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coffeeandink) wrote2009-07-23 02:11 pm
coffeeandink) wrote2009-07-23 02:11 pm
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mariness on Readercon and disability- Readercon 2010 programming suggestions
- Justine Larbelestier on the whitewashing of the cover of her book Liar, as well as whitewashing in YA covers in general. Noted also: Mary Ann Mohanraj in comments on SE Asian Diaspora covers, and Neesha in The Brown Bookshelf comments:
What I donât understand is this: this cover could have been an image of *anything*. Heck, it couldâve been a truncated body the likes of which many, many South Asian novels are presented with. The reason Iâve seen given, over and over, for not showing a face on a South Asian novel cover is because people âcanât relateâ to it if it is a brown face. So, we have many, many sari-clad bellies and henna-ed feet and hands, mangoes, spices, and yes, coconuts gracing South Asian books. But rarely any faces.
I find this a really chilling pocket encapsulation of neocolonialism in general, actually. (Also see Simon Winchester's bizarrely nostalgic review of Richard Bernstein's The East, the West, and Sex ["This idea â of the East as the center of a âharem cultureâ so enticingly different from what is parodied as our own Judeo-Calvinist dreariness â has captivated Westerners since the first imperialists planted their flags in the heat and dust of far away. In recent years, however, it is a notion that has spiraled frighteningly out of control. Nowadays there is precious little that passes for romance about the picture: the charming 19th-century image of Kiplingâs temple girl at the old pagoda in Moulmein, the âneater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land,â has been replaced by todayâs obese American pederast trolling for catamites in the bars of Zamboanga, or of middle-aged sex tourists buying infants in Phnom Penh or on the beaches outside Colombo."] or better yet just skip to Bitch Magazine's brief list of women of color who have been writing about these issues for at least twenty years.)
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Which is disturbing on its own (the assumption that readers have to identify, the assumption that female readers in particularly must have headless characters--it doesn't happen nearly so much with books with male main characters, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm not thinking of), I think--but I imagine it's exacerbated by racism in the case of books with headless POC (and mangoes) on the cover. I will be thrilled when the headless-woman-on-cover trend is over; I find it really creepy.
Lack of authorial control over cover art is a huge problem, and really displays the biases of the publishing industry. I remember people being upset about one of the Elizabeth Moon's books having a blond on the cover when the main character is Latina (I think the blond was meant to represent the next-most-main character, who is a blond white woman--but why put her on the cover instead?). When the Latina character was on the covers, she was portrayed very ambiguously, and the two times they put Heris on a cover (she's in her 40s and probably black), she was suddenly a young white woman.
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It really enrages me. I've been hating headless women on book covers for a long while.
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I'm kind of grumpy about the whole "reader must IDENTIFY" thing anyway--it's the same argument used to justify not making women or POC the heroes of movies, because oh noes! white men won't be able to "identify"! What's so wrong about expecting people to be willing to learn about other people, whether or not they're similar? I'd get pretty bored reading only about middle class white women, but apparently, that's what the publishing industry expects people to do--read about themselves (or at least read about white people, especially men). And the movie and TV industries are worse.
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I am not always 100% pro authorial control of covers -- visual art and writing are very different skills. But the persistent and institutional assumption of whiteness on book covers is a big issue.
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I do think it would be good for authors to have veto power if the cover is inaccurate, particularly in cases like this where inaccuracy almost always favors white people (vetoing for ugly, maybe not--but it's not like whoever picks covers always does a great job in that respect).
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"young" Thai prostitutesbutterflies. Which is magical and Eastern and not sad at all, no.no subject
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Obviously bad photoshop is not the reason so many genre covers are whitewashed, but I can't help but think that the popularity of bad photoshop for cover art doesn't help the whitewashing. Looking at my bookshelf, those covers that feature actual art created by a person, not on a computer, are vastly more likely to accurately reflect the protagonists' appearance. But I suppose the decision between art and photoshop is ultimately one that can be laid at the feet of marketing, which leads back to the original problem.
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Yeah, evidently.
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Justine Larbaliester was discussing the Last Airbender white washing/Racebending.
http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2009/07/20/race-and-avatar/
While we, in Racebending.com, were discussing the whitewashing of her book.
Is the racism in book publising as systemic as Hollywood racism?
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Ugh.
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But Sci-fi wasn't mainstream through most of that, and in forty years I'm reasonably certain those are all the books I've read with black protagonists.
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