What’s wrong with historical fiction?

January 17, 2023

During the pandemic lockdown, I was finally convinced to watch Outlander. When the show first aired, it gained immediate notoriety for being a steamy romance. What I found was a shockingly boring military historical drama about the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 that, yes, was interspersed with a significant amount of explicit sex, but seemingly half of that was assault. Later seasons change the setting to drop the characters into the highlights of 18th-century Atlantic history – pre-Revolution France, Caribbean piracy, pre-Revolutionary America (with a brief jaunt back into the 1960s with glasses on to show time has passed) – but the formula remains the same. Each season has a military/political focus with some good costumes and cultural fact sheet for color, punctuated by equal amounts of consensual sex and extremely disturbing sexual violence. I made it much farther than I really meant to given how much I disliked this setup, but when literally every main character had been assaulted I decided I was done.

Outlander may be pulpy fantasy (after all, the motivating plot device is time travel), but it encapsulates the issue with most historical fiction. It’s a three-part cocktail of conceits: 1) the main appeal is the fantasy of entering an “exciting time” in history, defined by major military or political change; 2) costuming and set are themselves central features of the storytelling because they are essential to setting the scene; and, most importantly, 3) despite the focus on this period, we must remember that it is better to be alive in the present than in the past. So, what seems to many people to be a fun glimpse into the past in order to “learn history”, like broccoli cheddar soup you’re not so much eating your vegetables as throwing a few nuggets of nutrition into otherwise empty calories. This approach is, to me, the greatest disservice to the telling of history, because for all of the effort to bring history to life, it creates more distance between the story and the audience. From my perspective, history is made real through compassion for the complexity of life in the past. But we can’t have compassion if we enter into these stories clinging to the notion that life must be better in the present, that the redeeming features of these stories are the lasting impact of the events and the escapism of their settings. Devices like sexual assault in stories such as this serve to prop up these expectations: the second Outlander’s Claire enters the 18th century, she is subjected to a constant barrage of threats of sexual violence, underlined by her crusade to bring “modern medicine” to a time literally plagued by smallpox.

Historical fiction is a genre that I keep returning to in the hopes that I will like it more this time, although I rarely have. More so now in movies and tv than books, I find myself struck again and again by how much this genre depends on suffering porn and I remind myself to avoid it. This, of course, is the basis for the “gritty realism” of Game of Thrones and its claims to historical accuracy to the Middle Ages. But this basic disrespect for the past, this inability to tell historical stories without focusing, to some extent, on suffering, runs through even relatively benign or seemingly joyful properties. I had this thought initially when I watched the remake of A League of Their Own, which reorients the story of the women’s All American Baseball League around the queer women who could have found refuge in it and the Black women who were excluded from it. Abbi Jacobson, who starred in and wrote the show, said that one of her goals was to show gay joy, to avoid the “bury your gays” trap. And yet the show itself has nary a moment of queer women living as themselves without the plot punishing them for it, through the consequences of being found out, through police raids, through the social complications of marriage. That plot progression of showing gay joy and following it immediately with severe consequences would have been right at home under the Hays Code, the repressive standards that censored movies and tv between 1936 and 1968, which allowed the representation of things considered “socially undesirable” so long as they were punished. It’s not ignoring the historical reality to show people existing as themselves in the societies they made without constantly following it up with violence, retribution, or tragedy.

In contrast, HBO’s The Gilded Age takes almost the opposite approach, with no violence, no sex, no suffering for the lower class, and little more but the slightest racially-motivated social snubs during the 1880s. For a time period defined by extreme class inequality, all the show depicts is the lives of New York aristocracy, with occasional glimpses into the seemingly stable and normal lives of their servants, and infrequent jaunts into the rosy utopia of segregated Black society. The most ill will the show has depicted is tied between a nice gay man who plots to marry a naïve young woman for her money and a racist lady’s maid who tries to discredit the show’s only major Black character, perhaps because she is personally frustrated with caring for her elderly and belligerent mother. Neither plot has yet proved successful. Presumably, part of the justification for making this show was the recent public debate about whether we are in a new Gilded Age ourselves, and yet this show does nothing to depict why that might be a bad thing. It almost seems to apologize for a a more civilized age of class disparity when millionaires were guided by morality and the poor all had jobs.

