steampunk

interesting article over at racialicious about people of color and steampunk. reading this, i realized that i have pretty much always assumed that steampunk was somehow reliant on a conceptual alternate history where victorian england is rivaled by the craftsmen of the technologically advanced dirigible industry in china or the artists of the congo who guide trees into shapes as they grow, their work lit by the glow of their tube amplifiers when they play music while harvesting the trees and turning them into rubber and wood custom pc enclosures. or, you know, something like that. i've always assumed some sort of post-colonial or colonial-moot underlying social structure, assuming it went hand in hand with gender equality - both are imao required.