Link of Interest: Article on "The Convert," by Danai Gurira

| February 18, 2012

NPR has an article interviewing Danai Gurira, a Zimbabwe-American woman who spent most of her childhood in Harare, and whose latest play The Convert explores the psychological impact of colonialism. 
Imperialism didn’t just happen materially, through military conflict and through ruthless greedy treaties. Earlier this week, I attended a talk on the psychic portrait of contemporary colonialism by Professor George Taiaiake Alfred, a Mohawk indigenous intellectual who’s worked for the Canadian government on Indigenous affairs (and is thus in the best position to critique All That’s Wrong with it). 
There’s a quote floating around, which runs like this: “When the white man came, we had the land and they had the Bible. They asked us to close our eyes and pray. When we opened our eyes, they had the land and we had the Bible.” I’ve seen it attributed to American Indians, but Google tells me that Bishop Desmond Tutu, African spiritual leader, was the first one to say it. 
Missionary schools were among the first formal schools (formal according to Western standards, that is) in Malaysia, particularly the Western peninsula, where I’m from. Until the education reform a few short decades ago that rendered all national education into Malay, missionary schools existed alongside vernacular schools (Chinese & Tamil schools), established by, well, missionaries. Many of them have very old and very good reputations. They also taught in English. Both my parents, growing up in the 60′s and 70′s, attended these missionary schools (hence why they communicate to each other in English as a common language, since they spoke/speak different dialects). 
But these things always come with a caveat, don’t they? A missionary’s got a mission, ostensibly to help those less fortunate. Not all the students that these missionary schools took in were that less fortunate, but they might as well have been, since they’re not Christian and all. Remember: Glory, gold and God. And so it is, that religion was every bit as used as a tool of imperialism. Marx doesn’t call religion the “opium of the masses” for no good reason. 

“There were many, many women who ran to the church — some of them became nuns, some of them became teachers — basically so that they could be free,” Mann says. “Women were often fleeing being sold off … or being given away, without their own permission, to be … as in this play, the 10th wife of an old man.”

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Black Sister, My Sister

| February 17, 2012

So, intra-POC prejudice and racism exists. It is a thing, an actual thing. It is pernicious, in the U.S./Canada it is often a symptom of white supremacy where we all fight according to the rules set by whiteness to judge each other and find each other wanting.

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This occurs despite a long history of inter-POC cooperation, where in the living memory of our elders, Asian groups participated and helped in the Black Panther Party’s activities, and Jews testify how black soldiers can to rescue them (and thus, how they knew the soldiers were not Nazis), and many other such histories which I can’t recall at the moment. All histories usually unspoken of, to the point where it is such a big fucking surprise to discover they exist. All pointing to how our intra-POC conflicts are really very counter-productive. All proving how short our communities’ memories are, because these stories have been so covered up into non-existence, so we’ll believe anything mainstream media tells us about each other.
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Racist Things Steampunks Are Not Immune To: Aversive Racism

| February 16, 2012

I talk a lot about racism in my work, not least because, uh, part of why I get pretty fucking angry about colonialism and whatnot is because the histories of colonialism that many POC live with today are the foundation for systemic racism that exists today.

It’s gotten to the point where I am kind of aggressively avoiding novels that feature straight white dudes unless it’s a YA (out of the four novels I have attempted to read in the last while, the only one I could stand was a YA novel) because I am just kind of pissed off at the reminder that straight white dudes have been allowed to call the shots when they have been so utterly wrong, and have created such utterly wrong worlds, both in fiction and in reality, and continue to be accepted when they exhibit utterly wrong behaviour. It gets to the point where I want to cloister all my white friends who are wonderful people away from all this wrongness in case it’s catching, like a flu.

But I can’t, so instead I go about identifying Things That Are Wrong and tell any listening public (like all four of you reading this blog!) about them, so I have the satisfaction of having at least attempted to mitigate the wrongness of the world. And you will have some names for Things That Are Generally Wrong With The World that also creep into steampunk, so you can start learning how to call it as you see it and thus help in the long arduous battle against racism in steampunk! Our first term is: Aversive Racism!

Aversive Racism is when people, in particular white liberals, say that they are not racist, and may genuinely consciously believe in egalitarianism, but unthinkingly display a bias. This bias is unconscious, although very easy to see if you’re a POC on the receiving end of it.

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Con or Bust! 2012 Auction has Opened

| February 11, 2012

Con or Bust!, the fundraiser that helped me get to WisCon34 back in 2010, has now opened for bidding on its various items! I also has an item up for bidding: The Steampowered Globe. If you would like to get a copy of this Singaporean steampunk anthology delivered to you personally from me and donate to a worthy cause at the same time, place a bid!

You can find most general information about Con or Bust at its site but I would like to give my own perspective on why you should bid, or perhaps even donate, to Con or Bust.

