My life in books

Adilifu Nama, in Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film, explores and interrogated (as he notes in his Introduction) "... the intersection of black representation and science fiction (sf) cinema." Acknowledging that actual representation of black people in sf film is extremely limited (even more so in 2008, when the book was published), he adds:

"... in spite of the overt omission of black representation and racial issues in sf cinema, I have found that both are present in numerous sf films. Albeit implicit—as structured absence, repressed or symbolic—blackness and race are often present in sf films as narrative subtext or implicit allegorical subject. Most important, for this book, is the cultural politics of race that such representations suggest not only in sf cinema but alongside the sociohis- torical place that blackness has occupied in American society. As a result, the sf film genre is not merely an imaginative medium primarily focused on the future. Sf film is also a powerful lens by which to observe the collective racial desires, constructs, fantasies, and fears circulating throughout American society."

In discussing the ways in which blackness is both openly represented and covertly coded in science fiction film, Nama acknowledges that he is examining the genre in unaccustomed ways:

"Too often the sf film genre is regarded as addressing only signature divisions in the genre: humans versus machines, old versus new, individual versus society, and nature versus the artificial. In this book, however, I place black racial formation at the center of these common dichotomies. As a result, a more complex and provocative picture emerges of how sf cinema, in imagining new worlds and addressing a broad range of social topics, has confronted and retreated from the color line, one of the most troubling and turbulent social issues present in American society."

Nama organises his analyses into six general topics. In the book's first chapter, "Structured Absence and Token Presence," he looks at the meanings inherent in the absence of black (and other racialised) characters in sf films, the implications of imagined futures in which only white people (and often only white Americans) survive, and the way blackness is coded through the use of symbolic characteristics and animals or animal-like others. While noting a number of films which do incorporate black characters - many of which, in the earlier years of sf film, were produced during the brief flourishing of 'blaxploitation' films which presented and validated black experience - Nama shows how these 'token' black characters often embody white concerns about racial issues. Examining films produced in more recent years, Nama looks at the emergence of the 'safe' black hero - in many instances portrayed by a single actor, Will Smith - as a reassuring figure for white audiences.

In the second chapter, "Bad Blood: Fear of Racial Contamination," Nama "examines the theme of racial contamination in sf cinema and, by extension, America’s fixation with racial boundary maintenance." Fear of racial 'contamination,' and the history of eugenicist responses to this fear, can be seen both in coded implication and overt symbolism in a number of science fiction themes and tropes - mutants, zombies, androids, shape-shifting 'things' - that, when associated, as they frequently are, with dystopian and post-apocalyptic settings, underline the belief that 'blood mixing' is the first step to the end of civilisation.

The third chapter, "The Black Body: Figures of Distortion," begins with the observation that the black body has long been depicted in a distorted or exaggerated fashion in American media. Nama goes on to discuss how "... the black body is often depicted in sf film not merely in ways that connect it with a sense of the grotesque or a source and site of phantasmagoric spectacle but also as a cultural and political metaphor for racial difference." Nama also notes the ways in which the male black body is associated with violent phallic and sexual imagery, suggestive of the construction of black men as sexually aggressive and threatening.

In the fourth chapter, "Humans Unite!: Race, Class and Postindustrial Aliens," Nama explores various unifying interests - class notably among them - that appear to override interracial strife or threats. In a number of science fiction films, the evil corporation becomes the threat which brings together black and white, while in others, the threat of an even greater Other - the invading or infiltrating alien - stand in for loss of jobs and disempowerment in a postindustrial economy and "... make racial strife obsolete." Ironically, while downplaying black/white racial tensions, many of these films symbolically depict fear of Latin@ immigrants 'invading' the shrinking blue-collar labour market.

In "White Narratives, Black Allegories," Nama begins his discussion by noting that science fiction film is a genre that, while superficially recapitulating many of the tropes of the white-supremacist, colonialist 'Western' genre, it is notably more open to resistant and subversive readings. In expanding on this, he "examines the allegorical import of sf film not only in breaching and buttressing the ideological constructs of America’s racial hierarchy but also as sources of subversive pleasure, meaning, and play that often contest the “preferred” meaning..." The chapter discusses a number of films that in Nama's analysis are "...open to racial readings that engage the legacy of American slavery, the racial injustice of the American legal system, black crime, police brutality, black liberation, and “race” riots, as well as racial pro ling."

