The Post On Posts

After S was born I took a job working on "Canada's Action Plan Against Racism" because I wanted my work to be something meaningful so that I could explain to my little person why I left every morning.  I really enjoyed the intellectual challenge of this file as we tried to work through how to report and measure racism. 

During this time I read a lot and a trio of novels expressed the optimism of that period for me.

 

Nation by Terry Pratchett which explores the relationship between an island boy and a victorian girl both cut off from the worlds they knew as they both realize what they may have held as truths were not as clear cut as they thought.

Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead where a nomiclature specialist is brought in to rename a town and must struggle between it's past as a haven for free slaves or it's "future" as the next technology city.  While the main character's inability to see himself almost leads to his death.

 

 

Slave to Sensation (Psy-Changelings, Book 1) (Psy/Changeling) Nalini Singh In this series she explores a world made up of humans totally focused on their minds and shape shifters who are the embodied "other" with "animal" passions.  She uses this construct as a means to explore multiculturalism and the negotiation of difference.

 

These novels impressed me with their attempt to outline a post multi-cultural world that moved on to the negotiation of other kinds of differences.  I found these narratives fascinating as we tried to take intersectionality into account as we did policy and reported on progress.

 

Yesterday I read bell hooks' essay "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance", where she speaks to the comoditization of "otherness", where we consume other cultures to provide spice to our unrelenting white culture and that this consumption allows people to feel that they have moved beyond race (aren't racist) while not actually mutually and meaningfully engaging the other.  This also reminded me of some of the work I have read on the magic black person where the black character is only there to provide support to the white character and allow the white person to fufill themselves.

 

In both these cases the "other" is comoditized into something safely and easily consumed by the white viewer and may even be a nostalgia for the "pure" representation of the "other" prior to colonialization.  She notes that while this may allow the voice of the non-white "other" to be consumed by a larger audience overall it also denies voice to a specific person(s).  "Booty" was brought back by a white girl and white rappers bring the grit to us.  We can have the black culture without giving anything back into it or actually enaging with it.  bell hooks suggests that until we move beyond the comodification of the "other"  we cannot have healthy diologue as a society.  We need to get to post - comoditization.

 

It struck me that each of these three books could be easily read within this context rather than/or as well as being post-multicultural, in that they could be seen as post-comoditization allegories as well.  Is it this post -comoditization that makes these works feel post multicultural?  Which one comes first?  In Nation, there is literally no market as there is almost no on left alive.  In Apex Hides the Hurt, comoditization is so open and ludicrous that it a parody of itself and no longer a real thing.  In the Nalini Singh books there is a contrast between the shape shifters who are focused on family and protection of a way of life (wild and free from environmental degredation) where there is enagement in the market with the aims of supporting these outcomes vs the humans who create their children in labs and will quite literally sacrifice these children for the greater good or market outcomes.

 

This narrative struck me as also applying to the larger question of claiming indigenaity.  Indian are definitally a consumable "other" and have been since contact (savage dark beauty, indian princess, strong warrior).  What is our role to support healthy mutual exchange with the dominant group and how do we reclaim power when the interaction are clearly comoditization?  How do we stop them?  And more personally, where in my life am I "consuming the other"?