I tend to see people ask, “what do we do to help racism go away?” Or “what can we do to encourage POC participation at events?” And sometimes infuriatingly, “yeah we know racism is bad: what are you doing about it?”

Racism being less just insults or individual prejudices and more a system of excluding people of colour from acts of self-empowerment and equal participation, requires a mass action on the parts of many individuals. It requires acknowledgement of exclusion and active movement to address this exclusion. It requires a communal effort of raising ourselves and each other and a pooling of our already-scarce resources.

When I asked for funding to go to WisCon, I indirectly also used that money to fund my trip to Steampunk World’s Fair, 2010, because it was just two weeks before, and I didn’t feel like traveling back into Canada and out again, when I could just stay in the States. After SPWF, I traveled from New Jersey to Wisconsin, and stayed with a friend of my father’s, before checking into the Concourse for WisCon34.

I actually did not honestly expect to get as much money as I did for my trip down: I simply told Kate Nepveu, who runs the show, the breakdown of expected costs for my trip. And somehow, that is what I got. I’ve actually been feeling quite guilty about that since then, because I was expecting maybe half of the amount, or less. “Whatever you can spare,” I told her.

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Steampunk POC: Stephanie Lai (Australian-Malaysian-Chinese)

| February 3, 2012

I do not actually remember how I got to know Stephanie! We have, however, frequently exchanged words about being Malaysian, and being Malaysian-Chinese. We both vied for a spot in Crossed Genres’ Eastern issue (she won with The Last Rickshaw!) and now we both have stories in Steam-Powered 2: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories! She hails from Melbourne’s SFF scene, which I know pretty much nothing about, so I will let her talk about it.

Stephanie! How did you get into steampunk?
Jaymee! I just kind of fell into it. I’ve always been into SFF, and I love alternate realities, and science and technology, and steampunk appealed to me as a way of combining all of my favourite things, so I started dabbling in it. Then I think I found your blog and it sucked me all the way in to steampunk.
What is steampunk like over there in Australia? Is it big? Is it small? Growing? Is it a literary trends, are there gatherings for me? Tell us o stranger from an arcane land!
Let me tell you, it is HARD WORK being an antipodean, way distant from everyone else, and needing to get people to proof and say whether my story is too Aussie to be understood. HARD WORK INDEED.
Steampunk is growing in Australia. There are a lot of readers and writers, and as a community we are definitely growing, if the number of panels being run  at cons (and the number of people attending) is
anything to go by. There’s nothing separate happening, mostly it’s just a handful of panels at Swancon and Continuum, but I think we’re moving towards maybe a specialised gathering or two.
I think within the SFF community it’s gaining greater traction, but I’m not super sure it’s growing at all outside the community.
However there is not a lot of Australian steampunk set in Australia, and that’s something I’d like to see change.
The Aussie steampunk scene sounds very literary-based! Is there a cosplay contingent, or a Maker community at all?
Ickle tiny cosplay contingent, mostly made up of literary types. There is a bit of a maker community but it’s not very big (it’s very pretty though!). Steampunk itself in Australia is still basically nascent!
What was your first impression of steampunk?
The potential! There is so much room for exploration and experimentation in steampunk. I think steampunk that spends all its time focusing on recreating and glamourising Victoriana is frittering away the opportunities for interrogating issues and creating awesome things. Yeah we can do these things with every-day SFF, but the conceits behind steampunk give us the opportunity to make more of it, and to play with different things, and to play with real world history and politics without resorting to blue people.
How do you do steampunk?
The South-East Asian way. Lots of water, lots of makan, Chinese airships coming down the straits and exploring opportunities on the peninsula. I want to use steampunk to interrogate our colonial past at
the same time as creating beautiful visuals.
I also want to start writing about a steampunk Australia. As with writing a steampunk S.E.A., it’s not just Victoriana and bustles. Can you imagine an age of steam in a country like Australia? I want a steampunk Australia to look at the issues of colonization and Terra Nullius, and to take into account the fact that we could never have done steam. I think of it as sand punk. And it’s awesome.
Do you feel the Australian steampunk scene leans towards reproducing the same Eurocentrism that North American steampunk currently does? As in romanticizing the Victorian era, re-imagining some fake time of innocence and exploration, or does the discourse among your literary type point to a different vision of steampunk for Australia’s growing scene?
I think it’s a little bit of both. I think that Australia’s non-SFF literary history (and even our SFF-history) predisposes us towards Eurocentrism anyway, so I don’t think it’s surprising that there’s a
lean there. But there’s definitely a growth into a different vision for steampunk, one that landscape-wise and theme-wise, is very clearly Australian.