Horns of our dilemma, 1890

Another recent somewhat fanciful historical fiction that gets a bit closer to good history is Amazon Prime’s The English. The English goes in guns blazing with social agenda, taking the Western genre and turning it on its head to focus on women and indigenous stories. It doesn’t shy away from violence, but it doesn’t glory in it either – sexual assault is seen in the aftermath or off screen, as is violence both individual and en masse toward Native Americans. The violence on screen is white men shooting each other, which is in an ironic way very true to the genre. This is a true centering of typically peripheral stories, allowing the characters to both show and tell the difficulties of their lives in this patriarchal settler-colonialist society. If anything, what is unsuccessful in this telling is how the plot falls back into the tropes of historical fiction by making these elements gain their power over the story through reveals, rather than using them to drive the narrative from the start. Rape is once again a plot device, rather than the inciting incident for the protagonist, which makes it seem more like a feature of the world in which she lives than the atrocity it was. Moreover, the grit of this show gives it that air of “at least things are better in our time”, when we know full-well that circumstances have largely not improved for indigenous people and that women are often subjected to the same treatment as in the show. If anything, the punch of the show could have hit harder if it looked a little more modern.

https://www.memedroid.com/memes/detail/3580852

So have I ever been happy with historical fiction? Yes. I would say the best historical movie/tv show I’ve seen was HBO’s Rome, which is absolutely full of sex and violence (though surprisingly more restrained in sexualized violence than its spiritual successor Game of Thrones) but brings ancient Rome to life in a complex and current-feeling way. The first season of Rome is driven by soldiers trying to find their places in life after war, an ambitious mother trying to push her children into places of political prominence, a politician trying to hide a disability, and a family trying to hide the true parentage of an infant. At the same time, there is a woman kneeling naked under a slaughtered bull. It’s not perfect – there are inaccuracies, it’s still a very military/political narrative, and it absolutely does not pass the Bechdel test. But it makes the distant past feel relatable in a compelling way and it manages to find a new narrative in a story that Shakespeare already made famous. One of the things that I think is most successful about this is that as much as the fictional characters are wrapped up in the real events leading up to the assassination of Julius Caesar, the story isn’t trying to explain why that happened. In fact, that event is itself used more as a plot device that helps to establish the emotional weight of all the other things that come to a head at the same time.

For a completely different approach, the best historical novel I’ve read was Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus, which is a personal narrative driven by social relationships and art set in 15th-century Florence (although I don’t read a lot of novels anymore so this book is already 20 years old). This is a story that could have fallen victim to a lot of overdone tropes of historical suffering, especially the Plague, which frankly would have been stupid (and I’ve read a book like that, Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders, it was terrible). Instead, it deals with a young woman’s maturation into adulthood and she could have navigated it within that society. What made this such a beautiful book is that, unlike most historical fiction, it isn’t trying to tell the story of a pivotal event, but instead using a historical setting to get at a human experience. As an art-loving teenager, I found this book incredibly true to life, putting equal emphasis on the struggle to paint beautifully and anxieties about finding love. It doesn’t have to be set in Florence, it could have been 1910s Paris or Egypt in 2000BC. That’s the point. The difference in setting helps reveal something essentially human. That’s why I was drawn to fantasy literature as a teenager as well. Some settings make it easier – there were, after all, a lot of opportunities to meet painters as a wealthy teenager in 15th-century Florence. If we focus in on historical settings that help us reflect on the present, we are also learning and appreciating more about the past. But if we are only using historical settings as window dressing, as superficial routes into the past, we aren’t really learning about either, because we can’t see past our expectations to get to any kind of meaningful depth. If one of the marks of good storytelling is that the characters grow or change, then in historical fiction the audience must be a character, we must experience growth as the story unfolds, because our time period is always implicitly invoked by the historicity of the story’s setting.