In the final chapter, "Subverting the Genre: The Mothership Connection," Nama "... shifts focus from Hollywood representations of science fiction blackness to those independent and extrafilmic productions that stand not only outside the mainstream apparatus of cinematic production but in some cases outside the cultural conventions of mainstream notions of blackness." In particular, he examines films which consciously engage with race and the black community. Nama also explores the relatively new movement of Afrofuturism which includes not only film, but "... art, independent black comic books, black music, and even hip-hop videos [which] have functioned as alternative sites where futuristic fantasyscapes populated by black people can find expression." In considering the importance of the Afrofuturism movement in black-created and black-centred cultural productions, Nama asks, as his closing remarks, "... sf film is an important symbol of the social progress of a society still struggling to come to terms with the legacy of American racism. If we cannot look toward the future to imagine new possibilities and solutions for a history of race relations marred with fear, violence, institu- tional discrimination, and deep-seated ambivalence, then where else?"

Judith Merril was one of the most influential American science fiction reviewers and editors of the 1960s. She introduced and championed the writers, works and revolutionary aesthetics of the British New Wave in North American, transforming the genre in the process.

In The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism: Judith Merril’s Nonfiction, part of Aqueduct Press' Heirloom series, editor Ritch Calvin has brought together a number of works that illustrate the evolution of Merril's critical theory: review columns, anthology introductions, and other selected essays.

Calvin's introduction to the collection, which he titles "Introduction: The SF Aesthetics of Judith Merril," is in fact an essay that sums up the key aspects of Merril's thinking about science fiction - which she often referred to as science fantasy - as a mature theory of criticism. The essays of Merril collected in the volume show the development of that theory through her ongoing examination of the works of sff writers over the years. They also, as Calvin notes, offer

"...a history of SF, SF authors and editors, and SF publishing. In her reviews, introductions, and tributes, she chronicles the lives and work of many prominent and lesser known figures. She details the lives and deaths of a number of writers and editors. And she recounts the developments within the field as they happened. Over a period of twelve years, we get yearly, and sometimes monthly, updates on who is publishing, what is being written, and how the field is changing."

Reading through the introductions - the earliest of which is for the first edition of SF: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy, published in 1956, is indeed very much a journey through history. As I read her discussions of the authors and works included in these volumes - some of the names still well-known, others barely remembered - I found myself transported back in time, to the memories of the child reading all the sff books she could find in her local library, spending her precious allowance on sff monthly magazines and the occasional new book she found in the carousel bookstands that used to grace variety, department and grocery stores.

I'm grateful to these reminders of the past, to have brought back to mind stories and authors whose works are rarely in the "Best SF Short Stories" anthologies that pick a topic or a decade and republish the great stories that are always republished. I'm also happy to be learning about authors whose work I somehow never encountered as a child - in the hopes that I may some day find an online repository where I can read them now.

A wonderful book for anyone interested in learning about, or revisiting, the history of the genre.

It has been said that the Inklings - the community of writers that surrounded C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams - was the most influential group of writers of the 20th century. In Bandersnatch: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings, Diana Pavlac Glyer traces the story of the Inklings as a working writers' group from its beginnings, detailing the evidence for the extensive influence the members had on each other's writing. The book itself is an adaptation of her earlier and more scholarly work, The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in community, and has been organised in such a way as to offer not only illuminative anecdotes about the writers and details of the process of critique and collaboration that marked their interactions, but observations on what made the group so successful in fostering each other's work and the lessons other groups might draw from that success.

The story of the Inklings begins with Lewis and Tolkien. Both employed in teaching English at Oxford, their association began when Tolkien, who believed that study of mythology and early languages was essential to the study of English, started a club, named the Kolbítar (Old Norse for “old cronies who sit round the fire so close that they look as if they were biting the coals") for the study and appreciation of old Icelandic literature. Lewis, long fascinated by Norse mythology, joined the club.

Then, in 1929, Tolkien asked Lewis to read his early draft of the Lay of Leithian, the poem about the love of the mortal Beren for the elven Lúthien Tinúviel, which would eventually become part of The Lord of the Rings. Lewis praised it highly - but he also offered a detailed critique on all levels, from conceptual matters to word choices. Tolkien responded with extensive revisions. Lewis then shared some of his own work with Tolkien, and eventually the two began meeting regularly to read and critique each other's work. They were eventually joined by Lewis's brother Warren, retired from military service, who had engaged on a project of editing the Lewis family papers for eventual publication (Warren Lewis would later turn his efforts to historical research and write several well-respected books on 17th century France.)

Glyer notes that while we tend to associate the Inklings with writing and scholarship, a third key element - like the first two, a matter of commitment, even devotion rather than simple interest - that bound them together was Christian theology and faith. As C. S. Lewis wrote when inviting Charles Williams to join their company, “We have a sort of informal club called the Inklings: the qualifications (as they have informally evolved) are a tendency to write, and Christianity."