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Steampunk POC: Monique Poirer (Seaconke Wampanoag)

| January 6, 2012

Some of you already know Monique Poirier, either from her Beyond Victoriana essay, or from Tumblr, or you know her from cons and stuff. So it seemed a pretty natural thing to get in touch with her for this series of steampunk POC interviews. I first met her at Steampunk World’s Fair 2010, and found her again through K Tempest Bradford’s musings about wearing steampunk fashion (Tempest said she couldn’t imagine wearing the usual corsets and bustle stuff, then point to Monique as wearing very wearable, everyday stuff). We occasionally chat late into the night, and when I first thought about doing a series of interviews with steampunk POC, it made sense to get in touch with her.

So without further ado, gentlefolk, I present, Monique Poirier:

I know you covered this in your BV essay, about how you come to start doing Native Steampunk, but how did you first get to know about steampunk? What were your impressions of it? Were you like me, as in the “it looks pretty but but but white people and colonialism” sort of way? Or were you a participant in your own way?

I first became aware of teampunk through costuming sometime 2008-2009, and when I came into it I wasn’t really involved in the non-European aspect. I originally loved steampunk for the pretty pretty clothes; not gonna lie, I am a sucker for lace and bustles and corsets and brass bits and top hats and waistcoats. I love cello music. I love clockwork. I was a goth in high school and college (this is what a Native steamgoth looks like). It hadn’t even occurred to me then to incorporate my ethnic identity into my costuming, or to even notice the colonialism aspect because I was so USED to being invisible as an NDN person, in whiteness and European identity being the only explored aspect, that the problematic white mono-culture aspects just seemed normal to me – but then I started reading about Steampunk online to dig for costuming ideas, and came across your articles at Tor, and started reading Beyond Victoriana, and generally thought more about incorporating my indigeneity into my Steampunk attire. After the Beyond Victoriana panel at the first Steampunk World’s Fair, where I (as an audience member) brought up the fact that colonialism effects NDN folks in that our colonizers never left, I was totally ready to make my outfits much more recognizably indigenous.

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Steampunk POC Interviews

| January 3, 2012

So, for the last couple of years, I’ve mostly been focusing on steampunk literature, in particular re-reading stuff that deals with issues surrounding Empire to point out how these narratives barely center POC unless it’s in problematic ways, or else ideas of Empire erases POC entirely. I’ve been formulating an understanding of the steampunk aesthetic in ways that could easily reach across different cultural iterations, riffing off Mike Perschon‘s delineation of the aesthetic.

I am kind of tired of having to say the same thing over and over: “racism racism White Gaze White Gaze Orientalism Orientalism Eurocentric Eurocentric”–if you’re a regular reader, I imagine this is pretty old hat by now. 
It’s not to say I’ve found nothing that’s POC-centric; of course I have, and that’s why this blog keeps going. As BeyondVictoriana.com keeps demonstrating, there’s a lot of POC history that simply never gets explored in mainstream steampunk. But just because there’re histories, doesn’t mean we see them happen in literature. 
Being POC means also being a living, breathing human being who interacts with this world, not just in between pages of text. Dealing with histories is very much part of life, part of living, part of culture. It doesn’t only happen in writing, although in my own way, I would like to try to document this part of living as much as possible. 
For the first Friday of the month, hopefully every month, I will post up an interview with a self-identified non-white steampunk. They may be writers. They may be Makers. They may be musicians. Heck, maybe they’re just fans of the aesthetic. The point is that, I want to talk to POC, about being a POC in steampunk. Some of us don’t really see race as an issue at all. Some of us reckon with racial issues in steampunk all the time. 
I have a few folks lined up for the next few months, and I will be on the lookout for more folks to talk to in the future. (And of course if you know anybody, or you might be interested, you can always email me!) Hope you enjoy this upcoming feature, for as long as I can keep it up =)


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Dear White People, You CAN Say "People Of Colour"

| December 19, 2011

There is this thing Ay-Leen and I do at our Steam Around the World presentation, and it’s when we get to talking about racism. We get the whole audience to yell, “RACISM!”

This is what I like to explain as a speech act. Here’s a thing explaining what speech acts are, and how we like to rely on obfuscation rather than stating outright what we really mean. The bit I like the most is the recounting of the conversation from When Harry Met Sally, where Harry tells Sally she’s attractive (7:10 – 7:26)  and she says, “It’s already out there.” it then goes on to talk about the profound consequences of this mutual knowledge about what we’re all talking about, that it enables a shared platform for which we can begin to have meaningful dialog about the same subject, and there’s a great thing about the Emperor’s New Clothes (8:56) enabling a collective challenge to the Emperor’s assertion that his new clothes are awesome.

When you use precise terms, and you know their history and their meanings, the implications of saying them, it becomes a lot easier to have conversation. So when we get the audience to say out loud, “RACISM!” it means it’s out there now. We can totally say it, and because we can say the word, we can now have a conversation about it.

