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breathedoutWell last night greywash and I caught up on our Magicians watch through the end of Season 3, and then this morning at the gym they were playing one of Peter Jackson's epic Hairy Men Go On a Violent Hike Through New Zealand movies in which our all-white heroes do epic battle with an army of dark-skinned baddies on elephants, and now I'm like. Mad about a trope within the fantasy genre?? Since when?? I don't want these feelings; I was happier not caring.
For those who don't watch The Magicians, both it and the books it's based on deliberately riff on the Narnia setup where a bunch of kids from Earth stroll through a portal to a magical land where they quickly become kings and queens over a diverse array of human and non-human beings whom they had never met before, and in whose cultural norms and values they are not steeped (in Lewis, this results in the beginning of "the Golden Age of Narnia"). And like. This was never going to be a politically neutral daydream. But from the pen of a white, aggressively Christian Oxford don in NINETEEN FORTY-NINE, let's all just acknowledge that it's straight-up British Imperialist propaganda (for those who don't want to click those links: Afghani independence 1919; partial Egyptian independence 1922 (full independence would come in 1952); Statute of Westminster 1931 (which removed ability of British Parliament to enact laws in Dominion countries); India/Pakistan independence and partition 1947; Burma (now Myanmar) independence 1948; Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) independence 1948; Ireland severs ties with the Commonwealth 1949—and a WHOLE BUNCH of other independence movements in British colonies were very active, and would continue to bear fruit throughout the 20th century). It's important, I think, to look at the historical moment: this was the dream of a representative of an imperial power whose empire was in the midst of crumbling. It seems almost tautological to suggest, as I'm sure many have done before me, that the pastoral, nostalgic setup, in which It Is Decreed that (earth) humans are meant to rule over everyone else because of some kind of magically-enforced version of the Divine Right of Kingly Succession, and all will not be right in the world until they do, is deeply fucked up in a way I frankly would expect that we'd be challenging a little more explicitly in 2019.
In Season 3 of The Magicians, Eliot and Margo, Earth 20-something humans who have stumbled into monarch-ship of the magical land Fillory, are subjected to a popular uprising at the hands of the Fillorian peasants. Once they're in chains, their native Fillorian advisor, Tick, turns on them and announces that he will take back the administration of Fillory, which he had been doing before the earth folks arrived. For plot-related reasons not limited to their hunger for power, this is narratively Bad, because our heroes need to regain their thrones in order to get their hands on a Mcguffin that will enable them to complete their Quest and turn magic back on (an outcome in which we, the viewers, are meant to be invested, although I have a whole other set of questions about whether magic is really benefiting this universe or whether everyone would just be better off accepting its loss and getting real jobs... but that's a post for another time). Eliot, Margo, and their pal Josh get Tick to call an election, in which Eliot makes wild and unfulfillable election promises, Tick proposes actual well-thought-out policies, and Margo wins on an unplanned write-in campaign due to her willingness to chat with what turns out to be the majority constituency in Fillory: the talking animals.
So, I think my issue with the show's treatment of this whole plotline is threefold: (a) it basically depicts the rioting peasants as an ignorant, misguided inconvenience; (b) it treats Tick as simultaneously a turncoat for betraying Eliot & Margo, and boring and politically naive for focusing on actual policies to better the lives of Fillorian people; and (c) it treats BOTH rule by democracy AND coalition-building rather than execution post-election, as innovations introduced by the foreign, minority rulers of a nation otherwise portrayed as extremely backwards and incapable of thinking up such enlightened concepts on their own. It doesn't use the opportunity to address any of the issues that would (IMO) have been more interesting and germane given this setup, such as:
I don't know! I feel like it was a missed opportunity, and the show's treatment struck me as sort of sneakily "Well yes there was some unpleasantness but at least the British brought railways, democracy, and political unity to the squabbling natives" when... the actual results of British railways and Imperialist practices were violence and famines, not a "golden age." Maybe the perpetual famine in Fillory is a RESULT of Earth rule. Historically speaking, it is far more likely than not.
