[Literature/inclusivity/race] So I normally don't like to touch the stuff that comes out of the YA readership community because THEY CAN BE A LOT, but this is making the rounds and I ended up having a lot of feelings about its tone and lack of self-critique. CW for well-intentioned people accidentally gatekeeping I guess?
Lists like these aren't inherently terrible. They're designed to get people reading, and reading isn't a bad thing. They want to get people reading particularly non-canonical material, and questioning a canon is also a good skill to have
but a lot of these categories make me feel kind of. Icky, for lack of a better term. There's something self-aggrandizing about basically receiving a list of boxes to check off and make yourself feel like a good person
"02. A book with a disabled main character" - Differences in ability are certainly important to include, but does it matter how the source material treats the disability? Is it in the style of victorian madness narratives that reinforce problematic ideas about who is allowed to be neurotypical? Is it something fetishtic from an able-bodied person
The Glass Menagerie inspires a lot of people when people encounter it - is it applicable here, or does it get shot down for being the domain of canonical white dudes?
Ah, here it is -- I knew there was one entry that made me go "!!!!!!!!!" and didn't immediately find it again: "09. A translated work (or, if you speak multiple languages, a book in one of them)"
I think that when questioning canonicity and trying to break away from it, there's gotten to be this idea that English is the language of colonialism and that everything non-english is new and better
"12. A book with a POC main character" as with the disability note, this feels like the equivalent of "I'm not a racist because look at how many black friends I have"
But should you? Literature is rife with people writing inauthentic stories about people of color. Ooronoko is credited as the first English-language novel, was written by a woman, and is the story of a black man kidnapped and sold into slavery, which is every bit as problematic as it sounds
And there is value inherent in looking at this european white lady hanging out in London while she fantasizes about what slave revolts in the new world are probably like. But I'm not sure this kind of list is even asking for that level of critique to come into play?
is Eat Pray Love applicable here because it's about a white woman touring the world and learning to find personal peace in fetishizing/exoticizing asian cultures she knows almost nothing about?
that list is very well intentioned and some people will use it for good and to discover works they wouldnt have thought to explore before, but...... white liberalism gonna white liberalism
ᴇʟɪsᴀsᴜᴇ 💉
: HELLO DANNI I WAS HOPING TO FIND YOU HERE since you've touched the back end of publishing and know a lot about the bullshit cultures that produce a lot of these things
also we started this series of trying to get guest posts from our authors and guess who never got credited for doing the initial groundwork for it loooooooooool
I am 100% in favor of white people (including myself) making a concerted effort to diversify the kinds of books we read, but yeah, it definitely feels kinda ooky to see it literally gamified into a bingo card to be filled out
and when you think about it in context of what's going down with the RWA diversity chair getting heat from the romance community because she called white members out on their racism (and was accused of being racist herself because of her wording)
yeah, all of this plurk brought the RWA shitshow to my mind; I've noticed a lot of performative wokeness in my social circles, and it's a lot of why I have a zero tolerance policy regarding that
i get wanting to broaden your reading and to seek out authors that wouldn't otherwise cross your mind bc as it turns out, that's hard to do if you're not actively in that mindset!! but... whiteness is a hell of a drug
I can even see how the alien thing might have been relevant to the person who put the list together! In a lot of instances, people use fantasy races as proxies to talk about real racism to keep from unsettling the "eScApIsM sHoUlDn'T bE pOlItIcAl" people
And it doesn’t have to be homework either tbh... I guarantee you, whatever your personal taste in fiction, there are marginalized authors writing stories in that genre
"09. A translated work (or, if you speak multiple languages, a book in one of them)"
How does this jive with fantasy/scifi novels, I wonder?
c....an we be more specific