Over time, the group, which adopted the name of the Inklings, grew to include other working writers - poets, essayists, scholars in a wide range of subjects from literature to medicine, novelists and playwrights - though not all participated to the same degree and several members came and went during the years. In all, 19 men are considered to have been members of the Inklings - Owen Barfield, J. A. W. Bennett, David Cecil, Nevill Coghill, James Dundas-Grant, Hugo Dyson, Adam Fox, Colin Hardie, Robert E. “Humphrey” Havard, C. S. Lewis, Warren Lewis, Gervase Mathew, R. B. McCallum, C. E. Stevens, Christopher Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Wain, Charles Williams, and C. L. Wren.

Glyer focuses her attentions on the writers 'at the heart' of the Inkings - Tolkien senior and later his son Christopher, the two Lewis brothers, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams - detailing their influences on each other and their collaborative projects. What emerges is a remarkable portrait of a group of intensely intellectual and creative men who shared some of the most intimate aspects of their lives - their creative processes and their spiritual selves. A rich community of authors, whose individual works would influence many other writers beyond their circle. Without their connections to each other and the long ongoing conversation that encompassed them all, English literature of the 20th century - including genre fiction - would have been very different, and much poorer for the loss.

Wonderfully left-wing publishing house PM Press has been putting out a series called Outspoken Authors which consists of collections of writings by visionary left-leaning writers, most of them writers of sff. I've read and talked a number of these before, including volumes that contained selected works (and an original interview) with people like Ursula Le Guin, Nalo Hopkinson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Terry Bisson and Eleanor Arnason.

My latest read from this series is a collection of essays, poems and other works from Marge Piercy called My Life, My Body. Woven through all the selections is a strong, politically and socially radical consciousness, conjoined with a commitment to feminist analysis, addressing topics ranging from the effects of gentrification on marginalised communities to the enforcement of a white male canon in literature.

Her focus ranges from social justice to literary criticism. Several of the selections here deal, in part or in whole, with the growing problem of homelessness, particularly among women. Others argue passionately against the trend in criticism that demands the separation of politics and art, and devalues literature written from a political consciousness (which, she notes, is often work created by women and marginalised peoples.

In addition to the essays and poems, the volume includes an interesting interview with Piercy conducted by fellow leftist and science fiction writer Terry Bisson.

If you're a fan of Piercy's work, you'll appreciate the pieces collected here immensely. And after that, I heartily recommend that you have a look at other volumes from the Outspoken Writers series.

Roxane Gay's collection of essays, Bad Feminist, expertly navigates the intersections between feminism and racism. In many of these essays Gay performs a kind of doubly focused analysis - in exploring issues from the desire for happy endings to the nature of rape culture through cultural elements - books, television and film, pop music, celebrities, art - she also critiques these cultural elements from these intersectional perspectives.

Other essays are personal, indeed intimate narratives about being a black woman, a child of immigrants, in American society, a woman trying to separate the mythology about being a feminist from the reality.

I'm not entirely sure why Gay calls herself a "bad feminist." In one of her more personal essays she says:

At some point, I got it into my head that a feminist was a certain kind of woman. I bought into grossly inaccurate myths about who feminists are—militant, perfect in their politics and person, man-hating, humorless. I bought into these myths even though, intellectually, I know better. I’m not proud of this. I don’t want to buy into these myths anymore. I don’t want to cavalierly disavow feminism like far too many other women have done.

In the same essay, she talks about feminism as a performance she is failing at, harkening back to comments in another essay about Judith Butler's theory of gender performance and extending that to performance of a feminist identity:

I am failing as a woman. I am failing as a feminist. To freely accept the feminist label would not be fair to good feminists. If I am, indeed, a feminist, I am a rather bad one. I am a mess of contradictions. There are many ways in which I am doing feminism wrong, at least according to the way my perceptions of feminism have been warped by being a woman.

She goes on to list ways in which she "fails" at being a feminist - liking the colour pink and rap culture, wanting a partner and a child, not understanding cars, negotiating relationships that don't seem sufficiently independent and egalitarian... And all I can think is, where did we, the generation of feminists that went before her, go wrong that she has this doubt about her feminism.

She adds:

Maybe I’m a bad feminist, but I am deeply committed to the issues important to the feminist movement. I have strong opinions about misogyny, institutional sexism that consistently places women at a disadvantage, the inequity in pay, the cult of beauty and thinness, the repeated attacks on reproductive freedom, violence against women, and on and on. I am as committed to fighting fiercely for equality as I am committed to disrupting the notion that there is an essential feminism.

And this us where I find myself saying to her, Girl, this is what makes you a feminist, and a good one. We are all human, and making certain choices in one's private life has nothing to do with fighting for a society in which all people are free to make any of those same choices without gendered baggage and fear of performing one's role wrongly - in which liking pink, or understanding cars, or wanting a family, and feeling like being taken care of, is entirely a matter of personal taste and interest and desire, and not a marker of maleness or femaleness.