It's frustrating, I think, when a media source that really tries for political engagement and genre-savviness, and succeeds on several fronts as The Magicians does, falls down on an opportunity like this; and probably it's unfair to find it more disappointing than when a media source just doesn't try at all (like... Peter Jackson, you did not have to cast that baddie army as Middle Eastern, or every heroic character as white.... it would have been SO EASY NOT TO DO THAT; yet here we are). But it did make me hope that there are people out there creating fantasy narratives that really engage with anti-imperialist politics, and directly challenge this inherited notion of divinely-decreed human and/or foreign rulers over a magical land. I'm certainly not going to write them and tbh I'm probably not even going to read them because, see title: I don't really go here; but I hope they're out there, and I hope they get made into films and TV shows with big budgets and good actors. SURELY they are. Hopefully they will.
Soliciting recs in the comments for people who read more fantasy than I do, but share my frustrations. (Edit: Marlon James's Black Leopard, Red Wolf looks like it might be doing some of this, with bonus queer Black protagonists.)
greywash and I caught up on our Magicians watch through the end of Season 3, and then this morning at the gym they were playing one of Peter Jackson's epic Hairy Men Go On a Violent Hike Through New Zealand movies in which our all-white heroes do epic battle with an army of dark-skinned baddies on elephants, and now I'm like. Mad about a trope within the fantasy genre?? Since when?? I don't want these feelings; I was happier not caring. For those who don't watch The Magicians, both it and the books it's based on deliberately riff on the Narnia setup where a bunch of kids from Earth stroll through a portal to a magical land where they quickly become kings and queens over a diverse array of human and non-human beings whom they had never met before, and in whose cultural norms and values they are not steeped (in Lewis, this results in the beginning of "the Golden Age of Narnia"). And like. This was never going to be a politically neutral daydream. But from the pen of a white, aggressively Christian Oxford don in NINETEEN FORTY-NINE, let's all just acknowledge that it's straight-up British Imperialist propaganda (for those who don't want to click those links: Afghani independence 1919; partial Egyptian independence 1922 (full independence would come in 1952); Statute of Westminster 1931 (which removed ability of British Parliament to enact laws in Dominion countries); India/Pakistan independence and partition 1947; Burma (now Myanmar) independence 1948; Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) independence 1948; Ireland severs ties with the Commonwealth 1949—and a WHOLE BUNCH of other independence movements in British colonies were very active, and would continue to bear fruit throughout the 20th century). It's important, I think, to look at the historical moment: this was the dream of a representative of an imperial power whose empire was in the midst of crumbling. It seems almost tautological to suggest, as I'm sure many have done before me, that the pastoral, nostalgic setup, in which It Is Decreed that (earth) humans are meant to rule over everyone else because of some kind of magically-enforced version of the Divine Right of Kingly Succession, and all will not be right in the world until they do, is deeply fucked up in a way I frankly would expect that we'd be challenging a little more explicitly in 2019.
In Season 3 of The Magicians, Eliot and Margo, Earth 20-something humans who have stumbled into monarch-ship of the magical land Fillory, are subjected to a popular uprising at the hands of the Fillorian peasants. Once they're in chains, their native Fillorian advisor, Tick, turns on them and announces that he will take back the administration of Fillory, which he had been doing before the earth folks arrived. For plot-related reasons not limited to their hunger for power, this is narratively Bad, because our heroes need to regain their thrones in order to get their hands on a Mcguffin that will enable them to complete their Quest and turn magic back on (an outcome in which we, the viewers, are meant to be invested, although I have a whole other set of questions about whether magic is really benefiting this universe or whether everyone would just be better off accepting its loss and getting real jobs... but that's a post for another time). Eliot, Margo, and their pal Josh get Tick to call an election, in which Eliot makes wild and unfulfillable election promises, Tick proposes actual well-thought-out policies, and Margo wins on an unplanned write-in campaign due to her willingness to chat with what turns out to be the majority constituency in Fillory: the talking animals.
