Re some articles on including racial groups in fictional literature

[Kyriakos]

I saw some articles, from an analogous (ongoing) thread at the Total War Center forums. Apparently the issue was a need or suggestion to include more "racial" minorities in written fiction. One of the examined cases was Asoiaf (GRRM books). One such article, by an academic, can be read at https://www.publicmedievalist.com/game-thrones-racism-problem/

Game of Thrones doesn’t just have a “diversity problem,” it has a racism problem. The casting and the lack of well-developed characters of colour that attract most critical attention are the visible tip of the iceberg of racism that lies under the surface of the show. That iceberg doesn’t just reflect the race problems of modern-day America, it reflects white privilege and a racist Eurocentric way of thinking about the world that goes back to the Middle Ages.

The tip of the racism-berg is important, and it’s a good place to start. Game of Thrones doesn’t even pass what Manohla Dargis called the “DuVernay test” (modelled on the Bechdel test). The Bechdel test offers a simple way to gauge whether women are represented as full and complete characters; the DuVernay test (named after Selma director Ava DuVernay) does the same for characters from racial minorities.

I think it is very problematic to ask this of people actually writing the books, cause it isn't the same as adapting a book for tv. The latter can more easily change things, and often the result can be positive (eg replacing an all-white cast with a varied one with good actors for tv Hannibal- the cannibal, not the carthagenian general ).
But writing isn't the same as hiring actors to read some lines. The writer can't just decide to insert some racial group because it is asked. I mean... it just doesn't make sense. Furthermore the inclusion or lack of of such characters doesn't signify importance or lack of it for the literary work. Eg i can note with safety that there literally is no black person in all of Kafka's literature. Only "non-white" (if one has to put it this way) characters there are peripheral, eg some generic "arabs" in one story (Arabs and Jackals), and the rare indian (not character, just mentioned as background) in two stories, one of which is incomplete and consists of two sentences, the other of which is complete and consists of four sentences and merely uses the indian as a metaphor ("The wish to be a red Indian").

I think that it is very problematic to ask of writers to get into the issue of social polemics, as if they are willingly a part of the "tv personalities" of the day, and want to troll and fight in that arena made out of mud.

Sometimes you would see a black character appear in Borges, and actually in one of his stories he is arguably the protagonist ("The dead"), but this was tied to "peon" in Argentina often being black, so it wasn't as if Borges forced the story at all. It had an air of authenticity, and worked very well.

-Do you think that it is logical to ask that the writing version/original of fictional stories includes more people who are "non-white"? And can that be achieved without forcing the work, and thus making it stray from any meaning the author had in mind?

note: although i don't intend this as a trolling thread, i did have in mind some tongue-in-cheek reaction to the many threads on the issue when dealing with TV It is a very distinct issue, though, and briefly i tried to elaborate as to why.

Edit: Borges' story was titled "The end"

 

[Ryika]

Honestly, I think people should just write what they find interesting and can represent faithfully, or if they want to explore those things, then they should do it because it is interesting to them, not to please these culture warriors. Because the thing is, they will never please them. When people do write in characters of racial minorities for example, they'll be yelled at for doing so "poorly", and for spreading stereotypes, because they'll find SOMETHING that is stereotypically <skincolor Y>, even if you do your best to write interesting, unique characters. Or in the rare case that they find nothing to complain about, they'll simply switch to "That's cultural appropriation!", because how dare you write a story that has a Civilization that takes Native American Culture and turns it into simple entertainment for mostly whites?!

It's simply a trap, people want something to whine about, so they create something to whine about.

Most readers don't care about it, because if they did, then books by artists who constantly go on about such issues would be the best sellers, not the stories of artists that manage to write interesting stories with sensible characters in cohesive worlds.

 

[Traitorfish]

The white saviour plot device goes back to at least the crusading romances which emerged in the late twelfth-century.

what?

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Problem is that white people with an european cultural background will usually write eurocentric stories protagonised by white characters. In a perfect world they would write sinocentric stories protagonised by austroloid characters, but sadly that is not the case.

Out of curiosity: are shows like Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or Family Matters considered racist?

 

[Traitorfish]

Problem is that white people with an european cultural background will usually write eurocentric stories protagonised by white characters.

I think that may be true broad: people will tend to write about times and places, or fantastic simulations thereof, which they see as representing the shared history of their country or their culture, and in the Anglo-American world, that tends to mean England, and at most a "Frankish core" of England, France and Western Germany. Even regions directly adjacent to this core, like Italy or Ireland, are represent as exotic and colourful; every pseudo-Celtic character in fantasy is a barbarian warrior or mysterious druid, every pseudo-Italian character a dashing rogue or scheming merchant.