Because in what she writes, Gay is a very good feminist indeed, and her insights into our society and culture are very much worth reading.

I must confess that I skimmed many of the early pieces in Margaret Atwood's Second Words: Selected Critical Prose 1960-1982, for a very simple reason - Atwood's early critical work examines a period of Canada's literary history that is well before my time. Reviews of small literary magazines that ceased publication before I was of an age to explore such things, while interesting in terms of following the development of Atwood's choices of subject, critical voice, and style, were not easy for me to sink into. Nonetheless, Atwood is always interesting, and even in her early days she had important things to say, and was on her way to developing that sly irony and trenchant wit which is such a part of her literary voice.

In one piece, while lamenting the end of one of those small Canadian literary magazines, Atwood makes an interesting observation:

Give the same poem to a model American, a model English and a model Canadian critic: the American will say "This is how it works;" the Englishman "How good, how true to Life" (or, "How boring, tasteless and trite"); the Canadian will say "This is where it fits into the entire universe."

There is something about this that rings true to me - certainly in my own modest and sporadic attempts at criticism (and not just literary criticism) I always seem to be looking for the contexts, the connections. And it is something that can be seen in Atwood's work in full measure.

The collection is divided into three sections and contains fifty short pieces, obviously not all of equal interest to me. My attention in the first part of the book (covering the years from 1960 to 1971) was particularly drawn to her analysis of the works of poets I have some familiarity with - Gwendolyn McEwan, Al Purdy - and to a fascination exploration of H. Rider Haggard's presentation of women in his novels, culminating in She and Ayesha: The Return of She.

Another of the early pieces that was more than a mere academic exercise for me was written in 1971. In "Nationalism, Limbo and The Canadian Club," Atwood talks about her memories of attending graduate school in the U.S. in the 60s, and the beginnings of the Canadian search for a unique cultural identity. How true the following observation rings, even today:

"They" had been taught that they were the centre of the universe, a huge, healthy apple pie, with other countries and cultures sprinkled round the outside, like raisins. "We" on the other hand had been taught that we were one of the raisins, in fact, the raisin, and that the other parts of the universe were invariably larger and more interesting than we were. A distortion of the truth in both cases, let us hope.

There were several disturbing corollaries. One was that we knew more about them, much more, than they knew about us; another was that they knew a lot more about themselves than we knew about ourselves. Another, related to our growing consciousness of economic domination, was that we had let ourselves come under the control of a people who neither knew nor cared to know anything about us. The most disturbing of all was the realization that they were blundering around in the rest of the world with the same power, the same staggering lack of knowledge and the same lack of concern: the best thing for the raisins, in their opinion, was to be absorbed into the apple pie.

In her introduction to the second section of the collection, containing works written between 1972 and 1976, Atwood notes that the publication of her book of Canadian literary criticism, Survival, and the growth of the women's movement had a significant influence on the nature of the requests she received for articles and speeches. Many of the collected pieces in this section are reviews of books written by women - Adrienne Rich, Audrey Thomas, Erica Jong, Kate Millett, Marie-Claire Blais, Marge Piercy - or
articles about literature or writing from an early feminist perspective. A must-read among these is "The Curse of Eve," in which almost every sentence identifies an entire library's worth of feminist cultural and literary analysis - most of which, at that time, was still waiting to be written. It concludes with this plea from a "woman writer" that is, in many ways still relevant today:

I will enter a simple plea; women, both as characters and as people, must be allowed their imperfections. If I create a female character, I would like to be able to show her having the emotions all human beings have—hate, envy, spite, lust, anger and fear, as well as love, compassion, tolerance and joy—without having her pronounced a monster, a slur, or a bad example. I would also like her to be cunning, intelligent and sly, if necessary for the plot, without having her branded as a bitch goddess or a glaring instance of the deviousness of women. For a long time, men in literature have been seen as individuals, women merely as examples of a gender; perhaps it is time to take the capital W off Woman. I myself have never known an angel, a harpy, a witch or an earth mother. I've known a number of real women, not all of whom have been nicer or more noble or more long-suffering or less self-righteous and pompous than men. Increasingly it is becoming possible to write about them, though as always it remains difficult for us to separate what we see from what we have been taught to see.

The remainder of the pieces from the second section are articles on themes in Canadian literature, or on the Canadian identity. Reading these latter pieces bring back memories of those days when we as Canadians were becoming aware of not just who we were, but how vulnerable we were to cultural and economic imperialism and exploitation.

But there's another image, fact, coming from the outside that I have to fit in. This territory, this thing I have called "mine," may not be mine much longer. Part of the much-sought Canadian identity is that few nationals have done a more enthusiastic job of selling their country than have Canadians. Of course there are buyers willing to exploit, as they say, our resources; there always are. It is our eagerness to sell that needs attention. Exploiting resources and developing potential are two different things: one is done from without by money, the other from within, by something I hesitate only for a moment to call love.