So, I think my issue with the show's treatment of this whole plotline is threefold: (a) it basically depicts the rioting peasants as an ignorant, misguided inconvenience; (b) it treats Tick as simultaneously a turncoat for betraying Eliot & Margo, and boring and politically naive for focusing on actual policies to better the lives of Fillorian people; and (c) it treats BOTH rule by democracy AND coalition-building rather than execution post-election, as innovations introduced by the foreign, minority rulers of a nation otherwise portrayed as extremely backwards and incapable of thinking up such enlightened concepts on their own. It doesn't use the opportunity to address any of the issues that would (IMO) have been more interesting and germane given this setup, such as:
- Why SHOULD foreigners rule Fillory? Especially completely untrained foreigners with no education in the history of the place? Especially foreigners who have, at a public trial among other places, voiced their contempt and disgust for Fillory and the Fillorians? Why should we be invested in the continuance of this state of affairs? This is the #1 question that I feel like it's BIZARRE that the show did not, in any serious way, address. I frankly didn't WANT magic turned back on, and I certainly didn't want it turned back on enough to want Eliot or Margo, however much I enjoy them as characters, back on the throne.
- The rioting peasants have resided for centuries in a land with MAGIC, yet most of them are still living in shacks, and regularly starving. What are the sources of structural inequality in a magic kingdom? Given the wealth on display in the castle, Earth (and other human) rulers have plainly been hoarding resources for a long time. Why SHOULD the Fillorians accept this, and who is best placed to address it?
- What are the demands of the rioting peasants, other than the ousting of the Earth rulers? We know there is an established resistance movement, because one of its representatives was previously thrown in the dungeons by our heroes. Maybe we could get a more developed sense of its aims? Or a more developed character who is a member of it? Maybe our heroes could return to said movement, with whom they have an established "in," in order to work with them on drawing up a plan for self-rule?
- Does the movement we've been introduced to include the talking animals, and if not, is there a separate grassroots non-human rights movement? (Like... plainly the answer to this question is a resounding "Yes" if they managed to win an election on a write-in campaign that the candidate was not even intending to run. That's some civic engagement magic right there, y'all.) What do these movements look like? What are the relations between the human and non-human branches?
- From Eliot and Margo's perspective, or even just the perspective of the show as a whole: if someone told you to go on a quest, but as part of that quest you're required to prop up an unjust system, at what point do you think to yourself, gosh, maybe this quest isn't actually morally justified? Apparently, the canonical answer to this from every single character except Alice is "Never," but man I would have been thinking it LONG before now. The show is pretty savvy about, for example, gods and other magical beings being self-interested dicks a lot of the time; in that context I don't find the statement "some dude with a tail gave this quest his seal of approval" to be a very convincing argument for its ethical spotlessness, nor would I think anyone else should.
I don't know! I feel like it was a missed opportunity, and the show's treatment struck me as sort of sneakily "Well yes there was some unpleasantness but at least the British brought railways, democracy, and political unity to the squabbling natives" when... the actual results of British railways and Imperialist practices were violence and famines, not a "golden age." Maybe the perpetual famine in Fillory is a RESULT of Earth rule. Historically speaking, it is far more likely than not.
It's frustrating, I think, when a media source that really tries for political engagement and genre-savviness, and succeeds on several fronts as The Magicians does, falls down on an opportunity like this; and probably it's unfair to find it more disappointing than when a media source just doesn't try at all (like... Peter Jackson, you did not have to cast that baddie army as Middle Eastern, or every heroic character as white.... it would have been SO EASY NOT TO DO THAT; yet here we are). But it did make me hope that there are people out there creating fantasy narratives that really engage with anti-imperialist politics, and directly challenge this inherited notion of divinely-decreed human and/or foreign rulers over a magical land. I'm certainly not going to write them and tbh I'm probably not even going to read them because, see title: I don't really go here; but I hope they're out there, and I hope they get made into films and TV shows with big budgets and good actors. SURELY they are. Hopefully they will.
Soliciting recs in the comments for people who read more fantasy than I do, but share my frustrations. (Edit: Marlon James's Black Leopard, Red Wolf looks like it might be doing some of this, with bonus queer Black protagonists.)
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Date: 2019-03-10 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 12:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-10 08:23 pm (UTC)As you know, I also kind of don't Go Here, like, just it comes to fantasy as a genre; I almost never read or watch fantasy stuff (at least, not as an adult), but my sister is a big fantasy fan and I do know that there have been several books/shows/movies that've tackled race and the legacy of colonialism in a much more sophisticated way. Nalo Hopkinson, an author who also edited So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, which I think is sort of the Gold Standard on this subject, is the name that even I have heard of. In terms of the fantasy I read as a kid, I know that Ursula le Guin's Earthsea books are overwhelmingly nonwhite—but I also know that they TOTALLY whitewashed the cast when they made the adaptation—which was also, I note, something for which we can blame Syfy (though I think it was still the Sci-fi Channel back then).