I unfortunately use obfuscating language on this blog, because I try for a message that people can find themselves in, in as varied a subject position as possible. It’s not always useful or helpful, of course. Which probably explains the lack of comments, haha.

But anyways, there is something to be said about being able to use the term “people of colour” in public to identify racialized persons, or people who self-identify that way.

Anecdote time!


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Conversations with Ghosts

| December 13, 2011

A lot of times, I have imaginary conversations in my headwhere I have to explain the approach I take with steampunk, because while mostpeople have some sort of fuzzy notion of what it means to think about racialrepresentation in steampunk, it’s rather more difficult to grasp with how it’sdone. Among the many different ways to do steampunk is using steampunk—the ideaof messing around with history—as a way to engage with the past.

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Conversations Steampunks Are Not Immune To, Part 2

| December 8, 2011

White Person: Look at this cool thing!
POC Friend: Dude, that cool thing completely misrepresents POC ish.

White Person: Aw, sorry I goofed, but I totally didn’t mean it that way!

POC Friend: Well, here are the ways that it does.

White Person: All right, thanks. How’s this?

POC Friend: Dude, you just completely erased POC ish from the picture instead.

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I wonder why race matters in steampunk, do you?

| December 7, 2011

At my first ever steampunk-themed event, I looked around, and I was the only visible POC there. Same time, Ay-Leen would go to a con and at a crowd of over a hundred, maybe more, only two people in the crowd would be visible POC.
Recently, two little boys were called racial slurs in class. They’re not the first, and won’t be the last.
In the Netherlands, a tradition of blackface continues. Darker-skinned people face prejudice at the same time that people declare this blackface tradition is not racist. 
Back home in Malaysia, a trans woman friend of mine confesses that she feels normal when a child calls her a “Cina babi” — Chinese pig — because it means she’s considered normal enough as a woman that people are just racist towards her, not transphobic.
Well-meaning white people tell me and Ay-Leen to our faces that it should be okay for them to say and do racist shit because it’s just an act, and people should be able to recognize it for what it is, except, of course, if I’m on the receiving end of racism, how am I supposed to know it’s an act?
White folk can come to this blog and ask me to explain why should racism matter in steampunk, why steampunk should be purposefully anti-racist, while by-passing my 101 Reading List, and tell me my experiences don’t validate the existence of racism nor the necessity of anti-racism in steampunk. 
They do the same thing at Occupy, they did the same thing during RaceFail, they probably did the same thing at every single major turning point in history where racialized peoples try to raise awareness of racial injustice. 
Meanwhile, people tell me that I can’t use steampunk to talk about racism because steampunk is supposed to be fun and fantasy. They tell me my presentation isn’t as good as it could have been because I talked about issues and stopped having fun. To my face, even.
People think “non-Caucasian” is a good way to say “person of colour” and obviously have never had to think about the words they use to talk about race. 
Hollywood whitewashes more Asian films, cutting off chances for Asian-Americans to star in favour of white actors who look more “American”.
Folk have the temerity to tell me that “racism will always exist” and apparently I should fucking accept this. Yes, I and all POC like myself should accept racial injustice embedded into systems of employment, education, healthcare, housing, access to basic standards of living. 
Somehow people can understand that the world is made of different cultures, different nations, different social groups, different genders, different this different that, but think everyone should be treated the exact same way anyway.
I get called a “racist” very casually for wanting to meet people who identify with these differences of theirs.
At my own party, to my face, again, when I say, I don’t believe in tolerance, because tolerance is no longer useful in gaining equality, I am equated to Matthew Shepard’s killers. (FYI, that was not a problem of tolerance. That was a problem of hatred.) At a steampunk convention.

Just a few things off the top of  my head that demonstrate how racism is an everyday part of life. Does steampunk happen in some alternate dimension completely insulated from everyday life? If so, please direct me to this magical portal.

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Conversations Steampunks Are Not Immune To

| December 5, 2011

Within the last week alone I’ve had to have the following conversations.

White Person: Look at me with this cool thing!

POC Friend: Dude, that cool thing is not cool.

White Person: Oh, sorry. Will stop doing it. What’s wrong with it?

POC Friend: It’s terrible in X, Y, Z ways.

White Person: I thought it was A, B, C.

POC Friend: Maybe you saw it that way, but there are other cool things which do A, B, C without doing X, Y, Z.

White Person: Wow, didn’t think about that. Sorry I goofed. Will do better next time.

Compare and contrast to the following exchange:
White Person: Look at me with this cool thing!

POC Friend: Dude, that cool thing is not cool.

White Person: Aw, sorry I goofed, but I totally didn’t mean it that way!

POC Friend: Well it comes across as terribly X, Y, Z in these ways.

White Person: Well hopefully other people will see what I mean anyway.

One conversation is more productive than another. Such conversations are also easily applicable to other kinds of marginalizations, not just racial ones.

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