The third section, which contains pieces published between 1977 and 1982, documents an expanded range of topics and perspectives on Atwood's part, as she notes in her introduction to the final section.

I have always seen Canadian nationalism and the concern for women's rights as part of a larger, non- exclusive picture. We sometimes forget, in our obsession with colonialism and imperialism, that Canada itself has been guilty of these stances towards others, both inside the country and outside it; and our concern about sexism, men's mistreatment of women, can blind us to the fact that men can be just as disgusting, and statistically more so, towards other men, and that women as members of certain national groups, although relatively powerless members, are not exempt from the temptation to profit at the expense of others. Looking back over this period, I see that I was writing and talking a little less about the Canadian scene and a little more about the global one.

Among the articles published in this period are reviews of a variety of books, some by authors still writing, some still part of the recognisable cultural canon even though their writers are no longer with us, and some that have passed into relative obscurity. Books reviewed include: A Harvest Yet to Reap, a book documenting the experiences and activism of prairie women; a posthumously published collection of letters by American poet Anne Sexton; Timothy Findley's novel The Wars; two works by recently deceased poets, Pat Lowther's A Stone Diary, and John Thompson's Stilt Jack; Tillie Olsen's Silences, a meditation on the obstacles facing writers, particularly women writers; Sylvia Plath's posthumously published Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams; Red Dust, a collection of short stories by W. D. Valdgardson; Nadine Gortimer's July's People; Ann Beattie's Falling in Place; E. L. Doctorow's Loon Lake; Jay McPherson's Poems Twice Told; and Midnight Birds, a collection of short fiction by Black women authors (concerning this review, Atwood examines not only the work, but the reasons why she has been asked to review a collection of American authors for a magazine devoted to "third world" literature).

In addition to the reviews, the collection includes a variety of articles and speeches, primarily on aspects of writing and being a writer:

"Diary Down Under," notes and observations made during her participation in 1978 in Writers' Week, an Australian literary event;
"Witches," a brief address on the persecution of authors and books - witch-hunting - whether they be North American feminists saying uncomfortable things, or revolutionary Latin-American poets saying things that get them disappeared;
"An End to Audience?," a lecture on what it means to be a writer, as a vocation, as a profession, as an art, as a moral statement - and on the changing nature of the writing and publishing landscape and the reading audience;
"Introduction to The Edible Woman" in which Atwood briefly discusses her own first published novel and its relationship to the feminist movement (incidentally, The Edible Woman is one of my favourite Atwood novels);
An address to a meeting of Amnesty International in which Atwood speaks passionately about the responsibility of the writer in a world where oppression and political censorship have become commonplace;
"Northrop Frye Observed," a discussion of Atwood's thoughts on having been a student of Frye's;
"Writing the Male Character," in which Atwood discusses the perils and pitfalls of writing a character of another gender than one's own, from a very feminist perspective.

In what is one of the longer pieces collected in this volume, "Canadian-American Relations" - a speech given to a US audience - Atwood traces the history of the quest for a Canadian identity, and looks at the ways in which the United States has alternately ignored and influenced this. In a somewhat prescient comment, she notes that both Canada and the US must now inhabit a changing world in which the lines are being redrawn:

The world is rapidly abandoning the nineteenth-century division into capitalist and socialist. The new camps are those countries that perform or tolerate political repression, torture and mass murder and those that do not.

Reading this collection, I was reminded once more just how much Atwood's critical perspectives on both art and the world we live in are worth reading.

Ursula Le Guin is one of the great writers of our time. I've been avidly reading her work for most of my life, I've grown up to become the woman, the feminist, the lover of books that I am today with my mind and passions fueled by the wide-ranging Hainish stories, the wonders of Earthsea, the unforgettable vision of the child in the cellar of Omelas, the challenge to established notions of gender posed by the people of Gethen (Winter), the ambiguous utopia of Anarres, the fascinating future of the Kesh, the recovered life of Lavinia, the annals of the Western Shore, and so many more worlds that Le Guin held open for us.

I love reading her work, and I love reading about her work and the life and mind behind that work. Recently, I've read two books that encouraged me to look at Le Guin's writing, and my relationship to it, in terms of its progression and change over time. First, a collection of interviews with Le Guin, gleaned from the past and covering most of her life as a published author, and second, an analysis of Le Guin's work from a feminist perspective, which examines how her work changes as she engages with feminist theory, and expressed her own developing feminist awareness.

