narrative and tell a story, which makes sense, even if it irks me. Hopefully we'll get to come back and look at the rest of it in a few years; they also had at least one section that was still being installed altogether, with an entire train car to show what segregated travel was like; I imagine there's other unfinished stuff too that will be forthcoming. I also darted into the shop to see if they had any exhibit catalogs for sale, but not yet; they had a book about the history of trying to get the museum built, and a short souvenir book that was images of highlights and so on. I really hope the next time I go they'll have some catalogs!!

Some links:

Created Equal: How Benjamin Banneker Challenged Jefferson on Race and Freedom

(Library of Congress Audio Collections) Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories

Current Mood: thoughtful

Last night we went to see Belle, a film I was very much looking forward to and was delighted to see playing in town.

Inspired by the true story of a legitimized mixed race daughter in the upper class of 18th c. England, the film flirts at being a romance even as it touches on one of the major legal stepping stones towards the abolition of slavery. After all, a woman in possession of a fortune must also be in search of a husband who isn't an utter douchebag.

Narratively, the film walks the line of "OMG there were black people in England!!!" and "be cool, there were TOTES black people in England." It doesn't always work; there's a tell-tale opening scene when a white dude in the shitty part of town picks up our young heroine and all of the white folks make goggle eyes. Like, there's only the two black people in the scene--the young girl and her aunt--but, come ON, there was a thriving community of ~250,000 blacks in London. Much later there's a scene when Belle and her cousin Elizabeth are in London for the season and Belle is struggling with combing her hair, and the black maid shows her that it's easiest to start from the ends. Which...it seems like this is the first time Belle has ever seen another black person? And I guess she's had to comb her hair the hard way for 21 years? The ONE SCENE with more than two black people in it is the climax at the end, when there are numerous black men in the balconies of the court, and NONE of them have lines, which reminded me uncomfortably of Django Unchained.

Newsflash, screenwriters: black people had a helluva lot to do with the abolitionist movement; it wasn't all just about white allies. JUST SAYIN'. (Amazing Grace is guilty of this sin too.)

I thought the film did a good job with the, ah, subtleties? flavors? of various kinds of racism too. Draco Malfoy appears as, er, Draco Malfoy--seriously, I kept waiting for him to call Belle a mudblood--who has nothing but disgust for Our Heroine, while his brother is the "nice" sort who thinks Belle's a babe and would totally be down with marrying her because she's rich and "overlook" the fact that she's brown and whatnot. Those conversations reminded me of all of the "Spock and his human mother" moments in Reboot; I was a little bit surprised that Belle actually didn't say "Live long and prosper" at the end there.

One of the things the film got very close to getting right was the friendship of Belle and Elizabeth, but even that was a little odd. Elizabeth hates that Belle can't eat with the family when company is over because reasons, and she's often sympathetic, but she is also absorbed in finding herself a husband and somehow can't tell Draco is a douche. There's also a scene where Belle is trying to explain that Draco is a douche and Elizabeth accuses her of lying and it's just an ugly, unfortunate scene that didn't really work for me on any level. It felt kind of shoved in, like someone said to the writers "you need to put some character tension in" and rather than say "you don't think 18th century mores make ENOUGH tension?!" they went ahead and did this.

Another narrative weakness was that the film never quite got at what the status of race actually WAS in ca. 1780. There's a scene where Belle asks if the black maid is a slave or not, and her uncle says that she's free and under his protection. "Like me," says Belle. Maybe a British audience would have been up on the fine points on this topic, though I doubt it, and the average American audience definitely wouldn't be. Seriously, a succinct three line paragraph at the beginning could have clarified this.

In short: it's a great film that's gorgeous, has great acting, and will hopefully be useful for having better conversations on race and history, but it also totally takes all of the easy paths of storytelling, and a complex story like this needed more.

Current Mood: thoughtful

I wanted to write a long post talking about all of these things in a thoughtful manner, then my brain popped. So here. HAVE ALL THE THINGS.

