Thank you for posting about this. I'm also glad that you're writing historical stuff and will continue to write it, minefields and all, because I LOVE it. Your story about the west amazed me.
When it comes to avoiding problems I can speak for my own experience as a reader... I have a pretty high tolerance when it comes to stuff written in the past. I'm a huge Lovecraft fan, for example, and Lovecraft is racist to a pathological degree. But his stuff is really about racial panic and racial contamination, so it all sort of blends in to the general creepiness, even when he's describing people who look like me as essentially animalistic and demonic. Umm, I guess that was a sidetrack (I love Lovecraft too much).
But when people are writing in the modern day and bringing a modern sensibility to the past, I expect that as they update their lens in some areas, they will update it in all areas, and that would mean using less slurs or using them more conscientiously, and not writing in stereotypes.
On the other hand, I think sometimes modern writers can and should use more slurs to reflect historical accuracy as long as they do it responsibly... for example, when Chester Himes wrote his Harlem crime novels he was censored heavily to the point where his books are filled with words like "motherraper". But when Walter Mosley wrote back about the same era in the same genre he was a lot more free to use words that reflected actual speech.
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Date: 2010-06-28 12:57 am (UTC)When it comes to avoiding problems I can speak for my own experience as a reader... I have a pretty high tolerance when it comes to stuff written in the past. I'm a huge Lovecraft fan, for example, and Lovecraft is racist to a pathological degree. But his stuff is really about racial panic and racial contamination, so it all sort of blends in to the general creepiness, even when he's describing people who look like me as essentially animalistic and demonic. Umm, I guess that was a sidetrack (I love Lovecraft too much).
But when people are writing in the modern day and bringing a modern sensibility to the past, I expect that as they update their lens in some areas, they will update it in all areas, and that would mean using less slurs or using them more conscientiously, and not writing in stereotypes.
On the other hand, I think sometimes modern writers can and should use more slurs to reflect historical accuracy as long as they do it responsibly... for example, when Chester Himes wrote his Harlem crime novels he was censored heavily to the point where his books are filled with words like "motherraper". But when Walter Mosley wrote back about the same era in the same genre he was a lot more free to use words that reflected actual speech.