Carl Freedman (ed.), Conversations with Ursula K. Leguin

This collection of ten interviews conducted with Ursula Le Guin by various people between 1980 and 2006, including one by the editor himself, gives the reader insight into Le Guin's thinking about writing - both her own and the craft itself - and many other subjects relevant to her life and work. I found these interviews quite fascinating to read, not just because they illuminate key aspects of a remarkable author's career, but also because Le Guin gives very good interviews. As editor Carl Freedman notes:

Le Guin takes every interview not as an opportunity to recapitulate long-held views but as an occasion for authentic intellectual discourse, with all the unpredictability that this implies and all the attendant dialectical give-and-take. She never hesitates to challenge an interviewer's assumptions when they seem to her to be inadequate to the issues at hand, and at least some interviewers return the compliment - that of conceptual seriousness - by issuing challenges of their own. The fundamental project of a Le Guin interview is learning, on the part of both parties to the interview and, of course, of the reader as well; and the topics about which one can learn are varied indeed, from U.S. foreign policy to the history of architecture, and much else besides.

this volume is, I think, an important piece for anyone interested not only in Le Guin's writings, but in what lies behind - and beyond - them.


Amy Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin's Journey to Post-Feminism

Amy Clarke has produced in this volume the first full-length examination of Le Guin's changing understanding and expression of feminism as seen through her work. As reviewer Sandra J. Lidnow comments in Science Fiction Studies,

This succinctly written book represents a thorough reading of Le Guin’s work and traces the evolution of her feminist thought from early in her career, when she professed to her mother, Theodora Kroeber, that she did not know how to write about women, to the present when Le Guin, along with authors such as Joanna Russ and Pamela Sargent, are acclaimed as the most influential speculative writers to have explored gender. (http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/lindow112.html)

That aspect of the book is exciting and wonderful and makes it well worth reading. However, i feel a need to talk about the whole "post-feminist" element of Clarke's thesis for a bit.

Post-feminism is a tricky topic. It suggests a way of thinking that, while influenced by feminism, is no longer in need of feminist theory, analysis or praxis. It says "it's time to move beyond feminism" and leaves open to the listener the reasons why this might be so. Post-feminists, it is sometimes argued, don't want to exclude men, the way feminists did. They are pro-sex, unlike the oddly prudish second wave feminists. They are conscious of diversity and intersectionality in ways feminists never dreamed of. As Clarke says, quoting Ann Brooks's Postfeminisms:

...post-feminism is both porous and comprehensive, a "non-hegemonic feminism capable of giving voice to local, indigenous and post-colonial feminisms." The post-feminist embrace extends as well to theories like post-structuralism, especially in rejecting singular, master narratives and instead seeking out the individual story, accepting multiple points of view. Unlike the story-telling of the early women's movement used in consciousness-raising sessions, the goal is not collectivity by seeking sameness, but instead by accepting difference. Along those lines, post-feminism rejects the essentialism inherent in much feminist theory. Taking lessons from gender studies, post-feminism is more male-inclusive, building as it does on a belief that gender lies upon a continuum. This inclusiveness extends to matters of personal choice as well, including those of work, dress and sexual practices.

This is where my problem comes in, because unlike most post-feminists, I was there when the second wave got rolling, and it was never as homogenous as these critiques suggest. We knew we were at the beginning of a long period of analysis and theory-making, and that much of our early ad hoc thinking would evolve. Among us were women of colour, women of varied sexual inclinations, trans and passing women, proud sex workers and even (gasp) men. Many of us were sex-positive from the word go, we simply wanted to be sure that it was our sexuality we were being positive about, not a patriarchal society's self-serving master narrative about what our sexuality ought to be. Many of us questioned essentialist thinking from the beginning, and found it wanting. It sometimes seems to me that what those who make these critiques are reacting to is not second wave feminism itself, but second wave feminism as seen distorted in the lens held up by its enemies.

So.... I must ask, are we speaking of our (Le Guin's and other feminists') journey to post-feminism, or our journey to a mature and evolved feminism? My view is more the latter, and it is with that observation - and reservation - that I read, and now comment upon, Clarke's work.

Clarke's thesis, as stated in her Introduction, is that Le Guin's writing has been profoundly shaped by feminist theory, and has in turn contributed to the growing body of feminist literature.

Le ​Guin ​has ​also ​been ​a ​central ​figure ​in ​feminist ​theory. ​She ​has ​frequently ​said ​that ​her ​writing ​was ​utterly ​reshaped ​by ​a ​feminist ​awakening ​she ​experienced ​in ​the ​late ​seventies ​when ​she responded ​to ​criticisms ​that ​her ​work ​was ​anti-feminist ​by ​immersing ​herself ​in ​the ​feminist ​debate. ​ ​Once ​having ​accepted ​feminist ​principles, ​Le ​Guin ​evolved ​a ​poetics ​of ​non-linear ​narrative, ​emphasizing ​"female" ​values ​and ​experimentation ​with ​language ​and ​syntax.