I feel like this is, like, the Letters section of Modern Jackass Magazine, but my impression is that in general, part of why you feel like there's a lack in terms of fantasy directly addressing this stuff is that this strikes me as a very white people approach to the question. What of Nalo Hopkinson's work I've read—which is like, Midnight Robber, 10 years ago, or something—was just... approaching the problem totally differently: the shift in cultural viewpoint meant that the issue was no longer the divine right of kings, or whatever, which I think makes a lot of sense? And the few fantasy movies I can think of that center the narratives of people of color—like, Beasts of the Southern Wild leaps to mind, also most of Guillermo del Toro's stuff—are all just kind of... focusing their effort and attention on a different part of structural oppression, to the extent that they are "about" structural oppression as their primary narrative concern (which—shocker: it's usually more complicated than that). But I would be not at all surprised if your fantasy-consuming readers have more to offer, on that front.
[I am using this icon with a profound sense of self-irony.]
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Date: 2019-03-11 12:59 am (UTC)Yeah that makes sense, that narrative focus would just be different. That also seems true of the James novel I edited to link, although he does seem to be directly parodying some of these conventions as well. But it's a less top-down focus, for sure. (Also people do indeed have recs! Some of which are interesting even to me.)
Also, yes, agreed that in the case of The Magicians the imperialist thread and the implicit privileging of (male) whiteness thread sort of mirror & reinforce each other. Unfortunately :-(
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Date: 2019-03-10 09:02 pm (UTC)N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy (The Fifth Season, etc.) won hugos three years running for a reason, as far as diverse fantasy goes.
I don't read much within this specific genre (portal fantasy), but Foz Meadows did a pretty good job working within the tropes while also critiquing them when they wrote An Accident of Stars and A Tyranny of Queens. Queer portal fantasy that does start a white protag, but is very clear about how racial politics are at force within the world.
Other authors/books that I'd generally recommend in context of this discussion:
- Everfair, by Nisi Shawl (afrofuturist alternate history of the Congo that I keep trying to read but not getting through 'cause it's dense, but I don't think that's a bad thing at all, especially to you)
- Nnedi Okorafor in general goes this direction
- J. Y. Yang's Tensorate books (The Black Tides of Heaven is first; pan-Asian inspired secondary world fantasy novellas)
- Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown (mixed-race man becomes leader of the Society of Magicians, hangs out with fierce woman magician who isn't allowed in said society, saves England)
- Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence (necromancer bureaucracy where souls are currency. start wherever; they're designed to be read in whatever order you want. A Ruin of Angels is the one about queer women doing heists to get rid of squid colonialists, though, so it's my personal favorite.)
- Indra Das' The Devourers (queer, historical fantasy, gross and beautiful, I don't know how else to describe it)
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Date: 2019-03-10 10:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 12:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-10 10:29 pm (UTC)I'm actually gobsmacked that the show itself doesn't deal with this as A Problem. I assumed it would be canon that obviously the brakebills gang are not fit to govern a local chapter of the Mickey Mouse club, let alone an actual *country*, magical or otherwise.
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Date: 2019-03-11 01:03 am (UTC)IT'S WEIRD AND FRUSTRATING. Oh well, thanks for enjoying my venting session.
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Date: 2019-03-10 10:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 01:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 02:00 am (UTC)I was frustrated that Stephen Black was such a passive character, but the boy argued that his passivity was really the worst [wisest! Not worst] choice, given the particular situation, and better than all the blundering about of the white characters. It did show at least that being made ruler of a magical parallel world is kind of a booby prize.
My biggest complaint was that, oddly (since it was written by a woman) the female characters seemed underdeveloped. But I really loved the portrayal of academics and academic relationships, which is a big part what doesn't work for me at all in The Magicians.
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Date: 2019-03-11 11:26 pm (UTC)But yes, I did love the academia of it all, and the Regency/Victorian tone was super well done.
