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RE: The Summer Prince -- lots of thoughts (a few on sex, most on location)
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From: Charles Bayless <charles.bayless_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 16:15:23 -0400
Ebony said: “I don't think that many outside of the Black community know this, but there was an upswing of interest in Brazilian educational and . . .” and also “I think there is a unique challenge for authors . . .”
Ebony,
I hope this becomes a topic for future discussion. There is a very dynamic interaction between Truth-Seekers (“Only by deep and wide engagement with history can we begin to reconstruct a reasonable notion as to what has happened and why”) and Myth-Makers (“she kept insisting that Brazil was less racist than the United States”). Neither position is bad and there are benefits to both but they are different lenses and you see things differently. The trick is, to paraphrase the Queen in Through the Looking Glass, to believe six inconsistent things before breakfast, to be both a Truth-Seeker and a Myth-Maker. And to realize that it is “a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Truth-Seeking involves trying to understand the past to comprehend and manage the present. Myth-Making often involves recasting the past and present as a predicate towards a better future. Truth-Seeking might be said to be an epistemological exercise whereas Myth-Making is an psychological one (particularly with regard to motivation).
I was aware of the elevation of Brazil on a racial equity pedestal back in the 80’s. Earlier in the 70s there was a similar argument and positioning regarding Cuba. Currently there is a similar dynamic regarding gender policies in Europe. The emotional desire for a Utopia where things are better is longstanding across all cultures though it is sometimes framed quite differently; a future religious paradise, a golden age in the past, etc. And the desire to believe there is a better, more perfect country elsewhere in the real world is also a long standing flaw. A less sensitive example would be international economic competitiveness. In the 80s the US was having its manufacturing clock cleaned by the Japanese and there was a pervasive concern bordering on hysteria that Japan was trending towards global economic domination. There were rivers of research papers, policy positions and books profiling the threat from Japan and what it was that they were doing (education policy, manufacturing policy, social policy, cultural attributes) to be so successful and which the US ought to emulate. And then the house of cards collapsed and interest in Japan subsided to be replaced by a fear of China. China is now the bête noire of economic competitiveness and again pundits look to see what in their culture, education policies, etc. can be emulated. The desire to find perfection elsewhere is common (myth-making), even if it is often not well grounded in factual reality (truth-seeking).
James Fallows, the Atlantic writer and author, lived in Japan and China for a couple of years in the early eighties, before the collapse, to try and understand what was going on, what was making the Japanese successful, and what cultural attributes and government policies could actually feasibly be transferred from one unique country to another. He wrote a very perceptive book about the experience, More Like Us, which correctly identified that there was little that could be translated from Japan to the US. That their then success was the result of a huge number of intertwined policies and cultural attributes that could not be surgically extracted and transplanted. Instead, we had to be More Like US, i.e. leverage our comparative systemic and cultural strengths.
The reason I dwell on Fallows is that it is an example of the desire to see the US as having failed at something (economic policy, education policy, race, gender, etc.) and seeking solutions in mythical alternate realities (such as economic Japan in the eighties). The myth-making creates powerful incentives to make changes, and that is important. But it is also important to have the Truth-Seekers such as Fallows who try and understand the complex reality of things. Are Cuba or Brazil countries of racial tranquility and equity? Absolutely not. Different, certainly. Better in some aspects and worse in others. But a model for others? Depends on what you want. Are European countries’ gender policies better than those in the US? Absolutely not. Different, certainly. Better in some aspects and worse in others. But a model for others? Depends on what you want. Most European policies that look so appealing are indistinguishable from pronatalist policies designed to encourage women to have more children. Not necessarily a bad thing, and certainly necessary to support the European socio-economic models. So if your goal is to make it easier for women to have children, then Europe serves as a great example for emulation of gender policies. If your goal is to make it easier for women to have a variety choices among maternity and professions, then the US clearly has more women at higher levels of achievement in more fields of competitive endeavor than virtually anywhere else. The grass is only greener depending on the hue of your glasses.
Thomas Sowell did some fascinating research back in the eighties and nineties about affirmative action around the world and about “model” minorities, i.e. diaspora minorities with significant economic success in alien countries (Lebanese in Africa, Igbo in West Africa, Indians in East and Southern Africa and in Britain, Chinese in Southeast Asia, Jews in Europe and North America, Scots in the Anglophone, etc.). One of the key themes was that much of what we view as American racial issues are really products of minority condition (i.e. being a minority whether by race, religion or culture). So diaspora minorities can be a model in terms of academic and economic achievement but they still face systemic challenges arising simply from being the Other regardless of country and particular historical circumstance. The other theme was one that occasionally has been mentioned in this forum; that much of what is deemed to be race-related is actually class.