On Race and History:

It's Time to Talk About Black Tudors

One of the examples of Africans found in important jobs at the time is a man named Fortunatus, who was in the employ of Robert Cecil, a member of Queen Elizabeth I’s Privy Council, proving that blacks in Tudor times were not always confined to the lower classes. Black representation in 16th and 17th Century art and literature was not unusual. Juriaen Van Streeck (1632-1687)’s painting “A Still Life with a Moorish Servant” depicts a Black man. Jan Brueghel, a prominent Flemish artist also has paintings of Black subjects.

With well-cited facts, records and other documents, credibility is lent to an under-researched and generally unpopular area. Onyeka Nubia acknowledges the challenges of working on such a neglected topic and stresses the history of the African diaspora be “taken more seriously.” Nubia carefully details the problems faced when researching the historical data of blacks — it begs the question, why are modern historians so uncomfortable with discussing the historical Black presence in Renaissance Europe? This is an area of history that hegemonic historians ignore.

Tudor Africans: What's in a Name?

It appears, then, that descriptions of Africans as Blackamoores, Moors, Negroes and Ethiopians in documents, parish records, books and letters from the 16th to the early 17th centuries could be used interchangeably. Of course this does not resolve all the issues related to these meanings. Did Africans choose the various terms that were used in parish records to describe them or were they imposed on them? Did the terms Blackamoore, Moor and Negro really ‘smell as sweet,’ investing those described thus with status and respect or did they have pejorative connotations that reflected perceptions of Africans as dejected strangers, immigrants and perpetual slaves? The evidence uncovered so far suggests that at least some Africans had a sense of their own ethnic identity and not all were slaves.

As the English merchant and trader Thomas Sherley says in 1600: ‘All the Blackamoores in England are regarded but only for the strangeness of their nation and not for service to the Queen.’ But the evidence uncovered so far suggests that his view is not reflective of how most people felt in Tudor England.

On Fandom:

Johnlocked: Sherlock, Slash Fiction and the Shaming of Female Fans

The gendered stereotyping of female fans has a long history: Horton and Wohl, in 1956, described fandom as a surrogate relationship and focused on "para-social interactions": the illusory relationships fans form with celebrities[2]. Joli Jenson noted that literature on fandom argues that fans "suffer from psychological inadequacy, and [...] seek contact with famous people in order to compensate for their own inadequate lives"[3]. More recently Melissa A. Click, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz note that public commentary on Twilight "positions girls and women as unexpected and unwelcome media fans, and denies the long and rich history of the relationships female fans have had with media texts and personalities"[4], and the publication of E L James's Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy in 2012 resulted in hundreds of articles about the emergence of female sexuality and erotica – their authors apparently unaware that women have been consuming porn for years.

That the language of twenty, thirty, and even sixty years ago is still being used to discuss female fans – and only very rarely to discuss male fans – points to the continuing way in which female responses to texts are dismissed. Steven Moffat himself has argued on more than one occasion that women only watch Sherlock because of their attraction to Benedict Cumberbatch. Female fans are held to be unable to appreciate a show’s intellectual prowess, rather they are in it for the men. That is, incidentally, one of the criticisms aimed at slash writers. Jacqueline M. Pinkowitz[5] notes how the activities of Twilight fans are still seen as culturally dismissible, and how, even with the recent publication of books like Anne Jamison’s Fic making fanfiction and slash more mainstream, slash writers are still met with suspicion.

Fifty Shades of Remix: The Intersecting Pleasures of Commercial and Fan Romances

Fifty Shades of Grey's past as a work of Twilight fan fiction has turned a spotlight onto the conversion of fan works for the commercial romance market. Fifty Shades reminds us of the increasing flow of texts, readers, and writers across these two categories of storytelling. Blurring traditional genre categories, stories like Fifty Shades represent a challenge for fan and popular romance studies. While scholars need to be attentive to medium specific contexts, the impulse to deny intersection may signal problematic assumptions and artificially segregate these storytelling forms. This paper reexamines past work on the differences between fan fiction and romance, arguing for greater attentiveness to the ways these two modes of storytelling intersect. Focusing on the importance of intertextuality and play with form in romantic storytelling, the paper argues that greater attention to these qualities offers new ways for us to study texts like Fifty Shades of Grey and may help scholars reconceptualize the relationship between fan and commercial work.