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Date: 2019-03-10 10:50 pm (UTC)Entirely agree that The Magicians deals with tropes of imperialism very very poorly. I feel like this is perhaps simply bad writing and that in regard to all the problems you identify, there is no plan or careful thought behind them. It looked, at points, as though the show was going to engage with them and then it was basically - oh look, something shiny, let's handwave this entire narrative strand and not think about it ever again! I'd like to see fans taking all this on through fic - like the writers who took on SGA and its even more stunning displays of imperialism, or what astolat is doing right now with 'Transformers'...
Not apropos of your main point, my kids are really really into Percy Jackson at the moment, and both Rick Riordan and The Magicians (TV not books) seem to me that they are making a similar move to post-Tolkien and Lewis British fantasy. That is, once you have lost the empire and your status as a world power is fading, you solve this by setting aside the 'conquer other worlds' plotline and instead making the ultimate battle between good and evil a local issue for a group of young (white) heroes in their home country (see: Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, J. K. Rowling et al). In this way BOTH the plots, and the books/media themselves in their mass circulation, become agents of cultural imperialism or soft power - they suggest that the key battles are fought by English-speaking white people, and are located in Western settings.
Percy Jackson and The Magicians specifically reimagine the USA as the new centre of operations of magic and the classical gods, and they're thinking about American imperialism - or buying into it - and about the loss of those powers. The Magicians NEARLY does something very explicit and interesting with this transfer of imperialist power from British to American hands, but fails to follow through properly on this and on its implications. (As with so much else.)
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Date: 2019-03-11 05:43 pm (UTC)Your second-to-last paragraph is really interesting and helped solidify some things in my brain about Rowling in particular, who is the only one of those authors I've read recently enough to remember. The extreme and almost bizarre England-focused insularity of the Harry Potter books always struck me, and what you say makes a lot of sense as background context for that insularity and also articulates very well some of what irked me about it.
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Date: 2019-03-11 12:47 am (UTC)I like Ursula Le Guin's Ekumen novels (though they're science fiction) as an alternative approach: there's an interplanetary organization, and they would like new planets to join for everyone's mutual benefit, but they will exert absolutely no force to make that happen. Their emissaries just have to go to the new world all alone and allow themselves to be changed by what they learn there.
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Date: 2019-03-11 06:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 01:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 06:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 05:44 am (UTC)I love lots of the fantasy books already mentioned in this thread! *adds others to reading list*
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Date: 2019-03-11 07:18 pm (UTC)Anyway, whatever, I'm glad you found the post satisfying. And people are being so generous with recs in the comments; I'm loving it!
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Date: 2019-03-11 06:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 08:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 11:33 am (UTC)We all know that there are new, exciting escapist stories with less bitter aftertaste waiting on the other end of that swamp, but boy, it's not fun to get through.
For people who (like me) trawled the comments for this for book recs, the book series this discussion reminds me of is the YA series World Whisperer" by Rachel Devenish Ford. It's not a portal fantasy, but I think it does a really good job of being non-Eurocentric and questioning while also having a pretty classic Chosen One narrative.
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Date: 2019-03-11 11:21 pm (UTC)And thanks for adding to the bank of recs! People are being so awesome & generous; I'm really digging it. :-D
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Date: 2019-03-12 09:50 pm (UTC)It's really hard to discuss this because whether an issue was addressed well/deeply/sensitively enough is so subjective. But I don't think I'm imagining things here. Just look at Sleepy Hollow as an example: the show first created a fanbase by billing itself as consciously diverse and genre-critical, then completely back-pedaled.
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Date: 2019-03-12 10:32 pm (UTC)That's a frustrating pattern, if indeed a pattern it is. :-/ Thanks for the validation of my frustrations, anyway!
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Date: 2019-03-11 11:47 am (UTC)It falls into a broad category of shows that leave out a LOT of things that would interest me. So in the case of The Magicians, if these 4 characters had to become kings and queens, then I would have loved to see what they did with that power as opposed to acting and reacting with the antagonist of the current story arc. Elliot and Margot don't seem to really take an interest in the country until around Season 3, and Quentin and Alice don't really act as king and queen. Admittedly they all have a lot of imminent disasters to deal with, but... I would have liked to see them learn about Fillory, and find out what talking animals are like (before S3), and understand the political situation with their neighbors before a crisis occurs, and... and... etc.
