Readercon, Part 2 - Civil War
Jul. 30th, 2013 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
[I'm gradually (and very casually) pulling together my notes and what I can remember from the Readercon panels I was on or attended. Part 1 is here, and covers "Have You Seen Me?: The Absent Children of Urban Fantasy" and "Apocalypse Then"]
A New Mythology of the Civil War
Dennis Danvers, Mikki Kendall (leader), Scott Lynch, Romie Stott, Howard Waldrop
In a 2012 piece for the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that the Lost Cause mythology of the American Civil War has settled so deeply in U.S. culture and historical understanding that it penetrates even our science fiction. (He was speaking of John Carter of Mars but might have been referring to many other works of SF.) "What we now need," he wrote, "is new stories, and new narratives, that not only refuse to revel in historical escapism, but also resist the lure of blaxploitation. People like James McPherson and Benjamin Quarles have gifted us with a new history. What we need now, is a new mythology." Who, if anyone, is undertaking the building of these new myths? And what are they reckoning with along the way?
Predictably, the panel had some interesting people on it who had some interesting things to say, and the audience was somewhat trollful - specifically the kind of trollery where one person in the audience thinks he's on the panel (let's be honest; it's usually a him) and more expert than the panel, and shouts his answers over the panelists' to make sure he gets the last word (usually a "nope"). Good lord, straight middle-aged white guys, you maybe don't know everything, and maybe a panel about how straight white guys haven't come up with the best takes on the Civil War isn't the time to insist that you have the answers to All The Problems, particularly when it means trying to talk over two women, one of whom is black and one of whom is queer, not that you asked.
(And maybe if you say that the Lost Cause mythology came from one source and I say it predates that source, just saying louder that you're right because you read a book does not invalidate the fact that I have a primary source that predates that book.)
Also, a lot of audience members were shocked and horrified that the Civil War is not really being taught well in modern public schools and had to be told several times that yes, really. Yes. It's not. Yes it was different when you went to school. No it is not in the current core standards, we promise. Yes, all the textbooks are being written to satisfy the Texas market and this is how Texas does it, which is that it doesn't.
But, anyway, the panel.
Mikki focused on under-told stories, particularly those which took place in black communities shortly before and shortly after the war. She talked about the complexity of a lot of the state and local laws, and the ways they worked to divide black families. For instance, in a number of areas, you had freed black men buying their wives and children, but then keeping them as slaves, because a change in their status would have forced them to leave the state or county. In other cases, you might have an owner free one member of a family but not the rest, and that freedman would therefore essentially be exiled.
A lot of it reminded me of modern immigration policies and how "documents" have become more important for belonging than degree of cultural integration in the community or degree of threat from "illegals" (and the ways contemporary Americans often sanctify their personal citizenship by birth, without realizing how arbitrary it is).
Mikki touched on the ways "one drop" rules could entangle family trees in the notably heritage-focused South - so that a white family might tell stories of a lost branch of the family that moved West and joined an Indian tribe, and then one day, generations later, a member of that branch might turn up, turn out to be black, and turn out to have been in the next town over.
Finally, she talked about how much black-on-white violence there actually was, which tends to get glossed over in favor of jumping straight to Martin Luther King Jr. You have people who have been enslaved and abused, you set them free and can't track them, and they do kill a bunch of people and then run off. You have black families acknowledging these murders matter-of-factly, or even embellishing them, as an example of justice, but these stories tend not to make it into recorded histories because the killers didn't get caught (and because for self-protecting PR reasons you don't want to say "yes, Southerners, you were right that freeing the slaves would suddenly put you in a lot of danger"). The point being that black people weren't all sweet and saintly children, and some of them behaved the way you might expect from abused insurgents.
Dennis, who is based in Richmond, talked about the degree to which facts of the past are ignored to create a more beautiful narrative, and how irresponsible this can be. He pointed to Lincoln's Dream, by Connie Willis, which is about Lee rather than Lincoln and which never uses the word slavery, and also the ways Steampunk tends to enjoy playing with the technology of the mid and late 1800s, but doesn't want to engage with the cultural forces.
