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Re: The Summer Prince -- lots of thoughts (a few on sex, most on location)
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From: Sarah Hamburg <srhf92_at_hampshire.edu>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 10:09:24 -0400
Thank you so much for this, Ebony.
I know it isn't the subject under discussion now, but I can't help thinking about how much this intersects with the conversation from last month-- and how so much of what was being talked about or around returned to other forms of myth-making, and the discomfort of being called to engage with a historicized reality. Though, of course, we each come to this from different spaces, and those approaches also bring different meanings.
Not to digress too much, but in the realm of fantastic fiction: I do wonder about the possibility of creating any new tradition that is somehow innocent? Tolkein's own imaginings harken back to Norse, Finnish, Celtic... etc. mythologies, with perhaps complicated dynamics in these appropriations and admixtures as well. Not that originality, or a novelty rooted in a tradition aren't possible, but maybe this never happens completely free of other histories?
This isn't specifically about sexuality, either, but many of my thoughts about The Summer Prince had to do with maybe related questions regarding de-centering. Initially, I loved that so much of the novel did seem to include the upending of dominant conventions: the story is set in a future where the US has no centrality, the society is matriarchal, age is privileged over youth, sexualities aren't judged against a "standard", white doesn't exist... On the other hand, there are still familiar hierarchies, as represented by the pyramid structure. Class is the most obvious untouched construct, and it still intersects with race (though I can't say I fully understood where concepts of class originated in the society. I understood the algae, which divided living quarters into desirable and undesirable, and the notion of self-preservation through the exclusion of those outside. But I didn't have enough of a sense of the internal economics of the society to fully appreciate how those divisions were perpetuated in the present, or how they still served those at the top. Besides that which is vestigial.)
As the book went on, though, I began to feel more and more that many of the elements were slipping back into something more centered in a dominant story. Though I appreciated the concept that sexuality was fluid, I can't say that the homosexual relationships felt as developed or multi-dimensional to me as the heterosexual relationships. (Part of this may be related to the main character's perspective: June obviously cares much more for her father than for her mother's new wife, so we don't get the same sense of depth in that second relationship. June also knows more about her own relationship with Enki, so we in turn experience more of it than we do his relationship with Gil.) Still, despite assertions to the contrary, for me there was a way that June's relationship with Enki took on a primacy that seemed to bring heterosexuality back to the center. Similarly, the ending put youth back in the center... and though June is supposed to shake up the persistent status quo-- the ending still has the character from the bottom of the pyramid sacrificing himself to preserve and enable her position at the very top (even if he continues to advise her as some form of data stream.) The outside world also remains firmly other as well.
I guess I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to read this as being part of what the book was about. Was the story a commentary on the persistence of these frameworks? Or did the story slip back to a more familiar center unintentionally? Or, was this only my reading?
(I'm also selfishly interested in the technical question of whether it's possible to explore notions of de-centering within a narrative that centers a main character with privilege-- this is something I'm questioning in my own work, too. I also wonder if this question takes on added dimensions in fantasy, where so much of the dominant tradition is tied to stories of privilege: gods, royalty, the elite, and those singled out as special. Is it possible to have a fantasy that shares power, if the story focuses on singular heroism?)
None of this is to take away from what I saw as remarkable strengths in the book! Just questions that kept returning.
Sarah
Subject: Re: The Summer Prince -- lots of thoughts (a few on sex, most on location) From: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas <ebonyt_at_gse.upenn.edu> Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:17:26 -0400 (EDT) X-Message-Number: 2
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 Me
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Received on Wed 19 Mar 2014 09:10:02 AM CDT
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 10:09:24 -0400
Thank you so much for this, Ebony.
I know it isn't the subject under discussion now, but I can't help thinking about how much this intersects with the conversation from last month-- and how so much of what was being talked about or around returned to other forms of myth-making, and the discomfort of being called to engage with a historicized reality. Though, of course, we each come to this from different spaces, and those approaches also bring different meanings.
Not to digress too much, but in the realm of fantastic fiction: I do wonder about the possibility of creating any new tradition that is somehow innocent? Tolkein's own imaginings harken back to Norse, Finnish, Celtic... etc. mythologies, with perhaps complicated dynamics in these appropriations and admixtures as well. Not that originality, or a novelty rooted in a tradition aren't possible, but maybe this never happens completely free of other histories?
This isn't specifically about sexuality, either, but many of my thoughts about The Summer Prince had to do with maybe related questions regarding de-centering. Initially, I loved that so much of the novel did seem to include the upending of dominant conventions: the story is set in a future where the US has no centrality, the society is matriarchal, age is privileged over youth, sexualities aren't judged against a "standard", white doesn't exist... On the other hand, there are still familiar hierarchies, as represented by the pyramid structure. Class is the most obvious untouched construct, and it still intersects with race (though I can't say I fully understood where concepts of class originated in the society. I understood the algae, which divided living quarters into desirable and undesirable, and the notion of self-preservation through the exclusion of those outside. But I didn't have enough of a sense of the internal economics of the society to fully appreciate how those divisions were perpetuated in the present, or how they still served those at the top. Besides that which is vestigial.)
As the book went on, though, I began to feel more and more that many of the elements were slipping back into something more centered in a dominant story. Though I appreciated the concept that sexuality was fluid, I can't say that the homosexual relationships felt as developed or multi-dimensional to me as the heterosexual relationships. (Part of this may be related to the main character's perspective: June obviously cares much more for her father than for her mother's new wife, so we don't get the same sense of depth in that second relationship. June also knows more about her own relationship with Enki, so we in turn experience more of it than we do his relationship with Gil.) Still, despite assertions to the contrary, for me there was a way that June's relationship with Enki took on a primacy that seemed to bring heterosexuality back to the center. Similarly, the ending put youth back in the center... and though June is supposed to shake up the persistent status quo-- the ending still has the character from the bottom of the pyramid sacrificing himself to preserve and enable her position at the very top (even if he continues to advise her as some form of data stream.) The outside world also remains firmly other as well.
I guess I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to read this as being part of what the book was about. Was the story a commentary on the persistence of these frameworks? Or did the story slip back to a more familiar center unintentionally? Or, was this only my reading?
(I'm also selfishly interested in the technical question of whether it's possible to explore notions of de-centering within a narrative that centers a main character with privilege-- this is something I'm questioning in my own work, too. I also wonder if this question takes on added dimensions in fantasy, where so much of the dominant tradition is tied to stories of privilege: gods, royalty, the elite, and those singled out as special. Is it possible to have a fantasy that shares power, if the story focuses on singular heroism?)
None of this is to take away from what I saw as remarkable strengths in the book! Just questions that kept returning.
Sarah
Subject: Re: The Summer Prince -- lots of thoughts (a few on sex, most on location) From: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas <ebonyt_at_gse.upenn.edu> Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:17:26 -0400 (EDT) X-Message-Number: 2
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 Me
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Received on Wed 19 Mar 2014 09:10:02 AM CDT