I had a similar feeling with the Stargate shows (specifically Atlantis and Universe). The attraction for me with those shows was the ancient environment the protagonists found themselves in. Mysterious and very cool. Yet mostly the characters are dealing with the crisis of the week, incoming warlike aliens or whatever. They learn about their environment only just in time to use Ancient Tech Tidbit of the week. I'd have been happy with them just exploring and integrating themselves into their new home. Fortunately there's excellent fic that addresses that. :-)
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Date: 2019-03-12 11:22 pm (UTC)When you say you would have liked to see Eliot & Margo take an interest in the country prior to S3, I think that really gets at part of what I'm reacting to here. They don't take an interest, or they only do when someone proactively brings to their attention an urgent crisis (e.g. when Fen mentions that without magic the peasants are starving, so Eliot distributes manure). They're very focused on themselves and what this change means for their lives, which is totally believable in terms of how self-involved 20-something grad student party animals WOULD act in this situation. But it means that (a) they are shitty rulers, and (b) the picture that we, the viewers, get of Fillory is super biased and constrained. And neither the shittiness of their rule, nor that bias and constraint, are really explored or challenged as the show goes on, even when the actual plot events would seem to provide an opportunity for them to be.
(But no, you're right that this kind of thinking-through isn't where the show shines or even where it's trying to focus.)
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Date: 2019-03-11 03:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 07:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-11 07:57 pm (UTC)Aliette de Bodard does a lot of interesting SF work in this area and I know she does fantasy, but I don't know if it carries over.
I have not personally read but have heard good things about the way The Traitor Baru Cormorant engages with imperialism, which may or may not be the same thing.
I also really enjoyed Karin Lowachee's Gaslight Dogs.
Otherwise most of the fantasy work i've seen in this space is about shifting the tradition of fantasy that it's working with, which feels like not quite what you're looking for.
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Date: 2019-03-12 11:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-14 05:10 pm (UTC)I have a lot of recs! I want to second a few people have already said, particularly Everfair by Nisi Shawl and Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho, both of which I really enjoyed.
Ursula Le Guin is another great rec; I'd particularly point out The Word for World is Forest, which is about a small, monkey-looking alien species whose world has been colonized by humans and who have been forced into slave labor, but who rebel and take back their world. It's a novella, so it's a short read, and it's VERY 1970s (when it was published), but it sounds like what you're looking for.
Another fantasy novel about imperialism is The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley, which deals with a British botanist in the 1860s, sent to Peru to investigate plants with commercial uses, who ends up involved with a village of locals and adapts to their mystical beliefs.
Like others have said, there's not a lot of portal fantasy being written today, possibly because many authors have realized the inherent problems with having new people come in and take over a world. But on the other hand, that means there's no direct answers to Narnia or the Magicians unfortunately. But there recently has been a trend to write antiracist answers to HP Lovecraft, which might interest you as a general response to old, problematic fantasy tropes?
Of this new genre, I'd particularly recommend The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle, which I LOVE SO MUCH. It specifically takes a minor black character from HP Lovecraft's 'The Horror at Red Hook' (considered one of Lovecraft's most racist stories, but you don't need to read it to understand LaValle) and makes him into the protagonist. It's just so, so good.
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff is more a series of interconnected short stories than a full novel, but it's about multiple members of a black family in the 1950s who are chased by a coven of New England wizards. The Green Book (the actual historical document, not the recent movie) is a major part of the plot. It's being adapted into a HBO series by Jordan Peele, which might be another fun reason to read it.
The best recent fictional work on imperialism that I can think of is mostly happening in sci-fi. I highly recommend The Imperial Radch trilogy by Ann Leckie and The Machineries of Empire trilogy by Yoon Ha Lee. Both deal with being a minor member of an intergalactic empire with serious ethical problems, and how a single individual deals with the guilt of being part of such a society, as well as how it's possible to create change in such huge systems. Both of them also have a ton of queer characters and do interesting things with gender, btw. And they're both really good!
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Date: 2019-03-14 09:22 pm (UTC)And thanks for the recs! I'm so psyched that this comments section has become such a rich resource for anti-imperialist fantasy (and some sci-fi).