He also told the story of the burning of Richmond - a fire which was started by Confederate troops as they retreated, in hopes of denying supplies to the advancing Union Army, and which was put out by the first regiment on the scene, a black regiment, who then distributed the food the Confederate troops had hoarded and then tried to burn even though most of Richmond's besieged population was by then starving. He noted that when the burning of Richmond is alluded to by Richmond museums, it is in an attempt to include Richmond in the arc of Sherman's March (i.e. devastation caused by the Union to force the South to surrender by attacking civilians), which is the opposite of its true story.
I suggested that much of the reason we have had trouble coming up with a just and compelling literary narrative of the Civil War is the fact that we still haven't resolved it in the real world. In order to reunite the country, both North and South had to almost immediately pivot to "we both had our differences, but we're all good people and that's behind us," like a couple trying to save a marriage. That narrative did its job, but let terrible structural inequalities go unresolved and terrible injustices go unpunished, and people who are now alive benefited and continue to benefit from that history of oppression, but are far removed enough we aren't the same bad (or good) actors who caused the problem. We don't know how to fix it, although we know it isn't fixed (as the disproportionate incarceration rate of black men shows).
We also run into other basic narrative problems: it is easy to tell a narrative that follows an individual struggling against the oppression of an individual, but difficult to tell a narrative that encompasses an entire society, particularly a society of people who are disempowered and can't exactly protag. (This stuff isn't impossible, but it is difficult. It goes without saying that not every writer has the skills of Chinua Achebe.)
This is particularly complicated while working in a genre that is, to one degree or another, escapist. SF likes positive endings (or tragic endings that are somehow poetic and awe-inspiring). We also have a long history of liking underdogs, which winds up working in favor of the Confederacy, and tend to get sidelined into battle stuff, if we like the Civil War, because it's fun - here's a time when you have a combination of WWI and Napoleonic strategies and technologies, and SF loves technological shifts.
However, the most significant thing that I think science fiction needs to examine is the degree to which our familiar narrative structures are grounded in the Western, in stories of the loner pushing the frontier forward and/or building a new society that ignores the past and promises a fresh start. In a lot of these original Westerns, the main characters are ex-Confederates, and the society they are moving away from is the society of the federal government.
When we replicate the archetypes from these stories - which we are often aping from other SF stories, and not directly from the Westerns, which we may not have read - we uncritically bring along a lot of "Lost Cause" baggage, which is perhaps all the more powerful for being invisible. We portray the individual as noble and the government as intrusive, and suggest that the past is something one wants to escape from and ignore (and is therefore not culpable for). We advance the notion that it's heroic to pit oneself against the frontier instead of getting entangled in "politics" and regulations, without considering who those politics and regulations might have been working to protect or compensate.
I think it is no coincidence that contemporary Libertarianism has been embraced fervently by the techy geek set in Northern California, who believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that we have reached a meritocracy and government is not needed. Science fiction has baked the Lost Cause into the foundation of our stories, and in doing so set the stage for an SFWA that has been plagued with hideous recent racism and sexism, with some members suggesting that women should be kicked out and at least one stating outright that black people are less evolved and we should take up guns against them. There are consequences when, to represent life beyond the stars, we unthinkingly mimic a frontier society that was made up not only disproportionately of men, but disproportionately of men who were traumatized combat veterans. Combat veterans from the side that wanted to perpetuate inequality and used violence to do it.
I am not saying that this is the only way to read these stories, or that there is no place for them. But it is something we, as SF authors, need to take a hard look at when we center our fiction on the individualistic and rootless adventurer, or say things like "the protagonist needs to protag." To build a new mythology, it is not enough to stick women or non-white characters into these roles if we tell the same narratives with the same unexamined ideals.
As a counterexample, I pointed out Jonathan Lethem's excellent Girl in Landscape, which not only deliberately subverts the John Wayne archetype, but includes one of the only evocations I've seen of one of the stranger aspects of Civil War-era Southern culture (and race relations in Haiti immediately prior to their successful slave revolt) - the tendency to view black people as invisible and threatening at the same time. You had Confederates discussing their plans and airing their beliefs that black people were violent and crazy in the same room where they were being waited upon by black house slaves, and there was never a moment of "oh, wait, they could kill me in my sleep." (In Haiti, as Mikki pointed out, the black slaves were asked to carry the guns.) Girl in Landscape brings humans into contact with an alien species, and the question isn't simply what their rights might be, and whether they might be violent, but whether humans could get along fine by pretending the aliens aren't there. (If you haven't read it, read it.)