https://www.invaluable.com/blog/art-history-memes/

If you’re not convinced, I have a final thought. If we return to Shakespeare, there’s something about his plays that we don’t often put in perspective. Those stories were not set with a sense for “historical accuracy”. As Shakespeare scholars have pointed out, Caesar and other ancient characters in these plays were mostly dressed as Elizabethans. This is probably not for a lack of knowledge – after all, medieval and Renaissance peoples were surrounded by depictions of ancient Romans, from the art on the walls of Catholic churches (though in England much less so after the Protestant Reformation) to extant statues and mosaics. Instead, it has to do with relatability. Shakespeare’s plays always had elements in the writing that were meant to draw in audiences from different backgrounds, such as the wisecracking peasants who are often prominent secondary characters. By costuming the performances in Shakespeare’s present, these productions removed the historical obstacle of the setting so that the audience could focus on the emotional thrust of the play. In our media, we are obsessed with historical accuracy, even for relatively recent settings. We are laboring under the tyranny of trying to get in the mindset of a different time, when it is impossible to escape the present. Slavish adherence to setting is often a distraction, both to the production team and the audience, from what the story is about and how it can spark meaning.

History of the World, Part 1 (1981), dir. Mel Brooks

At the start, I offered a set of guidelines that describe how historical fiction is often written. Here’s an alternative: treat historical fiction as fiction first and history second. Serve the characters and the plot before the setting. Allow the story to be driven by narrative beats rather than pivotal real events. And, perhaps most importantly to me as a historian, acknowledge that we as the producers of this art and its audience exist in the present and do not have a full appreciation of the past; we cannot fully remove ourselves from the telling of this story and we can appreciate it better when we acknowledge our relevance to it.

History’s Histories

April 8, 2022

Or why I study the Middle Ages and dress like the 1940s.

If you run in vaguely historical or vintage fashion-oriented circles online, you’ve probably run into the Vintage Egyptologist (whose work I can’t condone) or maybe, more recently, the Overdressed Archaeologist (whose work I absolutely encourage you to check out). These two women combine interests that are seemingly a bit at odds: a love of vintage fashion and style with the informed pursuit of ancient history. Why these things seem at odds is pretty immediately revealing. We often contrast women who are interested in their appearance with women of substance (though they are not mutually exclusive). We also see history as divided into distinct time periods and geographies that shouldn’t be combined – if you are interested in the very distant past, you must not care much for the more recent past, what with all its technology and liberal thought (ha!). But this particular combination of interests also feels very right and I can sum up why in one name: Indiana Jones. The most famous archaeologist, fictional or otherwise, unites interests in the study of the past with the aesthetics of the 1940s, the fantasy of a myth with the truth of what we find in the ground, and the tension between the order of museums/fascism with the freedom of being an American who can run around looting artifacts for a “good reason” and punching Nazis in the face along the way. Indiana Jones is all about fantasizing in two settings at the same time.

“But in Latin, Jehova is spelled with an I.”

