Haus: Now, of course our expectations are being played with here, George is being clever blah blah fishcakes, and I am sure that he will subvert etc. However, as I said above, that doesn't alter that fact that I'm more comfortable with play with the stereotypical presentations of British Asianness - corner shops, arranged marriages, Bollywood, H0tt South Asian babes - when it comes from British Asian writers. Possibly that's a bit cowardly of me.
kovacs: But with Morrison's white characters, their whiteness -- skin colour and the accompanying attitudes, culture and behaviour that we might call "ethnicity" -- isn't a foregrounded characteristic.
i have to admit that i do, too, but that sort of leaves us in a weird spot. in general, i´m always feeling icky about writers or filmmakers or whoever using protagonists of a different race or ethnicity than their own, because it brings up all kinds of issues of power and representation and all that. i´m doubly uncomfortable when the Otherness of that ethnicity is as foregrounded as it is here, in the way that kovacs so sharply points out.
however, on the other hand, i don´t know how comofortable i am with saying that someone shouldn´t write another person´s ethnic experience, as setting up boundaries of that sort seems to be essentializing ethnic difference in a way that may be unhelpful.
on the other other hand, i´m excited to be reading a fun, cosmic psychedelic adventure story in the classic GM fashion. of course, it´s practically the definition of white privilege to be able to overlook sticky issues of ethnicity and power and so on and so forth in the pursuit of one´s own enjoyment.
i´m reading it, i´m enjoying it, and i don´t know how i feel about the political or moral implications of either of those facts.
i am, however, unsure of how i will feel about this going forward on how the "Hindlamic" (thanks, Haus) deities issue gets addressed. i have no idea how it works in Pakistan or elsewhere in South Asia, but it´s my understanding that Arab Muslims, at least, generally view pre-Islamic Arab culture as being something wholly other than their own, and, in general, that Islam encourages the devout to basically divide history in two with a sharp line drawn at the revelation of the Quran to Muhammed. i don´t know how much i would expect a contemporary British Asian to think of deities worshipped in his ancestral homeland prior to the coming of Islam as part of his past, as opposed to part of the past. it seems to be comparable to the way contemporary Egyptian Muslims don´t (again, to my understanding) acknowledge ancient Egyptian culture as part of their cultural heritage. of course, modern Egyptians are mostly Arabs, and the ancient Egyptians were not, but it still seems relevant. |