We all agreed that regardless of whether or not we like it, Firefly is problematic. Scott Lynch refilled everybody's water, like a tea party, apparently a holdover habit from the time he spent waiting tables.
A New Mythology of the Civil War
Dennis Danvers, Mikki Kendall (leader), Scott Lynch, Romie Stott, Howard Waldrop
In a 2012 piece for the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that the Lost Cause mythology of the American Civil War has settled so deeply in U.S. culture and historical understanding that it penetrates even our science fiction. (He was speaking of John Carter of Mars but might have been referring to many other works of SF.) "What we now need," he wrote, "is new stories, and new narratives, that not only refuse to revel in historical escapism, but also resist the lure of blaxploitation. People like James McPherson and Benjamin Quarles have gifted us with a new history. What we need now, is a new mythology." Who, if anyone, is undertaking the building of these new myths? And what are they reckoning with along the way?
Predictably, the panel had some interesting people on it who had some interesting things to say, and the audience was somewhat trollful - specifically the kind of trollery where one person in the audience thinks he's on the panel (let's be honest; it's usually a him) and more expert than the panel, and shouts his answers over the panelists' to make sure he gets the last word (usually a "nope"). Good lord, straight middle-aged white guys, you maybe don't know everything, and maybe a panel about how straight white guys haven't come up with the best takes on the Civil War isn't the time to insist that you have the answers to All The Problems, particularly when it means trying to talk over two women, one of whom is black and one of whom is queer, not that you asked.
(And maybe if you say that the Lost Cause mythology came from one source and I say it predates that source, just saying louder that you're right because you read a book does not invalidate the fact that I have a primary source that predates that book.)
Also, a lot of audience members were shocked and horrified that the Civil War is not really being taught well in modern public schools and had to be told several times that yes, really. Yes. It's not. Yes it was different when you went to school. No it is not in the current core standards, we promise. Yes, all the textbooks are being written to satisfy the Texas market and this is how Texas does it, which is that it doesn't.
But, anyway, the panel.
Mikki focused on under-told stories, particularly those which took place in black communities shortly before and shortly after the war. She talked about the complexity of a lot of the state and local laws, and the ways they worked to divide black families. For instance, in a number of areas, you had freed black men buying their wives and children, but then keeping them as slaves, because a change in their status would have forced them to leave the state or county. In other cases, you might have an owner free one member of a family but not the rest, and that freedman would therefore essentially be exiled.
A lot of it reminded me of modern immigration policies and how "documents" have become more important for belonging than degree of cultural integration in the community or degree of threat from "illegals" (and the ways contemporary Americans often sanctify their personal citizenship by birth, without realizing how arbitrary it is).
Mikki touched on the ways "one drop" rules could entangle family trees in the notably heritage-focused South - so that a white family might tell stories of a lost branch of the family that moved West and joined an Indian tribe, and then one day, generations later, a member of that branch might turn up, turn out to be black, and turn out to have been in the next town over.
Finally, she talked about how much black-on-white violence there actually was, which tends to get glossed over in favor of jumping straight to Martin Luther King Jr. You have people who have been enslaved and abused, you set them free and can't track them, and they do kill a bunch of people and then run off. You have black families acknowledging these murders matter-of-factly, or even embellishing them, as an example of justice, but these stories tend not to make it into recorded histories because the killers didn't get caught (and because for self-protecting PR reasons you don't want to say "yes, Southerners, you were right that freeing the slaves would suddenly put you in a lot of danger"). The point being that black people weren't all sweet and saintly children, and some of them behaved the way you might expect from abused insurgents.
Dennis, who is based in Richmond, talked about the degree to which facts of the past are ignored to create a more beautiful narrative, and how irresponsible this can be. He pointed to Lincoln's Dream, by Connie Willis, which is about Lee rather than Lincoln and which never uses the word slavery, and also the ways Steampunk tends to enjoy playing with the technology of the mid and late 1800s, but doesn't want to engage with the cultural forces.
He also told the story of the burning of Richmond - a fire which was started by Confederate troops as they retreated, in hopes of denying supplies to the advancing Union Army, and which was put out by the first regiment on the scene, a black regiment, who then distributed the food the Confederate troops had hoarded and then tried to burn even though most of Richmond's besieged population was by then starving. He noted that when the burning of Richmond is alluded to by Richmond museums, it is in an attempt to include Richmond in the arc of Sherman's March (i.e. devastation caused by the Union to force the South to surrender by attacking civilians), which is the opposite of its true story.