I think it would be great to discuss the manifestation and tension in children’s literature between myth-making and truth-seeking.
Your penultimate paragraph is also a rich discussion. Most people for most of history have lived in a world of structural inequalities. The ubiquity and dominance of Anglophone culture and traditions is not more than 100 years old. It is hard to remember that Britain was invaded repeatedly over the centuries, occupied by foreigners repeatedly, and was low man on the European pyramid of power until quite recently. Your reference to Tolkien is an interesting example. I am not a literary scholar but my impression is that while the Tolkien project might have been intended as an English myth, it is actually very much a synthesis of Anglo-Saxon, Dane, Celt, Norwegian, Norse and Icelandic myths and trditions. Those who we think of as the conquering British are the product of a slew of traditions, events, and subjugations, repeatedly suffering from structural inequalities. If everyone has been on the pointy end of history it raises all sorts of questions. When is a people a people, who owns the myths, when is reinterpretation of history (refinement through truth-seeking) a recasting of history (recreation through myth-making), and how do a people’s myths and stories shape their contemporary literature. For example – are there identifiable differences in the sci-fi/fantasy literatures of Black Americans, Black Brazilians, White Americans, White Brazilians, British, Germans, Poles, small eastern European cultures, etc. And if so, why? And more to the point, what are the differences, if any, between conceptualized utopias in each of those traditions?
So I am suggesting two topics for future discussion. 1) What is the prevalence and dynamic of truth-seeking and myth-making in children’s literature. 2) What influence do historical myths, whether still subscribed to or not, have upon contemporary children’s literature and contemporary belief systems.
Charles
From: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas [mailto:ebonyt_at_gse.upenn.edu] Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 9:17 PM To: Crystal Brunelle Cc: ccbc-net ccbc-net Subject: Re: [ccbc-net] The Summer Prince -- lots of thoughts (a few on sex, most on location)
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 cultures.
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.
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 Jeunesse, "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: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 16:15:23 -0400
Ebony said: “I don't think that many outside of the Black community know this, but there was an upswing of interest in Brazilian educational and . . .” and also “I think there is a unique challenge for authors . . .”
Ebony,
I hope this becomes a topic for future discussion. There is a very dynamic interaction between Truth-Seekers (“Only by deep and wide engagement with history can we begin to reconstruct a reasonable notion as to what has happened and why”) and Myth-Makers (“she kept insisting that Brazil was less racist than the United States”). Neither position is bad and there are benefits to both but they are different lenses and you see things differently. The trick is, to paraphrase the Queen in Through the Looking Glass, to believe six inconsistent things before breakfast, to be both a Truth-Seeker and a Myth-Maker. And to realize that it is “a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Truth-Seeking involves trying to understand the past to comprehend and manage the present. Myth-Making often involves recasting the past and present as a predicate towards a better future. Truth-Seeking might be said to be an epistemological exercise whereas Myth-Making is an psychological one (particularly with regard to motivation).
I was aware of the elevation of Brazil on a racial equity pedestal back in the 80’s. Earlier in the 70s there was a similar argument and positioning regarding Cuba. Currently there is a similar dynamic regarding gender policies in Europe. The emotional desire for a Utopia where things are better is longstanding across all cultures though it is sometimes framed quite differently; a future religious paradise, a golden age in the past, etc. And the desire to believe there is a better, more perfect country elsewhere in the real world is also a long standing flaw. A less sensitive example would be international economic competitiveness. In the 80s the US was having its manufacturing clock cleaned by the Japanese and there was a pervasive concern bordering on hysteria that Japan was trending towards global economic domination. There were rivers of research papers, policy positions and books profiling the threat from Japan and what it was that they were doing (education policy, manufacturing policy, social policy, cultural attributes) to be so successful and which the US ought to emulate. And then the house of cards collapsed and interest in Japan subsided to be replaced by a fear of China. China is now the bête noire of economic competitiveness and again pundits look to see what in their culture, education policies, etc. can be emulated. The desire to find perfection elsewhere is common (myth-making), even if it is often not well grounded in factual reality (truth-seeking).