This thesis is presented through an extensive analysis of Le Guin's work, including not only her speculative fiction, but also her non-genre fiction, her poetry, and her essays (although I must add that relatively less attention is paid to Le Guin's more recent work, including Lavinia and the three-volume Annals of the Western Shore). Clarke also draws on interviews, including her own conversations with Le Guin about her work and process.

Clarke sees LeGuin's career as a writer engaged and engaging with feminist theory as divided into stages (with some overlap); in her book, she devotes one chapter to each stage. The first stage encompasses all of her early work, including The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, and is characterised by Clarke as a highly productive period in which Le Guin seeks to maintain “good manners” while still producing work which challenges the social order, a period in which she is clearly writing within a literary tradition based on male writing, but is exploring the social position of women and subverting the traditional image of the male hero. Clarke argues, in reference to early feminist criticism of Le Guin's works in this period, that "she ​was ​never ​as ​tradition-bound ​and ​
hero-oriented ​as ​has ​been ​described. ​In ​fact, ​with ​The ​Left ​Hand ​of ​Darkness ​and ​The ​Dispossessed, ​she ​was ​an ​early ​feminist ​voice ​even ​before ​she ​aligned ​herself ​with ​the ​movement."​

Clarke's analysis locates the second stage of Le Guin's journey as a period of reaction and re-evaluation, in which she produces (relatively) little original work and begins to "question her relation to gender issues and the literary tradition, to consider her art through a feminist prism."

By the middle of the 1980s, Clarke argues, Le Guin has entered a third stage in which her work becomes both more experimental and more explicitly feminist. She explores ways of storytelling that focus on non-hierarchical relationships and the patterns of women's lives, or that challenge the idea of linear narrative altogether. In this period, Le Guin incorporates into her writing the feminist literary theory of women such as Helen Cixous and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, "writing the body" and "beyond the ending." Her approach to fiction altered by her deep engagement with feminist thought, Le Guin writes women and women's magic into Earthsea, explores women's varied experiences in the linked stories of Searoad, and produces the profoundly experimental and women-centred Always Coming Home. In assessing Le Guin's work of this period, Clarke notes that

In "Why Are We Huddling About the Campfire?" she suggests that we tell stories as a way of constructing reality, of making ourselves understand both that we do exist and offering explanations for why we exist. If we tell stories about men only, feminist theory has taught her, women will not exist. Her writing in this period has been in the service of women, telling their stories. What she has learned from feminism, are ways in which to narrate the lives that do not fit in men's stories.

It is following this period, which Clarke characterises as "high feminist," that she sees Le Guin moving into what she variously calls post-feminism and next-stage feminism (a conceptual tag that I prefer).

Examining the differences in both subject and style that separate Le Guin's work in the 1990s from that of her experimental period, Clarke asks

Having ​
followed ​the ​feminist ​tide, ​does ​she ​now ​emerge ​as ​post-feminist? ​Can ​she ​help ​us ​define ​this ​still ​ambiguous ​term? ​I ​argue ​that ​Le ​Guin ​has ​in ​fact ​moved ​into ​next-stage ​feminism. ​​Her ​return ​to ​the ​imaginary ​lands ​of ​her ​earlier ​writing ​is ​marked ​not ​by ​feminist ​essentialism ​and ​narrative ​experimentation, ​but ​by ​her ​seeming ​rapprochement ​with ​traditional ​forms. ​Her ​recent ​writings ​represent ​Le ​Guin ​at ​another ​artistic ​height, ​but ​they ​also ​indicate ​a ​narrative ​journey ​back ​to ​her ​own ​beginnings, ​her ​own ​"native" ​
content ​and ​style. ​Yet, ​she ​returns ​with ​the ​express ​aim ​of ​shifting ​paradigms ​and ​breaking ​with ​the ​literary ​rules ​of ​engagement, ​a ​legacy ​of ​her ​feminist ​empowerment.

According to Clarke, the hallmarks of this next-stage feminism in Le Guin's writing are greater inclusivity, an engagement with post-colonialism (though I would suggest that through her anthropological perspective, Le Guin was exploring post-colonial narratives well before they were identified as such) and post-modernism (particularly in its valuing of multiple narratives over master narratives), and a return to less experimental styles. In this period, Le Guin continues the project begun with Tehanu, writing women and other non-privileged voices into her prior creations, including the Hainish and Earthsea universes.

While Clarke attempts to equate this shift to a post-feminist stance on the part of Le Guin, she acknowledges that Le Guin herself has not embraced that label for herself and her work.

in Le Guin's world, true journey is return and her evolution into postfeminism marks a spiral trajectory, nearly coming back to origins. She does not reject her feminism but builds it into her mental architecture in a way that makes it seem second nature, so that the writing that springs from it seems more organic. But she moves on from some of the fervor of high feminism, including its experimentalism, essentialism and exclusion. Le Guin has not engaged in discussions of post-feminism. Nonetheless her work of this period shows a clear backing away from the experimental non-linear narratives of her high feminist period. She is certainly assessing the lot of men differently as well. ... There is less universalising of the male experience; more dimensionality and more recognition that men can be as constrained by social roles as women.