On the SFWA fracas:

Apparently, these guys don't want women to write science fiction

A conversation on a science-fiction forum this week revealed a section of the community that's teeming with indignation about recent attempts to make the genre more progressive.

Just when readers thought the dust had settled on last week’s debate about “political correctness” in sci-fi publishing, a group of highly influential writers spent the past few days lamenting the rise of increasingly vocal women and minorities in their community. The discussion happened on a list-serv thread where the participants apparently thought no one would notice them—at least until they remembered all their posts were public.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Me, as a useful representative example

So this is why I feel weird about writing about this. My impulse is to tell you all that I’m fine and that this has no material affect on my life. And that is true. But I also know that I am a useful representative sample of the abuse that happens to other women.

I know that there are a ton of women who have received similar messages — and can we stop pretending that sexism is happening because it’s SFWA? Sexism happens all the time. It’s visible in SFWA because people are actively fighting against it.

Cheap Tarts expands a bit more on the attacks on Kowal specifically (and women generally):

If Mary decided to wear a Lady Gaga meat suit to a con I don’t think that it would be much of my business. However my point is: While people talk about the freedom to have a cheesecake Red Sonja and how this is an important cause to fight for, we are busy judging what a writer wears and her personal appearance. A woman is constantly under scrutiny even in situations where you would think she would be safe of such scrutiny (at a convention and awards ceremonies, for example).

But women must put up with this stuff all the time. Dress nice, but not too nice or some dude will think you are some sort of tart and criticize you for your necklines. Be social, but not too social because then you are some kind of attention whore. Smile. Play nice. Don’t complain. I’ve been called fat, ugly, a lesbian for writing pretty mild blog posts such as this one. And not only by random trolls. Sean P. Fodera, as he likes to remind everyone in his posts, works in the publishing industry.

You can imagine the constant state of paranoia a woman can live in when casual comments on message boards treat her as insignificant, stupid, and the like. This is the kind of shit we deal with on a regular basis. And then you wonder why we worry about sexism and stuff like that? It burns. It really does.

Would you like some tits with your guild?

We make fun of romance novelists but their organization seems capable of not pasting Fabio’s ass on the cover. Meanwhile, Truesdale is fighting for your right to have a badly painted chain-mail bikini Red Sonja wannabe.

John Scalzi: Join the Insect Army

“The problem is that the ‘vocal minority’ of insects who make up the new generation of writers don’t scramble for the shadows when outside lights shines on them—they bare their pincers and go for the jugular. Maybe it is a good thing that SFWA keeps them locked up. The newer members who Scalzi et al. brought in are an embarrassment to the genre.” — (name withheld) on SFF.net, during the recent unpleasantness.

Heh heh heh.

I realize, of course, that the person who wrote the comment above meant “insect” as an insult. But what do we know about insects? They are numerous, adaptable, highly successful as a class, and, when they put their mind to it, absolutely unstoppable. No wonder this person seems absolutely terrified.

N.K. Jemisen: Pretty much the only comment I’ll make here on the current SFWA shenanigans

But context matters. Ethics matter. The guy initiating this petition has an extensive history of filling some of the most visible parts of the SFFsphere with his misogyny, homophobia, and other choice bigotries. He often wraps these ideas in anti-political-correctness freedom-fighting MURRICA flag-waving, but when it comes down to it, that’s what this petition is pushing for — this guy’s right to be a bigoted asshole, essentially unchallenged, in SFWA publications. Ditto a few other (mostly older, white, straight) guys’ right to do the same; this freedom to spout hate and fear and contempt for whole swaths of people is a privilege they once gleefully embraced, and they’re mad because it’s not the norm of professionalism anymore. They want it re-normalized. And by standing up not for artistic expression, but for the violent, exclusionary rhetoric that has made SFFdom such a hostile environment for many non-male non-straight non-white people, every signatory on that petition has basically laughed at the First Amendment. This has squat to do with freedom of expression. It’s about making sure the old (sorry, “The Old”) white guys get to talk how they want about the “furry pussies” and the “savages” and the “metrosexuals”, while making sure the targets of their vitriol STFU, waste energy defending their right to exist unobjectified, or leave the profession. That’s basically the opposite of what the First Amendment is supposed to do.