James Fallows, the Atlantic writer and author, lived in Japan and China for a couple of years in the early eighties, before the collapse, to try and understand what was going on, what was making the Japanese successful, and what cultural attributes and government policies could actually feasibly be transferred from one unique country to another. He wrote a very perceptive book about the experience, More Like Us, which correctly identified that there was little that could be translated from Japan to the US. That their then success was the result of a huge number of intertwined policies and cultural attributes that could not be surgically extracted and transplanted. Instead, we had to be More Like US, i.e. leverage our comparative systemic and cultural strengths.
The reason I dwell on Fallows is that it is an example of the desire to see the US as having failed at something (economic policy, education policy, race, gender, etc.) and seeking solutions in mythical alternate realities (such as economic Japan in the eighties). The myth-making creates powerful incentives to make changes, and that is important. But it is also important to have the Truth-Seekers such as Fallows who try and understand the complex reality of things. Are Cuba or Brazil countries of racial tranquility and equity? Absolutely not. Different, certainly. Better in some aspects and worse in others. But a model for others? Depends on what you want. Are European countries’ gender policies better than those in the US? Absolutely not. Different, certainly. Better in some aspects and worse in others. But a model for others? Depends on what you want. Most European policies that look so appealing are indistinguishable from pronatalist policies designed to encourage women to have more children. Not necessarily a bad thing, and certainly necessary to support the European socio-economic models. So if your goal is to make it easier for women to have children, then Europe serves as a great example for emulation of gender policies. If your goal is to make it easier for women to have a variety choices among maternity and professions, then the US clearly has more women at higher levels of achievement in more fields of competitive endeavor than virtually anywhere else. The grass is only greener depending on the hue of your glasses.
Thomas Sowell did some fascinating research back in the eighties and nineties about affirmative action around the world and about “model” minorities, i.e. diaspora minorities with significant economic success in alien countries (Lebanese in Africa, Igbo in West Africa, Indians in East and Southern Africa and in Britain, Chinese in Southeast Asia, Jews in Europe and North America, Scots in the Anglophone, etc.). One of the key themes was that much of what we view as American racial issues are really products of minority condition (i.e. being a minority whether by race, religion or culture). So diaspora minorities can be a model in terms of academic and economic achievement but they still face systemic challenges arising simply from being the Other regardless of country and particular historical circumstance. The other theme was one that occasionally has been mentioned in this forum; that much of what is deemed to be race-related is actually class.
I think it would be great to discuss the manifestation and tension in children’s literature between myth-making and truth-seeking.
Your penultimate paragraph is also a rich discussion. Most people for most of history have lived in a world of structural inequalities. The ubiquity and dominance of Anglophone culture and traditions is not more than 100 years old. It is hard to remember that Britain was invaded repeatedly over the centuries, occupied by foreigners repeatedly, and was low man on the European pyramid of power until quite recently. Your reference to Tolkien is an interesting example. I am not a literary scholar but my impression is that while the Tolkien project might have been intended as an English myth, it is actually very much a synthesis of Anglo-Saxon, Dane, Celt, Norwegian, Norse and Icelandic myths and trditions. Those who we think of as the conquering British are the product of a slew of traditions, events, and subjugations, repeatedly suffering from structural inequalities. If everyone has been on the pointy end of history it raises all sorts of questions. When is a people a people, who owns the myths, when is reinterpretation of history (refinement through truth-seeking) a recasting of history (recreation through myth-making), and how do a people’s myths and stories shape their contemporary literature. For example – are there identifiable differences in the sci-fi/fantasy literatures of Black Americans, Black Brazilians, White Americans, White Brazilians, British, Germans, Poles, small eastern European cultures, etc. And if so, why? And more to the point, what are the differences, if any, between conceptualized utopias in each of those traditions?
So I am suggesting two topics for future discussion. 1) What is the prevalence and dynamic of truth-seeking and myth-making in children’s literature. 2) What influence do historical myths, whether still subscribed to or not, have upon contemporary children’s literature and contemporary belief systems.
Charles
From: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas [mailto:ebonyt_at_gse.upenn.edu] Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 9:17 PM To: Crystal Brunelle Cc: ccbc-net ccbc-net Subject: Re: [ccbc-net] The Summer Prince -- lots of thoughts (a few on sex, most on location)
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 cultures.
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.
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 Jeunesse, "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 <tel:%28215%29%20898-9309>
Email: ebonyt_at_gse.upenn.edu
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Received on Sun 23 Mar 2014 03:16:16 PM CDT
