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Re: The Summer Prince -- lots of thoughts (a few on sex, most on location)
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From: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas <ebonyt_at_gse.upenn.edu>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:17:26 -0400 (EDT)
This was the 2013 YA novel that stayed with me the longest. I was so struck by it that I put it on my YA lit master's seminar syllabus.
My students (mostly early 20somethings) were fine with the sexuality as portrayed but a couple felt as if June wasn't "relatable." We have been thinking (and talking!) a lot about relatability in class. It's actually a topic that Liz B covered on her SLJ blog this month. (Liz was a guest speaker in our class today.)
I especially appreciated the way that sexuality was fluid and not static in that world. The way that my Generation X friends and I describe sex, love, and marriage is along a single continuum, something along the lines of the Kinsey scale. But I see a flowering in the ways that young people are describing their identities online -- gender, sexuality, romantic attraction, and affinities for friendship aren't just binary anymore. It makes sense to me that 500 years in the future, one loves whom one loves. I think it's one of the best features of the book.
I thought Johnson's worldbuilding was solid. Yet I read the perspectives of the Brazilian librarian with interest... and quite a bit of guilt. My longest fanfic was set mostly in Brazil, and I've never been there. I've asked myself why I chose Brazil as a location, too.
I don't think that many outside of the Black community know this, but there was an upswing of interest in Brazilian educational and cultural tourism among middle-class African Americans in the 1990s and 2000s. The thinking (at least, as I understood it) was that the cultural loss and trauma of Atlantic slavery had been far less severe in Brazil than it had been in the United States. I wanted to write a world with magical characters of color, so I set the fic in the most magical place I could think of at the time. Johnson says she had Brazilians look over her manuscripts -- I did the same with my fic. However, back then, I didn't yet have the analytical tools or the critical lenses to understand that I, too, could appropriate other cultur es.
While writing that story, I stumbled upon the community forums at brazzil.net, where people from all over the world who loved Brazil converged. It was there that I was shaken out of my fantasy as I read a heated exchange between a Brazilian anthropologist, Macunaima, and an African American woman. The woman was determined to keep her allochronic vision of Bahia as an "Afrotopia" when she retired to live, so she kept insisting that Brazil was less racist than the United States. The anthropologist was highly offended. He wrote something on that thread that affected me so profoundly that I saved it to mull over:
Myth-making is not a good cure for amnesia. In fact, given your original statement as to "stagnant" African culture, it seems that your amnesia has resulted in your unconscious incorporation of some incredibly racist opinions and beliefs. This is why myth-making is dangerous for subordinate peoples: your imagination is more controlled by the dominant social formation that you're probably willing to admit. Only by deep and wide engagement with history can we begin to reconstruct a reasonable notion as to what has happened and why.
New Orleans, Haiti, Brazil (specifically, Bahia) , or "someplace in Africa" -- those are the locations of the dark fantastic. Zetta Elliott talks about the politics of locating speculative fiction with Black characters in the latest issue of Je unesse, "The Trouble With Magic." Another locus for these conversations lately has been MedievalPOC Tumblr blog, which has generated much discussion in fan cultures and among art historians alike, and challenges notions of when a "dark fantastic" could have happened.
But I think there is a unique challenge for authors of the African Diaspora who are “looking back” for deep, ancestral sources to inspire world-building -- in a world with structural inequalities, if you're setting up a fantastic world, when does your world happen, and where is it? The answer for many Black Americans is that magic is over there, not now, and not for us. That's why I've always believed that Tolkien's project -- to build a uniquely English mythopoeia -- is inspiring. It's one of the reasons why The Silmarillion is one of my favorite books . We've been using that mythopoeia in the English speaking world for quite a long time.
I'm wondering what other mythopoeias might look like. But I think The Summer Prince is a giant leap forward. I'm glad Scholastic published it.