Martin himself is of mostly Italian, Irish and German ancestry, so I understand, but his stories are mostly set in an ersatz Medieval England. That doesn't reflect his personal origins, but the places that white Americans have decided to regard as their collective historical origins. The Iberian and Italian regions appear in the Southern periphery of the map, and their echoes of the Celtic and Nordic regions in the North, but Central and Eastern Europe are essentially plunged beneath the waves because they present an unnecessary geographic complication between Westeros and Essos. In Martin's case, I think this stems from a life-long genuine interest in Medieval European history rather than any ethnic or racial chauvinism, but it's none the less telling that the kind of Medieval history available to a child should be rooted so squarely within a relatively narrow set of geographic and cultural boundaries.

What both critics and apologists for "GoT so white" seem to miss that Wessos is not really representative of Europe so much as an Anglo-American folk-memory of medieval Europe, of the bits that the common sense of the English-speaking world has decided is "ours". White Americans identify with this setting, yes, but is that true of white Russians, white Greeks or white Lithuanians? It's more complicated than just "white people gonna white".

 

[Kyriakos]

what?

 

[Akka]

Each time I read these idiotic, small-minded, superficial and thought-control-happy "critics", I die a bit more inside.

It's not common that a meme-gif-whatever makes me actually laugh out loud, but this one did.
And after reading the first post, I needed that

 

[Thorgalaeg]

I think that may be true broad: people will tend to write about times and places, or fantastic simulations thereof, which they see as representing the shared history of their country or their culture, and in the Anglo-American world, that tends to mean England, and at most a "Frankish core" of England, France and Western Germany. Even regions directly adjacent to this core, like Italy or Ireland, are represent as exotic and colourful; every pseudo-Celtic character in fantasy is a barbarian warrior or mysterious druid, every pseudo-Italian character a dashing rogue or scheming merchant.

Martin himself is of mostly Italian, Irish and German ancestry, so I understand, but his stories are mostly set in an ersatz Medieval England. That doesn't reflect his personal origins, but the places that white Americans have decided to regard as their collective historical origins. The Iberian and Italian regions appear in the Southern periphery of the map, and their echoes of the Celtic and Nordic regions in the North, but Central and Eastern Europe are essentially plunged beneath the waves because they present an unnecessary geographic complication between Westeros and Essos. In Martin's case, I think this stems from a life-long genuine interest in Medieval European history rather than any ethnic or racial chauvinism, but it's none the less telling that the kind of Medieval history available to a child should be rooted so squarely within a relatively narrow set of geographic and cultural boundaries.

What both critics and apologists for "GoT so white" seem to miss that Wessos is not really representative of Europe so much as an Anglo-American folk-memory of medieval Europe, of the bits that the common sense of the English-speaking world has decided is "ours". White Americans identify with this setting, yes, but is that true of white Russians, white Greeks or white Lithuanians? It's more complicated than just "white people gonna white".

Well, i think that in the specific case of fantasy genre everybody identify with the medieval english setting because there is this strong presence of Tolkien's universe "polluting" the whole thing. Any modern writer from europe and the americas and even beyond, no matter its nationality, will be heavily influenced by Tolkien which is strongly rooted in english and norse myths and will have to do a conscient effort to separate from it. It has become the official mythology of our pop culture.

That is because i prefer Robert E. Howard's Hyborean universe, which is clean from any Tolkienist influence and where every current country and race is present, even in a proper racist early 20th century way, with the protagonist coming from Cimmeria (arguably England) and Spain interpreted by Zingara, (the bad guys of course).

 

[Kyriakos]

^Tolkien sadly turned a rather more serious "fantasy" themed literature which was there before him, into cheaper stuff. Eg before Tolkien there were writers like Dunsany who wrote fantasy, and many others who produced some fantasy too, including Goethe and other german romanticists like ETA Hoffmann.
Tolkien is a bad writer when compared to them. Dunsany was even his contemporary, and probably also an influence on him (?), yet the gap between the two is massive.

The elf king, by Goethe.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Will have to read something by this Lord Dunsany. It seems he was a real egghead.

 

[Kyriakos]

Will have to read something by this Lord Dunsany. It seems he was a real egghead.

"
CHARON

Charon leaned forward and rowed. All things were one with his weariness.

It was not with him a matter of years or of centuries, but of wide floods of time, and an old heaviness and a pain in the arms that had become for him part of the scheme that the gods had made and was of a piece with Eternity.

If the gods had even sent him a contrary wind it would have divided all time in his memory into two equal slabs.

So grey were all things always where he was that if any radiance lingered a moment among the dead, on the face of such a queen perhaps as Cleopatra, his eyes could not have perceived it.

It was strange that the dead nowadays were coming in such numbers. They were coming in thousands where they used to come in fifties. It was neither Charon's duty nor his wont to ponder in his grey soul why these things might be. Charon leaned forward and rowed.

Then no one came for a while. It was not usual for the gods to send no one down from Earth for such a space. But the gods knew best.

