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Very good article by Walter Mosley about the scarcity of black voices in genre fiction, particularly sci-fi. I'll give you the money graf, but please read the whole thing—it's wonderful:
One reason for this absence is that black writers have only recently entered the popular genres in force. Our writers have historically been regarded as a footnote best suited to address the nature of our own chains. So, if black writers wanted to branch out past the realism of racism and race, they were curtailed by their own desire to document the crimes of America. A further deterrent was the white literary establishment's desire for blacks to write about being black in a white world, a limitation imposed upon a limitation.
Let that soak in: Our writers have historically been regarded as ... best suited to address the nature of our own chains. That's a beautiful line, encapsulating a terrible, and horrifically pervavise, idea.
This hold across genres, BTW, not just for fantastic genres. Terry McMillan caught a considerable amount of heat early in her career for the success of her black chick-lit—she was wasting her time (and, by implication, letting the race down) with frivolous entertainments, it was said, instead of writing serious literary works about the black experience.
Despicable... and all the moreso because this criticism was most often levelled by well-meaning white liberal literati types.
(By the way, Mosley's own foray into SF, Blue Light, was slammed by critics on its release, as lacking in the "gritty authenticity" of his Easy Rawlins books... and, five years on, his predicted "explosion" of young black SF writers has yet to materialize. Funny, that.) |
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