And yeah, I get that part of the problem here is that some of the petition’s signatories feel marginalized. Yet somehow Truesdale had a column in F&SF for years, and somehow Malzberg and Resnick had the SFWA Bulletin as a platform for years. And somehow lots of these signatories are bestsellers or former SFWA officers or have earned the highest awards in our genre, as the petition so-helpfully emphasized.

But you don’t get to claim marginalization when you’re at the center of a thing. You can’t endorse the efforts of bigots to establish a safe space for their bigotry, and then plausibly claim you’re not one of them. You don’t get to pretend that you’re in the demographic minority when you’re… not.

ETA: Information Just Wants To Be Free Tumblr collects "the best of" the comments thread regarding the matter on the SFWA listserv. (That Awkward Moment When Everyone Remembers This Is a Public List-serv totally deserves to be a meme.)

Current Mood: thoughtful

So this is a really interesting speech and I love that it's about *words.* And Joss supplies "genderist" as an analog to "racist" to contextualize, to acknowledge this whole history up until "we realized it was wrong"--and, here's the thing, HISTORY ISN'T LIKE THAT.

Lemme back up a sec.

The more and more reading I do the more I realize that history is utterly constructed. (This is me saying the obvious. Imma gonna do that a lot.) Twentieth century narratives were constructed in reaction to the nineteenth century (look how much we've improved!) which were constructed in reaction to the eighteenth century (REVOLUTIONDEATHANARCHYSEXOHMYGOD) which was constructed in reaction to the seventeenth century (....REVOLUTIONDEATHANARCHYSEXOHMYGOD!!!!!), etc. etc. But within each and everyone of those centuries you also have women who are fighting the status quo and there are men championing them too and then you have something like a dam opening up and then teabaggers making more laws. It's basically like BSG on repeat, constantly.

And right now, I know so many good guys who are feminists and who are smart, and who also total enable the problem. (Seriously, the older I get the more I totally think that separating the sexes is just the best off for sanity.) And they don't see themselves as enabling the problem at all. (I'm not sure if Joss is one or not. That'll require more time and reflection than I have today.)

Anyways, I wanted to think and rant. There you go.

Current Mood: thoughtful

I don't like being glad someone is dead, but--I really really am.

Soooo, now what?

Current Mood: schadenfreude?

I am astonished.

1) McCain acting like a decent human being. I almost like him again.

2) Hi, human race. You're surprising me. I kinda love you now.

Current Mood: ecstatic

First, how awesome is the October issue of Harper's Magazine? 'Cause Naomi Klein has a great essay on disaster capitalism in it.

Next, Viacom is putting ALL episodes of The Daily Show online at http://www.thedailyshow.com/. Including the Craig Kilborn ones. They're not all up yet, but a lot are. God, Jon Stewart in 1999 looks so young and innocent.

Last, Lewis H. Lapham is starting a new historical magazine called Lapham's Quarterly. The first issue is out Nov. 13 and I am so picking it up, but I'll probably get a subscription, cos: ooh, pretty.

Current Mood: cheerful

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About that Roman Empire Trend
Notes from the New African American History Museum in DC
Movie Review: Belle
Today's Recommended Reading!
So...let's talk about Genderists?
This Emotion Makes Me Uncomfortable
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Just a Sci-Fi Kid Like Me

i'm a digital brat with an insect mind

Entries tagged with history

About that Roman Empire Trend

Notes from the New African American History Museum in DC

Movie Review: Belle

Today's Recommended Reading!

So...let's talk about Genderists?

This Emotion Makes Me Uncomfortable

Hey Look, History

Random Assortment of Neat Things