Then one man came alone. And the little shade sat shivering on a lonely bench and the great boat pushed off. Only one passenger: the gods knew best. And great and weary Charon rowed on and on beside the little, silent, shivering ghost.

And the sound of the river was like a mighty sigh that Grief in the beginning had sighed among her sisters, and that could not die like the echoes of human sorrow failing on earthly hills, but was as old as time and the pain in Charon's arms.

Then the boat from the slow, grey river loomed up to the coast of Dis and the little, silent shade still shivering stepped ashore, and Charon turned the boat to go wearily back to the world. Then the little shadow spoke, that had been a man.

"I am the last," he said.

No one had ever made Charon smile before, no one before had ever made him weep.
"

More at http://sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/index.htm

 

[luiz]

Before we start any discussion on diversity, we should agree on the following :

Which group is more diverse?
-three hipsters from Brooklyn, one white, one latino, one black
-three white guys : one a lumberjack from Alaska, one a London banker, one a Greek fisherman.

 

[Kyriakos]

^+1 for not using stereotypes

 

[innonimatu]

Art and pleasure should not be subject to political correctness. Those are individual activities, people must be free to search what pleases them. Let the failed writers playing critics spill their venom, it just shows them as pathetic.

"Commercial writing" such as the arguments for a lot of what comes out of Hollywood, well, those I am not surprised should they become politicized. And they kind of deserve it, because it is more marketing according to specifications (and with aims of social manipulation) than individual expression by the writers.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

"
CHARON

Charon leaned forward and rowed. All things were one with his weariness.

It was not with him a matter of years or of centuries, but of wide floods of time, and an old heaviness and a pain in the arms that had become for him part of the scheme that the gods had made and was of a piece with Eternity.

If the gods had even sent him a contrary wind it would have divided all time in his memory into two equal slabs.

So grey were all things always where he was that if any radiance lingered a moment among the dead, on the face of such a queen perhaps as Cleopatra, his eyes could not have perceived it.

It was strange that the dead nowadays were coming in such numbers. They were coming in thousands where they used to come in fifties. It was neither Charon's duty nor his wont to ponder in his grey soul why these things might be. Charon leaned forward and rowed.

Then no one came for a while. It was not usual for the gods to send no one down from Earth for such a space. But the gods knew best.

Then one man came alone. And the little shade sat shivering on a lonely bench and the great boat pushed off. Only one passenger: the gods knew best. And great and weary Charon rowed on and on beside the little, silent, shivering ghost.

And the sound of the river was like a mighty sigh that Grief in the beginning had sighed among her sisters, and that could not die like the echoes of human sorrow failing on earthly hills, but was as old as time and the pain in Charon's arms.

Then the boat from the slow, grey river loomed up to the coast of Dis and the little, silent shade still shivering stepped ashore, and Charon turned the boat to go wearily back to the world. Then the little shadow spoke, that had been a man.

"I am the last," he said.

No one had ever made Charon smile before, no one before had ever made him weep.
"

More at http://sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/index.htm

So was Charon smiling/weeping because humanity got extinct or because he was unemployed?

 

[Arent11]

the real reason GRRM sucks said:
Game of Thrones doesn’t just have a “diversity problem,” it has a racism problem. The casting and the lack of well-developed characters of colour that attract most critical attention are the visible tip of the iceberg of racism that lies under the surface of the show. That iceberg doesn’t just reflect the race problems of modern-day America, it reflects white privilege and a racist Eurocentric way of thinking about the world that goes back to the Middle Ages.

The tip of the racism-berg is important, and it’s a good place to start. Game of Thrones doesn’t even pass what Manohla Dargis called the “DuVernay test” (modelled on the Bechdel test). The Bechdel test offers a simple way to gauge whether women are represented as full and complete characters; the DuVernay test (named after Selma director Ava DuVernay) does the same for characters from racial minorities.

This is exactly why I say that so called "antiracists", in my opinion, hold discriminating or racist views. There are several points here you immediately notice:

(1) The poster doesn't criticise actual racism - ethnic cleanings, slave markets or degradation - but instead representation of characters in fiction.
(2) He doesn't criticize "diversity problems" without looking at race, nationality, religion - for example bollywood movies only focusing on india or chinese movies only focusing on china - but selectively only criticises western movies/books & even clearly says he is only interested in "white" or "western" groups.
(3) To gain more credibility, he "proves" that there is not a single movie in the world in which all kinds of people - women, black, white, hispanics, asian - are represented equally Hell, there are movies that only have women(!) Or only men(!) Or just black people(!) Now, this is of course a grave "problem" he needs to "solve". And he needs much money to "solve" that "problem".

 

[Kyriakos]

So was Charon smiling/weeping because humanity got extinct or because he was unemployed?

