steampunk

[rmd]

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.

Comments

[gayathri.livejournal.com]

I think mind does too, but that might be because we think about that outside of the context of the usual places people might think about it.

One of the things I liked about the article

[drwex]

Is that the writer admits that even in an alternate universe where the Pacific nations weren't so heavily colonized/mined they would still likely have had their own power dominance relationships (e.g. China and Japan on top) and that those societies are themselves deeply racist at times.

I think the point I got out of it was not that one could take some specific set of steps to neutralize all the racial/sexual/privelege-associated elements, but that the structure and newness of steampunk offered opportunities for a more aware and informed approach to those sets of baggage.