My best,
Ebony
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:17:26 -0400 (EDT)
This was the 2013 YA novel that stayed with me the longest. I was so struck by it that I put it on my YA lit master's seminar syllabus.
My students (mostly early 20somethings) were fine with the sexuality as portrayed but a couple felt as if June wasn't "relatable." We have been thinking (and talking!) a lot about relatability in class. It's actually a topic that Liz B covered on her SLJ blog this month. (Liz was a guest speaker in our class today.)
I especially appreciated the way that sexuality was fluid and not static in that world. The way that my Generation X friends and I describe sex, love, and marriage is along a single continuum, something along the lines of the Kinsey scale. But I see a flowering in the ways that young people are describing their identities online -- gender, sexuality, romantic attraction, and affinities for friendship aren't just binary anymore. It makes sense to me that 500 years in the future, one loves whom one loves. I think it's one of the best features of the book.
I thought Johnson's worldbuilding was solid. Yet I read the perspectives of the Brazilian librarian with interest... and quite a bit of guilt. My longest fanfic was set mostly in Brazil, and I've never been there. I've asked myself why I chose Brazil as a location, too.
I don't think that many outside of the Black community know this, but there was an upswing of interest in Brazilian educational and cultural tourism among middle-class African Americans in the 1990s and 2000s. The thinking (at least, as I understood it) was that the cultural loss and trauma of Atlantic slavery had been far less severe in Brazil than it had been in the United States. I wanted to write a world with magical characters of color, so I set the fic in the most magical place I could think of at the time. Johnson says she had Brazilians look over her manuscripts -- I did the same with my fic. However, back then, I didn't yet have the analytical tools or the critical lenses to understand that I, too, could appropriate other cultur es.
While writing that story, I stumbled upon the community forums at brazzil.net, where people from all over the world who loved Brazil converged. It was there that I was shaken out of my fantasy as I read a heated exchange between a Brazilian anthropologist, Macunaima, and an African American woman. The woman was determined to keep her allochronic vision of Bahia as an "Afrotopia" when she retired to live, so she kept insisting that Brazil was less racist than the United States. The anthropologist was highly offended. He wrote something on that thread that affected me so profoundly that I saved it to mull over:
Myth-making is not a good cure for amnesia. In fact, given your original statement as to "stagnant" African culture, it seems that your amnesia has resulted in your unconscious incorporation of some incredibly racist opinions and beliefs. This is why myth-making is dangerous for subordinate peoples: your imagination is more controlled by the dominant social formation that you're probably willing to admit. Only by deep and wide engagement with history can we begin to reconstruct a reasonable notion as to what has happened and why.
New Orleans, Haiti, Brazil (specifically, Bahia) , or "someplace in Africa" -- those are the locations of the dark fantastic. Zetta Elliott talks about the politics of locating speculative fiction with Black characters in the latest issue of Je unesse, "The Trouble With Magic." Another locus for these conversations lately has been MedievalPOC Tumblr blog, which has generated much discussion in fan cultures and among art historians alike, and challenges notions of when a "dark fantastic" could have happened.
But I think there is a unique challenge for authors of the African Diaspora who are “looking back” for deep, ancestral sources to inspire world-building -- in a world with structural inequalities, if you're setting up a fantastic world, when does your world happen, and where is it? The answer for many Black Americans is that magic is over there, not now, and not for us. That's why I've always believed that Tolkien's project -- to build a uniquely English mythopoeia -- is inspiring. It's one of the reasons why The Silmarillion is one of my favorite books . We've been using that mythopoeia in the English speaking world for quite a long time.
I'm wondering what other mythopoeias might look like. But I think The Summer Prince is a giant leap forward. I'm glad Scholastic published it.
My best,
Ebony
--
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Reading/Writing/Literacy Division
Graduate School of Education
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216
Office: (215) 898-9309
Email: ebonyt_at_gse.upenn.edu
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Received on Tue 18 Mar 2014 08:18:07 PM CDT
