POC in Sci-fi and Fantasy

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More from Ibarw:

I loved, and still love sci-fi. But sci-fi and fantasy, until recently, certainly didn't seem to love me back.


Let start right off by diving into the meat of the matter, The Epic Indian inquires:Is American Science Fiction & Fantasy racist? (And sexist, bigoted, and culturally insensitive too?)


Librarian blogger Elizabeth sttles down to do someIBARW: Questioning the default settings
My fav paragraphs:

Kindergarten kids are all about making that connection to their own lives. If you read a book about a pet dog, half of them will want to tell you about their own dog, and the other half want to tell you that they have a cat instead or that their babysitter has a dog or that their little brother is allergic and their mom said they couldn’t get a dog or even a hamster but their dad wants a dog and then one time when they went to their grandma’s….

But I thought about how excited wee Christopher had been over a book with a Chinese dragon. Here’s a kid who is thrilled because of something in a book that looks like his life. This is not to say that you can’t relate to a story if you are a different ethnicity-race-gender-orientation-religion than the characters, but I think it’s really important that there be stories out there for kids in which they can see their own lives. It’s incredibly alienating to never see anyone like you in a book or on TV or in the movies.

...
One of the grade three teachers was HUGE into having her class read “classics.” (She also did not appear to have a working definition, it was just something that everybody KNEW was a classic. Also, grade THREE. Gaaaargh.) The end result is that I was booktalking The Secret Garden to her class, and explaining the difference between an abridged and unabridged book, and how Mrs. L said it was okay to read the abridged book for your list. (Oh yes, they had to read X number of classics for the year.) As we finished storytime and the kids all scattered to pick out books, one of the students asked me if the abridged book had the bits in it that took place in India. I said yes, it did, and that we would have more books with bits about India when the rest of our library books came in. And I looked at the small girl of Indian heritage in front of me, and wished very hard that her teacher’s hallowed classics list had some stories on it where all the Indian characters weren’t servants.

We proceed to answer the question and detail the reasons for our answers in: POC in Sci-Fi: A Carnival




smillaraaq points out that sometimes POC are "whitetified" on the covers of their own books: Not all cats are grey: 25 years of cover whitewashing in Joan Vinge's "Cat" series [IBARW3]

cyphomandra encounters a case where the inconvenient POC (in this case the Maori) have simply been erased altogether Elizabeth Knox, Dreamquake Funny that, since the Maori actually were living in New Zealand long before the English came along.

kittikattie looks at the issue of white-washing across the whole genreSci-fi and Fantasy: The Whitewashing




Further examples and advice are provided in Bears, Bombs and Popcorn :Some considerations when mining other cultures for source materials, by Judith Berman

Popular Video games and their lack of representation are looked at in Race, Ethnic Stereotypes, and WoW


Tobias Bucknell writes highly good sci-fi novels that feature Caribbean protagonists. Problem is, he looks white and doesn't identify as such. He explains in: What does it mean to be this Caribbean writer?

For those of us who have been wondering where the hell do we find books written by POC, here are some recs:


saskia starts us off withIndigenous Women's Literature



lady_ganesh continues with Four books about race, both explicitly and implicitly.

starkymonster introduces us to two different kinds of vampires in IBRAW: Vampiric Desegregation or Everyone's Blood is Red (and Delicious)


More recs from nex0s who in IBARW: Book Recommendation! I have GOT to get Acacia:The war with the Mein

sunnyskywalker favourably reviews"Zahrah the Windseeker and The Shadow Speaker

rydra_wong puts together the mother of all post in The SF/F Recs Post

Oh, and while you are at it, join the 50books_poc comm. There are piles more books in there!

EDIT:Recommended Reading - Fantasy Literature by People of Color and/or including PoC and diverse cultures

Comments

[cobecat.livejournal.com]

Oh, lovely. Will be coming back to read these more in-depth later, but for now one of the passages that really spoke to me was Elizabeth's. What a perfect way to make it clear why this is so important.

I took a sci-fi class this summer taught by a woman who grew up on a native american pacifist-anarchist commune in Canada. XD Needless to say, it was a unique perspective on the genre, and she made sure to focus on POC, women-centric and queer literature. Ursula LeGuin is one of my favourites if you're talking about gender theory, and I strongly recommend "Dark Matter" (ed Sheree Thomas), an anthology of African diasporic sci-fi.