You see, we don’t just want to be the discoverers of the past. We want to be people with style, just as we remember the recent past to have been, struggling against the limitations of our society to make sense of a far more distant one. We want to think of ourselves being remembered even as we are doing the remembering. We want to signal our importance by fashioning our personal images more intentionally. And we want to simplify our study of history by framing it, depending on your view of the 1940s, within a time that was either simpler and thus easier to do “objective” history within or with more clearly archetypal politics and thus easier to make current social critiques within. The 1940s (and the century of archaeology and history leading up to it) are an intentional choice for this setting. It was the end of an era, the imperial age, before it became taboo for large powerful nations to go into other countries and, while exploiting their natural resources and human labor, dig up their history and decide what it meant. At least, it became taboo to do that explicitly. It was during this time that the modern concept of history was defined. We looked at ourselves in the present and declared that we were outside of history, separate from the past, and that we could thus determine what the past was with pure objectivity. This is also the reason that time travel narratives don’t really exist in fiction before the late 19th century. This period saw the development of a complex and highly specific understanding of ourselves (by which I largely mean white Westerners) as our own creations, the end point of a series of choices about progress and civilization. As a result, we are both fascinated by and able to investigate all of the prior and “traditional” societies that did not seem to exhibit signs of such intentionality (although they are and have always been just as intentional). It’s for this same reason that a generation later, the kids raised on this kind of thinking and this approach to the past, felt there was nowhere left to go but up. “Space, the final frontier” encapsulates in four words an entire era’s dogma.

As an American medievalist, this period I’m describing from around the mid-19th century to the mid-20th is particularly important, because it’s when my field was created. America doesn’t have a medieval past, at least, not one that can serve as a foil and point of origin for a European society. Rather than find meaning in the Native American past that this country was rapidly erasing, Americans of European descent, particularly those with disposable wealth or some kind of European pedigree, wanted to stake their claim in European medieval history. They did this in very real, material ways, such as by collecting medieval antiquities, including entire buildings. This is a good moment for us to stop and appreciate what this kind of collecting really feels like, since it is the same process by which artifacts from all around the world have ended up in European and American art and cultural heritage institutions, now very controversial. In the wake of WWI, American art dealers traveled to Europe and picked through the remains of French towns destroyed by the war, then brought back everything from illuminated bibles to jeweled crosses to, again, entire buildings, and sold them to wealthy American industrialists like the Rockefellers or financiers like J.P. Morgan, who eventually donated them to museums as a kind of very conspicuous philanthropy. For white Americans, this kind of story might help illustrate why people might be very insistent that museums return artifacts to the countries they were found in – because the taking of those artifacts represents current political conflicts and violence. This is why romanticizing the era in which most of this collecting happened is at best oblivious – the lifestyles of the people who did this kind of antiquities collecting were very much a part of the disregard they exhibited toward the modern civilizations that lived on top of those antiquities. Appreciating archaeology as destruction (a favorite phrase of my college archaeology professor), also helps demonstrate how the perspective of one generation of men could influence a hundred years of the study of history – these objects and manuscripts became the basis for an American understanding of the medieval European past, complete with the idea that Americans have a connection to the medieval European past through our white ancestry. Said plainly – the study of the European Middle Ages in the US is based in white supremacy.

In case you couldn’t already tell, it’s a complicated time to be a medievalist.

When I think about my field, I now can’t help but think about the people who made it, the people whose interests guided how I have come to interact with this material. It’s not just something I’ve inherited. Charles Homer Haskins, the founder of American medieval studies, is the person whose claim I am directly arguing against in my dissertation. He said that we should study the brief period during which Latin Europeans controlled southern Italy in the 12th century because they brought back into Latin a knowledge of the Classical sciences that had been ceded to Arabic and Greek for hundreds of years. He justified an interest in this particular time and place based on the direct value it provided to the place we would come to understand as Europe. He drew a circle around all the people who could read Latin and left everyone else out. He articulated a sense of ownership over knowledge and not just any knowledge. Knowledge of the sciences, the thing that European empires would argue made them great. He told me, an Ashkenazi Jewish woman living a century after him, to find value in a peripheral corner of Europe because it would be the spark that would make Europe dominate the rest of the world in his lifetime. My struggle as a historian has been dismantling every assumption he made, trying to show continuity where he showed rupture, emphasizing diversity where he saw hegemony.