As much as I enjoyed Clarke's detailed analysis of Le Guin's works, and the ways in which they embody the feminist process, here is where I (and other feminist reviewers) part company with her thesis. As Sharon de Graw notes in her review, "Given Le Guin's extensive critical and fictional interactions with feminism, some weight should be given to the fact the she has not explicitly disengaged herself from the term feminist nor specifically identified herself with post-feminism in these contexts. (http://www.readperiodicals.com/201101/2560135751.html#ixzz3NIMxv4Kr)

Given that Le Guin's place in literature is well-secured, the fact of her very public espousal of feminist theory and concerns in her work is an important area of criticism, and this book is a good beginning to that project; I hope to see more feminist analysis of her work in the future.

Life's been too much of a bitch for me to keep on writing about books much, but I still read, and I may as well at least post lists of what I read this past year. Here's the first list.


Non-fiction


Much of the of the non-fiction I read was a bit of a hodge-podge. Cultural/political studies, feminism, history, biography. All in its way interesting and nothing I regret reading.

Helen Merrick, The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms

Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender

Adam Kotsko, Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television
Arundahti Roy, Talking to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy
Tim Wise, Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority

Lillian Faderman, Naked in the Promised Land

Alison Weir, The Wars of the Roses
Leanda de Lisle, Tudor: The Family Story

Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, edited by Gauri Viswanathan

This is a fascinating collection of 19 interviews with Edward W Said, conducted between 1976 and 2000 and published in a variety of scholarly and other venues. Through these interviews, it is possible to follow the development of Said’s scholarship and his political activism, as they illuminate the range, penetration and passions in Said’s intellectual and public life.

Editor Gavri Viswanathan puts it best in her introduction:

The interviews Said gave over the past three decades boldly announce that neither his own books and essays nor those written about him have the last word. The first thing to note is not only th number of interviews Said has given, both to print and broadcast media, but also the number of locations in which they took place, spanning Asia and the Middle East as well as Europe and the United States. They confirm his presence on the world stage as one of the most forceful public intellectuals of our time, a man who evokes interest in the general public for his passionate humanism, his cultivation and erudition, his provocative views and his unswerving commitment to the cause of Palestinian self-determination... Together, [these interviews] reveal a ceaselessly roving mind returning to earlier ideas in his books and novels and engaging with them anew. One measure of the fluidity and range of Said’s thought is his ability to revisit arguments made in his books and essays, not merely to defend and elaborate on them but, more important, both to mark their limits and probe their extended possibilities, especially in contexts other than those which first gave rise to them.

Said’s topics range from discourses on the development of his own work, particularly on Orientalism and post-colonial theory, to ruminations on his childhood and how it affects his sense of self in the world, to his political activism and evolving relationship with the PLO, to reflections on other authors and areas from Austen, Conrad, Naipaul and Rushdie to Derrida and Foucault.

There’s a wealth of thought in these interviews, well worth savouring.

Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, Nisi Shawl & Cynthia Ward

Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward are professional writers of speculative fiction who jointly developed and teach the workshop "Writing the other: bridging cultural differences for successful fiction." This book contains material adapted from their workshop, as well as two essays written by Shawl, “Beautiful Strangers: Transracial Writing for the Sincere,” and “Appropriate Cultural Appropriation.”

This volume is designed to be used by authors concerned about honestly, effectively and respectfully writing about people, settings and cultures that diverge from the dominant paradigm -the unmarked state. I can’t venture an opinion on how well it does this, because I am not myself a writer. But I have found it to be, whether by design or not, an excellent book for the reader who is interested in seeing more clearly how successfully the books she reads are at writing the other.

The authors give many examples of successful and unsuccessful attempts at writing culturally diverse works. While there is a strong focus on race, they also consider sex and sexual orientation, culture and religion. Oddly enough, they seem to consider social class not a major category of "Other," at least in North American writing. I would tend to disagree, but I imagine that in a workshop, one must choose topics carefully, as there is not time enough to cover everything one might want to.

I was personally most engaged by the section on cultural appropriation, because it's something that I worry about a lot in my own life. I have a very strong sense of attraction, indeed resonance, to aspects of the art, culture, philosophy and religion of a number of other peoples, and it is often an inner struggle for me to try to work out whether I'm being a cultural poacher or a respectful learner. I'm still not sure I know the answer, but this essay gave me more ways in which to think about what it is that I do.