I took it to mean that he was smiling because he no longer would have to row (no one left to ferry to the other side) and crying because he knew of nothing else for his entire life spanning thousands of years. The contrary wind finally was sent by the gods

 

[Traitorfish]

Well, i think that in the specific case of fantasy genre everybody identify with the medieval english setting because there is this strong presence of Tolkien's universe "polluting" the whole thing. Any modern writer from europe and the americas and even beyond, no matter its nationality, will be heavily influenced by Tolkien which is strongly rooted in english and norse myths and will have to do a conscient effort to separate from it. It has become the official mythology of our pop culture.

Middle-Earth is really an Early Medieval rather than High Medieval setting, though. Rohan is very much Anglo-Saxon England, and Gondor is somewhere between the Carolignian and Byzantine Empires. The dwarves and elves don't really have a clear real-world analogue, while the Shire is (inexplicably) post-medieval. The High Medieval framing is something that readers have brought to it after the fact, because that was assumed to be the cultural baseline.

If you want to point fingers, it has to be at the entire tradition of English romantic writing, from Mallory down to Morris, of which Tolkien was a relatively late representative.

That is because i prefer Robert E. Howard's Hyborean universe, which is clean from any Tolkienist influence and where every current country and race is present, even in a proper racist early 20th century way, with the protagonist coming from Cimmeria (arguably England) and Spain interpreted by Zingara, (the bad guys of course).

Well, Cimmeria is pretty explicitly Ireland (and also Ukraine, because: early-twentieth century race science), but that itself was something of a reaction to the already-prevailing trends in historic and fantasy pulp.

Art and pleasure should not be subject to political correctness. Those are individual activities, people must be free to search what pleases them. Let the failed writers playing critics spill their venom, it just shows them as pathetic.

Game of Thrones has a cast and crew of hundreds. It's hard to frame that as an "individual" activity.

 

[Kyriakos]

"Cimmeria" historically (eg in Herodotos' histories) is in the Ukraine. Typically (again going by Herodotos and other greek writers) the cimmerians were supposed to have once lived in northern Ukraine, bordering the Hyperborea iirc, and then displaced by other races, finally displaced and/or assimilated by the Scythians who were concurrent with Herodotos.
Not that they have to have existed. Eg one of the races that replaced them had only one eye, while another were literally griffons.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Do you think that it is logical to ask that the writing version/original of fictional stories includes more people who are "non-white"? And can that be achieved without forcing the work, and thus making it stray from any meaning the author had in mind?

I'm sure you're familiar with the phrase "write what you know"? I don't think I've ever written a character who was definitely stated to be black, unless I was writing Star Trek fanfiction and dealing with characters like Uhura, Geordi Laforge, or Tuvok (who doesn't really count since he's a Vulcan who is played by a black actor). I've never written any DS9 fanfic, so have never thought about whether I'd write much about Sisko or Jake (probably not, since neither are among my favorite characters on that series).


Replacing all-white characters with a mixed group of characters when adapting a book is what the producers did with the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The novel explicitly states that there are no non-white people in the Republic of Gilead; all black, Hispanic, or other non-white people were either deported, killed, or sent to the "colonies" (labor camps where the inmates are assigned to clean up toxic waste; the life expectancy there is measured in weeks, or months at most). So all the characters in the novel were white.

The TV series changed that, and made not only the best friend of the protagonist a black woman, but her husband and daughter are also played by black actors. So Offred is white, her best friend Moira, her husband Luke, and her daughter Hannah, are all black. The Martha in the household (aka the cook/housekeeper) was white in the novel. In the TV series she's Hispanic.

This was a controversial move, since the reason Margaret Atwood made all her characters white was to illustrate the sheer hatred and bigotry of the religious fundamentalist cult that took over the United States and transformed it into a religious fascist state in which women were essentially either the property of their husbands or the property of the state, not allowed to possess money, not allowed to read, and the ones who were fertile were assigned to the various Commanders (the men who ran Gilead) as breeding stock. Their function was to be impregnated, give birth to a healthy baby, and then be reassigned to another Commander and do it again. Any Handmaid who wasn't able to produce a healthy baby after three assignments (each lasting two years) was considered infertile, declared "Unwoman", and sent to the colonies with the other undesirables. Atwood wanted it clearly understood that the Gilead elite did not want the healthy babies of black or Hispanic women. Only healthy white babies would do.

Part of the reason the cast was mixed was, of course, because of the criticism that Hollywood was reserving the best roles for white actors, and even though the book had an all-white "cast of characters" there were very real political and social reasons why the TV series would have been vilified for following the book to that extent.

As far as I'm concerned, it works either way. The elites who run Gilead in the TV series are really vicious people (mostly; one of the Wives tried to be considerate of the Handmaid assigned to her husband, but of course they had to go through with the monthly Ceremony anyway since it was mandated by law) no matter what color their skin is. It's the mindset that makes them evil, not external coloring.