I don’t know that my habit of styling myself based on a mid-century aesthetic originally came out of my interest in medieval history, but both my interests and my aesthetic might have come from the same place. We often talk about our upbringing in terms of what our parents gave us, but I think my grandparents had a lot more influence over how I understood my history. They told me what history was, whether by taking me to museums or bringing me souvenirs from their trips or even by being part of history. My grandparents very much understood themselves or wanted to understand themselves as European, but the reality of being Jewish and American made that a little difficult (even more so in my grandfather’s case, as a Polish immigrant in occupied Palestine). Their generation, the same one as Haskins and Rockefeller Jr., produced all of the experiences through which I came to know about history. Perhaps unintentionally, they made it so that I couldn’t understand what came before them without having to see it through their eyes.

A sarcophagus-shaped pencil case, now sold at the British Museum. My grandmother gave me a very similar one when I started school. https://www.britishmuseumshoponline.org/mummy-pencil-tin-nespernub.html

I didn’t start wearing mid-century clothes or wearing my hair in a vaguely Edwardian style until late in my grandmother’s life. As a kid, though, I was always wearing the biggest, fullest skirts possible. In my mind, they were better, more real maybe, because they were more “traditional”. I definitely had the sense that they were medieval, although I think back then the image in my mind was more 17th century. Probably the first spark that launched me into the mindset of the mid century was the movie The Hours, which I know is where I got my hairstyle. My grandmother’s apartment was something of a window into the past for me. I would go there and dig through the closets, finding treasures from what seemed like a very long time ago, like an old pocket camera or boxes of war bonds. I once found a copy of Treasure Island that I brought home and placed on my shelf because I liked the look of the green cover. I was inventing cottage core and dark academia out of the things I found in my grandmother’s closets. After my grandmother died when I was a teenager, I became more interested in understanding the time she grew up in, not for its own events, but for its perspective that had left a mark on the history I was consuming and the reality I was living. That especially became true as I became more aware of world events and struggled to understand her generation’s role in conflicts like Israel-Palestine.

To some extent, I think that the mid-century aesthetic is like an iconographic costume for historians. You put on your mid-century clothing to study history the same way you put on your deerstalker and pipe to solve a mystery.

Seriously, this is quite a visual trope.

But more than that, I think the mid-century is the filter through which we in the 21st century see history. We might acknowledge it more now, or maybe we have made that filter stronger over time. It’s certainly a product of how the history we consume has been written, but it might also reflect the way we choose to understand the ways that history has come to us. Whether intentionally or not, premodern history arrives in the 21st century translated into mid-century, and a lot of us historians (and archaeologists, etc.) need to get into translator mode to understand it. I can’t condone the impulse to try to live in the past – that kind of mental transposing is pretty ignorant and if you’re going to stoke an interest in any time period you have to be aware of what that time period means now. But appreciating the perspective of a past generation is an essential aspect of the study of history, so you might as well enjoy the fashion while you’re doing that.

The Politics and Anxieties of Curly Hair, Part 2: What I learned (and didn’t) from my parents

November 12, 2021

The other day, a completely innocuous thing happened while I was at work: my coworker complemented my hairstyle. She and I have just about the same hair in color and texture, but that day we had opposite styles – hers was in full fabulous curl, and mine was braided down against the sides of my head. When she said she liked my hair, my first thought was to say “oh God no, I just did this out of practicality”. I had braided it while it was still wet the night before, since it’s growing longer and it keeps getting really tangled while I’m sleeping. But I stopped myself and just told her I liked hers too (which I really did). It is, after all, an accepted greeting among curly-haired women that we assess each other’s hair and then trade styling tips. In my usual manner of overthinking things, this interaction led me down a line of thought that wove together a few different things that have been on my mind lately, and so I thought it was time for a follow up to the last time I wrote about curly hair.

