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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32829 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Even the burning of the library of Alexandria didn't happen the way it is supposed to have done in the popular imagination, and that pop culture version is very much a deliberate creation of people with an agenda in the past.

No, Dahl and Fleming aren't important, Fleming more unimportant than Dahl. But they're straws in the wind. The little pebbles whose falling starts the avalanche in the mountains. This is a mainstream publisher mucking around with long-established properties, not a first-time YA novel getting lambasted for having the wrong type of slavery. Indeed, the first "it's only a few pebbles" was a 2022 memoir by someone who was the typical liberal do-gooder, but was guilty of being the White Saviour:

Last month, controversy was reignited in the UK around teacher Kate Clanchy’s memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, about her time teaching kids from diverse backgrounds to write poetry.

Although Clanchy’s book was initially lauded (even winning the Orwell Prize), criticism soon eclipsed praise. Readers, prominent writers of colour and autistic author Dara McNulty protested the language Clanchy used to describe her pupils (“Somali height”, “Ashkenazi nose”, autistic children as “jarring company”). Her publisher Picador agreed the objections were “instructive and clear-sighted”; eventually, it withdrew the book from publication.

When an author or other creator is not from the group being represented in their work, they might decide to engage a member of that particular community to read it and offer feedback. A novel featuring a transgender Indigenous character would ideally be read by a transgender Indigenous person, and so on.

And if you can't easily get your hands on a trans Indigenous person, you won't get published, seems to be the message here.

They moved on from non-fiction to fiction. What is the next target? Dickens is very problematic, even in his own time (see Fagin). A lot of "Classics" by Dead White Males that don't have even a single transgender Indigenous person! Even worse, there's the reshaping of the past to fit the present:

A recent example from academic publishing shows how this happens. Mary Rambaran-Olm was asked to read a chapter on Early Medieval England of a history book written for the general public. Rambaran-Olm has expertise in relevant academic fields, and also through her personal experience as a scholar of Afro/Indo Caribbean origin.

The white male authors overwhelmingly did not accept her advice about problems with the manuscript’s representation of the past and how it feeds into contemporary racism. They thanked her in the acknowledgements, however. This created the false impression she had actively shaped the contents of the book.

You see? How do you or anyone else learn about Early Mediaeval England? Generally you read a scholarly book. But if the scholarly books are increasingly being "sensitivity read" to make sure that they include all the right think about "contemporary racism", what version are you getting? How much is this already happening, without us knowing?

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