Transformative Works and Cultures

Really appreciated the discussion here.

I was surprised, though, to see the simplification in footnote 2 that in Wrede's book, "the elimination of native peoples only resulted in geographic locations having different names" - I'm the last to say that Wrede's book did not have serious issues, but she didn't completely skip doing her homework. In addition to having different geographical names, her colonists did not use any agricultural products (food or medicine) developed by natives. Also, the Lewis and Clark expedition failed, and nobody had ever crossed the Rockies. (I made a point of getting the book to read it to get around the argument about commenting about the concept, not the book, and then gave it away to someone else who wanted to do that too.)

I think it would be good to mention that a significant part of why people got upset is because the author, her editors, several reviewers, and people she had discussed the idea with on rec.arts.sf.composition had not been concerned that her premise was problematic in this way, and I think your footnote would be improved by pointing out that authorial intent could be discovered because of Wrede's posts on rec.arts.sf.composition from before she wrote the book. A link to http://elynross.dreamwidth.org/415992.html in the footnote would also be helpful, since that pulls out a lot of the
money quotes from wrede's posts.

oh, and the mammothfail link you use at the top, in your intro, to http://linkspam.dreamwidth.org/tag/mammothfail
links to a series of short posts that are in reverse chronological order (like livejournal does), so the most recent posts on mammothfail are the first thing the user sees links to, not the original posts - this was confusing to me and I'm sure would be even more confusing to someone who hadn't participated in the discussion when it happened.

Less confusing, I think, would be to link just to the MammothFail master post, at http://linkspam.dreamwidth.org/880.html, which is in top-down chronological order and I believe has all the links
incorporated into it.

I don't know if your journal's policy is to treat articles as though they are printed on dead trees or to re-shape them in response to feedback, but in either case I wanted to share my thoughts.

It's a helpful capture of a lot of good discussion. Particularly
useful, I think, is the description of what bingo cards mean to people of color and how they serve that part of the community. I agree that a lot of white people react negatively to those when they get flashed at them without context, and it's good to have an explanation to link to.

I think, like any pattern we use to frame our thinking, the bingo cards have the potential to cause people to "recognize" something as being a patterned moment when it isn't. I've seen a couple instances of that, e.g. when a person is trying to reconcile two different perspectives from different PoC, and they bring up what one PoC said, only to be dismissed for using the "I have a black friend" bingo statement.

But of course having one's words dismissed because they resemble a pattern of behavior attributed to you based on your race can also be a learning moment, if you keep in mind that the people you are dealing with use those frameworks in reaction to many more much worse experiences. :)

regards,

--Anne