Colonial legacy

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#41

I think with the internet, it’s easy to find out every bad, wrong, or truly evil thing any creator ever did. I can appreciate the creation without appreciating the creator. I think there’s a difference between bad ideas inside a work and bad things outside of it. Like James Brown beat his wife, but he didn’t write songs about it. But you can never make Birth of a Nation not about racism. You can never watch that movie not knowing what it’s about.

Some people think we should ban stuff. I don’t agree with that. Other people just don’t fuck with it. I won’t fight that.

I’m all for death of the author. If Lovecraft wanted Cthulhu to be a metaphor for immigrants, he can roll in his grave. I appreciate them as genius horror stories and nothing else.

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#42

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#43

fuck I completely forgot about him being a right wing revisionist grosshole. but yup, that’s the complexity of the situation for ya!

but yeah I don’t agree with outright banning problematic media (and tbh I don’t know many people who do agree with it) since the entire benefit of the stuff existing is that it is conducive to discussion. the old Tom and Jerry cartoons were rereleased last year(?) and they got a disclaimer at the beginning of them that says “hey this has some fucked up stuff by today’s standards, but it was still wrong back then. that said, pls enjoy this cat eating dynamite” which is cool. there’s a chance that kind of disclaimer can get people in the living room to talk about why mammy stereotypes are troubling.

you know, because parents are so well known for actually engaging with their children and media instead of substituting said media for more involved parenting

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#44

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#45

Weirdly enough, this is basically how Lovecraft wanted his work read anyway, just as horror stories. He was just such a virulent bigot that a lot of those things seeped into his stories regardless. He had a very deep (especially at the time) understanding of horror fiction and gothic fiction. He’s actually a pretty good author to look at from a le morte d’auteur perspective because a goodly portion of his work at least started as transcriptions of his dreams (after he died, some entries from his dream journal were literally published as ‘stories’ on their own. They weren’t good by any means, but there was a common resemblance with his usual horror fiction.) and once something is explicitly dreamstuff, it becomes meaningless to try to glean a meaning out of it besides its aesthetic value.

More to the point, so many of these racist stories aren’t bad because they’re racist, they’re bad because they’re terrible stories, and they’re racist because they’re terrible stories written by people that defaulted to racism at the time.

I genuinely don’t think there’s much value to glean from a person’s worst works. I don’t think one can gain much insight into horror as a genre by reading HP Lovecraft’s The Street, or The Terrible Old Man, or The Horror at Red Hook. Those stories are crap, and they’re noxiously racist in part because they’re crap. Similarly, it should be emphasized that the overwhelming majority of Uncle Scrooge comics are nowhere near the racist shit posted upthread.

If you’re writing from the 1970s maybe, but Chinua Achebe’s essay on Heart of Darkness is literally 40 years old now. The readiness with which we leap to identifying racist trends in old media by dead people does mean we’re not really talking about the media at all (especially because the average internet comment about racism in past media doesn’t have a fraction of the insight of Achebe’s criticism or Said’s defense of Heart of Darkness; usually beginning and ending with ‘this thing is racist and therefore bad’ or ‘this person once made a racist story and therefore everything they have ever made has no value’)

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#46

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#47

Actually that would be precisely the opposite conclusion. Did you read what I wrote?

Of course it is. What else could it possibly be?

If I am a rape victim I’m entitled to say “this classic story with rape in it that might be great for x y and z reasons is of no interest to me, no amount of aesthetic value can overwhelm the horror I feel of reliving my own tragedy as triggered by what’s in the story”. Right? Or do you think such a person should be forced, or shamed in some way, into reading this story just because it’s “a classic”?

#48

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#49

This sounds a lot like studying a thing… So to figure out whether or not a thing should be studied, first you have to study it intensely

#50

I didn’t realize pointing out troubling aspects in media became pointless with a 1970s essay on heart of darkness, because it’s so much more insightful than any dum dum average joe internet comments because it’s probably in a book instead of tumblr reblog. that’s great to hear, and so useful to that average joe too.

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#51

The true chinua achebe starts here

#52

If you want to hold yourself out as an expert in the critique of film, you should probably watch Birth of a Nation, even if you’re a black American and particularly sensitive to its nonsense. If you’re just a regular black dude though, it’s entirely rational and not at all cowardly or willfully ignorant to say “I get that it’s a classic and all, but, yeah. No thanks.”

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#53

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#54

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#55

I didn’t say otherwise. I was saying it doesn’t all start and stop with the dusty academic tomes, and simplification isn’t necessarily bad.

#56

Discussing racism in media is not actually pointless, I’m just salty about an idiotic article I saw on io9 the other day about how you should feel bad for even thinking of watching the new Jungle Book movie, because didn’t you know that Kipling was a racist and imperialist. I guess if I were to walk back some hyperbole, I shouldn’t say that modern internet writing is universally crap, just that its crappiness is proportional to how clickbaity and smug it sounds.

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#57

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#58

Actually, AFAIK Achebe’s essay is included in most modern editions of Heart of Darkness anyway, so you kind of have to go out of your way to not read it. It is exactly as dusty and academic as the novel itself. I know that is probably neither here nor there, but if anything the ideas he expresses in that piece are probably a lot easier for people to understand now than when he first wrote them down.

This x100. I absolutely hate it when people try to compose serious, complicated essays in a series of tweets. It is such an abysmal medium for communicating anything of substance, and I find it terrifying that so many otherwise intelligent people still use it that way (1/500000). Just write a blog post and link to it in a tweet for chrissakes.

#59

racism and classism still exists. it’s ’ antiquated ’ only in the sense that we have past evidence which displays that having these views wasn’t frowned upon. i feel like it’s not really the ’ criticism ’ that’s ever the issue, it’s more like ’ i like this thing and i want to overlook how it may have had any negative impact and you’re an asshole for bringing it up because thinking about the media we consume is tedious ’ sort of thing.

this is just my opinion though. things being ’ problematic ’ can be subjective and full of reactive and thirsty people desperate to seem revolutionary but, i wouldn’t be so quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater and assume that that’s the case for every subject that’s brought forward.

one-dimensional thinking goes both ways.

#60

Internet folks are way less likely to talk about classism.

Its much harder to co-opt class consciousness into neoliberal capitalist ideology

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