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My white Jewish privilege was reading myself into all atypical characters

October 29, 2021

I’ve written before about how complicated it is to be Ashkenazi in the US, both othered to the extreme by virtue of being non-Christian and having features that are definitely NOT considered the American ideal (curly dark hair and big noses being the obvious ones), while also very much passing as white. Growing up in New York, it was easy to ignore or at least shrug off a lot of the American standards that felt othering, because, frankly, most New Yorkers don’t really think of themselves as “typically American” anyway. But despite New York’s tremendous cultural influence and the massive bubble New Yorkers are often able to build around themselves, as Americans we still consume plenty of culture and media that is based in the social and cultural standards of the rest of the country. In fact, having lived in Minnesota and California, I’ve come to realize how much of what I think of as typical American culture is really an invention of California in the 1950s and ’60s, probably due to the fact that the film industry is based here. So, as a kid who was always aware of feeling not quite white and not quite American, I was always drawn to movie and TV characters who were signaled as strange, different, or exotic. And, I realized very recently, the mental gymnastics I performed to help myself identify with them was that I decided that they were all Jewish.

This thought really crystalized as I was watching this most excellent recent video from the YouTube channel BeKindRewind. At one point, the video discusses how two different adaptations of the Addams Family approach Christmas (which, as a colleague reminded me when I attended a Catholic university, is an American holiday). While the 1960s sitcom had the Addamses play out a pretty standard Christmas plot of convincing the children that Santa is real, the original comic and the ’90s movies on which I was raised showed the family pouring a boiling cauldron on carolers. BeKindRewind’s interpretation of this, which I think is probably correct, is that the Addams family is showing its distaste for the saccarine schlock of caroling and its insincere wishes. But as a kid, I thought this gleeful disdain was based in the fact that the family was Jewish. I mean, they hang out in their family graveyard. They wear all black. They perform a family dance called “the mamushka”. Tell me I’m not crazy to interpret them this way. (There’s an argument to be made that the kind of creepiness the Addams Family taps into is the same one behind the original Dracula novel, which some people have also argued is meant to represent a Jew, although it could also be just straight-up Orientalism.)

For me, the Addamses, especially Wednesday, in their refutation of classic Americana, were everything that felt right to me. They were funny and joyful without performing. They celebrated being dark and angsty. They had close and genuine relationships within their very insular family. It also didn’t hurt that my mom looked like Morticia, with her signature long dark hair. And my dad clearly loved these movies for their humor and transgressions, which is why we had VHS tapes of both of them in our regular rotation.

But it wasn’t just the obviously weird outsider Addams Family that I read this way. I always identified with the strong-willed female characters who were visually established as not properly white. And it’s not that much of a jump to see them as Jewish. Belle in Beauty and the Beast, Jasmine in Aladdin, Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Why is Belle singled out in the town as weird? Because she reads and, so the visuals of the movie imply, she’s the only pretty girl with brown hair. If you were raised in an Ashkenazi household, chances are you had the value of education beaten into you, while also being told you were attractive enough despite your “darker” features.

Jasmine, well, she’s… let’s just say Oriental and put the subtext out there, shall we? But she’s also a self-possessed young woman trapped by a structurally sexist society. And my experience of Judaism has very much been that. The Jewish tradition I was raised in is explicitly patriarchal. It also helped that around the time I first watched Aladdin was also when I was learning about my familial connection to Israel. The movie and my experience of the country played off each other in my mind: the market scene where Jasmine first goes out of the palace in disguise, the Jerusalem shouk, and NYC summer street fairs all swirled together into an open air market dreamscape.

Esmeralda is a gypsy (I’m not saying Romani or Roma here because she’s written in the book and the movie as the gypsy stereotype, not the actual Roma ethnic group). That one is a pretty obvious connection. There’s an international club of minority ethno-religious groups that have been systematically abused and shunned by Europeans (and some countries in western Asia), and that includes Jews, the Roma, the Kurds, the Druze… It’s the same association that made me love the Kurdish militia when I first started to learn about them back in high school.

These associations are pretty well-grounded, even if they’re not 100% accurate.

Are you ready for what I realize is probably my strangest interpretation?

Star Wars.

To this day, you can’t tell me that I’m wrong. The Skywalkers are Jewish.