I suggested that much of the reason we have had trouble coming up with a just and compelling literary narrative of the Civil War is the fact that we still haven't resolved it in the real world. In order to reunite the country, both North and South had to almost immediately pivot to "we both had our differences, but we're all good people and that's behind us," like a couple trying to save a marriage. That narrative did its job, but let terrible structural inequalities go unresolved and terrible injustices go unpunished, and people who are now alive benefited and continue to benefit from that history of oppression, but are far removed enough we aren't the same bad (or good) actors who caused the problem. We don't know how to fix it, although we know it isn't fixed (as the disproportionate incarceration rate of black men shows).
We also run into other basic narrative problems: it is easy to tell a narrative that follows an individual struggling against the oppression of an individual, but difficult to tell a narrative that encompasses an entire society, particularly a society of people who are disempowered and can't exactly protag. (This stuff isn't impossible, but it is difficult. It goes without saying that not every writer has the skills of Chinua Achebe.)
This is particularly complicated while working in a genre that is, to one degree or another, escapist. SF likes positive endings (or tragic endings that are somehow poetic and awe-inspiring). We also have a long history of liking underdogs, which winds up working in favor of the Confederacy, and tend to get sidelined into battle stuff, if we like the Civil War, because it's fun - here's a time when you have a combination of WWI and Napoleonic strategies and technologies, and SF loves technological shifts.
However, the most significant thing that I think science fiction needs to examine is the degree to which our familiar narrative structures are grounded in the Western, in stories of the loner pushing the frontier forward and/or building a new society that ignores the past and promises a fresh start. In a lot of these original Westerns, the main characters are ex-Confederates, and the society they are moving away from is the society of the federal government.
When we replicate the archetypes from these stories - which we are often aping from other SF stories, and not directly from the Westerns, which we may not have read - we uncritically bring along a lot of "Lost Cause" baggage, which is perhaps all the more powerful for being invisible. We portray the individual as noble and the government as intrusive, and suggest that the past is something one wants to escape from and ignore (and is therefore not culpable for). We advance the notion that it's heroic to pit oneself against the frontier instead of getting entangled in "politics" and regulations, without considering who those politics and regulations might have been working to protect or compensate.
I think it is no coincidence that contemporary Libertarianism has been embraced fervently by the techy geek set in Northern California, who believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that we have reached a meritocracy and government is not needed. Science fiction has baked the Lost Cause into the foundation of our stories, and in doing so set the stage for an SFWA that has been plagued with hideous recent racism and sexism, with some members suggesting that women should be kicked out and at least one stating outright that black people are less evolved and we should take up guns against them. There are consequences when, to represent life beyond the stars, we unthinkingly mimic a frontier society that was made up not only disproportionately of men, but disproportionately of men who were traumatized combat veterans. Combat veterans from the side that wanted to perpetuate inequality and used violence to do it.
I am not saying that this is the only way to read these stories, or that there is no place for them. But it is something we, as SF authors, need to take a hard look at when we center our fiction on the individualistic and rootless adventurer, or say things like "the protagonist needs to protag." To build a new mythology, it is not enough to stick women or non-white characters into these roles if we tell the same narratives with the same unexamined ideals.
As a counterexample, I pointed out Jonathan Lethem's excellent Girl in Landscape, which not only deliberately subverts the John Wayne archetype, but includes one of the only evocations I've seen of one of the stranger aspects of Civil War-era Southern culture (and race relations in Haiti immediately prior to their successful slave revolt) - the tendency to view black people as invisible and threatening at the same time. You had Confederates discussing their plans and airing their beliefs that black people were violent and crazy in the same room where they were being waited upon by black house slaves, and there was never a moment of "oh, wait, they could kill me in my sleep." (In Haiti, as Mikki pointed out, the black slaves were asked to carry the guns.) Girl in Landscape brings humans into contact with an alien species, and the question isn't simply what their rights might be, and whether they might be violent, but whether humans could get along fine by pretending the aliens aren't there. (If you haven't read it, read it.)
We all agreed that regardless of whether or not we like it, Firefly is problematic. Scott Lynch refilled everybody's water, like a tea party, apparently a holdover habit from the time he spent waiting tables.