This one is harder to explain. It’s not so much that Luke and Leia tap into actual stereotypes or associations with Ashkenazi Jewishiness, but that I identified with these characters so strongly that I had to make them Jewish in my mind so that sympathy was acceptable. I’m very literal. Someone has to actually be me for me to identify with them. I didn’t just love Princess Leia, I was going to grow up to BE Princess Leia. I mean, sure, I could find explanations that make this fit a little better – the destruction of Alderaan (which as a word kind of looks like Canaan) and Leia’s resulting homelessness, Luke’s feeling that he didn’t belong; those ring true for me as part of my identity as the grandchild of refugees, as well as my own ambivalent relationship with the state of Israel. But I don’t think that’s why I saw them as Jewish. Maybe part of it was just that Leia has brown hair, and I really appreciated seeing that (seriously, hair is a big thing).

There’s a part of this strange habit of mine that I think is more important than just a thing I do. I am able to do make these associations because all of these characters are still essentially white. Maybe not Jasmine, unless you’re the US government. But the same degree of whiteness that allows me and other Ashkenazi Jews to pass most days in America unmolested (despite the very real and present threat of antisemitism) is also what makes all of these characters acceptable as protagonists or supporting characters in major works of American media. If you’ve never seen someone who looks like you represented in film, it’s hard to understand why that representation is so important. But the reality is that it is difficult to really identify with and care about characters that you don’t feel that fundamental connection of identity to. The degree to which that identity is literal is pretty variable. But I think race and ethnicity have a lot to do with it. If you are white – by which I really mean of primarily northern European descent and Christian – you have a bit more freedom to see yourself in a range of characters based on their upbringing or their personality traits. But if that identity doesn’t read onto your own in a meaningful way, that difference can be a barrier to feeling a connection to what you see on screen. In my case, I would describe it as a fundamental mistrust. Similar to what I wrote previously about the baked in sense that people who aren’t Jewish won’t stick their necks out for you, I find that I am not fully convinced that a character understands the issues they are purported to be grappling with (otherness, patriarchy, discrimination based on their (relatively) darker features) unless I have reason to believe that they have really been othered in a meaningful way. And so I invent this Jewish identity for them to convince myself that what they have to say about their struggle is actually a valid comparison to my own struggles. It’s a thoroughly self-centered way to consume media. And so recognizing that I do this has also made me aware of what it must mean to people who experience much more direct and systemic discrimination not to have those connections to a character. My white privilege as an Ashkenazi Jew is in being able to invent connections to people who were not intended to be me, but are similar to me in ways I find compelling. But those connections are simply harder or not available if you can’t suspend your disbelief to interpret the Addamses or the Skywalkers as a marginalized group that is distinctly non-white.

I’m finding some optimism in the greater racial diversity of media at the moment, but this habit of mine is cluing me in to just how superficial that representation is. So, after reading all this, I want you to ask yourself “how much does this character’s racial image actually impact their experience in the narrative?” If the answer is not very much, then representation isn’t really doing enough, is it?

History isn’t a Fantasy, but it is an Imaginary

October 13, 2021

I wrote a few weeks back about a major blowup that happened in the historical costuming community, when a prominent member outed herself as a bigot. This is only one of many recent events that seem to be constantly shaking this subculture, likely as its membership grows and changes, and as it responds more to and reflects more the social issues that are on everyone’s lips these days. As Bo Burnham has observed, the outcome of all this pain and consternation is more content. Lots and lots of videos about racism, whitewashing, colonialism, and of course the global system of capitalism. Those videos all essentially express the same message: history, especially European and North American history, is not as white as we have been told, and we need to reflect that more, even in play.

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Strolling and Wandering

September 17, 2021

Right before I took my oral qualifying exams, I called my adviser in a panic. I had failed my German and Latin exams almost ten times each, and time was running out to pass them before I would have to push back my oral exam date. My adviser talked me down. “Take a walk” he said “when was the last time you went to the park?”

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