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Reading Wednesday 2.13.19
Feb. 13th, 2019 08:47 amWednesday again! This week's reading has gone like so:
By far the book I spent the most time with was Constance Backhouse's Colour Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada 1900-1950, which I pored over all weekend and excerpted here at length. I also read an unrelated 1988 article by Backhouse, "Married Women's Property Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada," which contained this excellent zinger. Both of these sources were research for my WWI Canadians novel, and both of them proved/are proving extremely useful. Colour Coded is divided into essay-length chapters, each of which deals with a legal case involving race in Canada. Starting with the chapters that seem most likely to be relevant to my characters, either in terms of era, racial group, or geographical region, I read the whole of one section and parts of two others:
Backhouse's "Married Women's Property Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada" article was also incredibly useful! I feel like so often when I'm doing research I'm triangulating from the sources I can find to the actual questions I have (i.e. what I talked about above re: extrapolating attitudes on Black/white intermarriage in 1914 Nova Scotia from, among other data points, voiced attitudes on Black/white intermarriage in 1930 Ontario and Chinese/white intermarriage in 1924 Saskatchewan), but this piece came very close to answering exactly the set of questions I went into it asking. It had a level of granularity on both the time and geography fronts that I greatly appreciated, and also discussed many examples of cases that were brought at various times & places, the specifics of which were even more generative. The only thing I wished was that the scope extended another 10 years or so, into the first decade of the 20th century; I'm not totally sure when a couple of laws that went into effect in the 1880s and 1890s became obsolete. (In particular: in Nova Scotia, from 1884 until ____, a married woman had to have written consent from her husband in order to retain control of her own wages; otherwise they would revert to his possession as they would have done under English common law. This was definitely still the case at the turn of the 20th century but I haven't been able to find any record of when it was eventually overturned or superceded by another law. I'm... assuming that it was overturned or superceded at some point, rather than still being the case. If anyone has any insight, I'm all ears.)
Much of the Backhouse research is in service of fleshing out a character who I hadn't really been intending to develop all that much, prior to starting the ficlet cycle: a decision I'm now... reevaluating. Maybe. Potentially. I still have a lot of unanswered questions about how it would look if I end up making her a more central character, though: whether it would mean alternating home-front and war-front storylines in the same novel; or two different, related novels; or some other possibility. Obviously either/any of those options brings up further questions about how to optimize narrative tension and best serve both women's stories. I love the "two or more interwoven narrative threads" story structure—love reading it and LOVE writing it—but it does introduce a lot more moving parts than the simpler "single narrator starts at the beginning and takes us through to the end" model that exists in my current outline. And especially in a setup where those two threads are geographically separate for the bulk of the story, I would have to do work to make them add to one another and pull against each other, rather than just existing side by side. I do think there are places in the current outline that would benefit from being pulled against in that way, but there are other places where I'd have to safeguard against dilution, or against giving the reader an "out." Food for thought, food for thought.
I also read a good chunk of Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater, which I'd just picked up on Libby last week. A number of people said they deeply appreciated but didn't exactly "enjoy" this book, and I can understand why one would make that distinction. It involves sexual and other trauma, and is told from the points of view of what western medicine would call the alters of a Nigerian girl/woman with Dissociative Identity Disorder (this is, unsurprisingly, not how the narrators of the book conceptualize their existence). The attitudes of the multiple narrating selves toward their host, Ada, is complex and sometimes disturbing: there's a fierce caretaking element, along with pity and occasional empathy, but there's also multifaceted hostility and contempt, and a dysphoric sense of wrongness: of being trapped when they should be free; of something being left open that ought to have been closed. The narrators' formulations of the relationship between themselves and Ada's trauma; between themselves and Ada's colonially-inflected Christian religious belief; and between themselves and the idea of "madness," are all nuanced and sometimes uncomfortable. I'm about 40% in at this point, so I'll be interested to see how Emezi develops their themes.
By far the book I spent the most time with was Constance Backhouse's Colour Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada 1900-1950, which I pored over all weekend and excerpted here at length. I also read an unrelated 1988 article by Backhouse, "Married Women's Property Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada," which contained this excellent zinger. Both of these sources were research for my WWI Canadians novel, and both of them proved/are proving extremely useful. Colour Coded is divided into essay-length chapters, each of which deals with a legal case involving race in Canada. Starting with the chapters that seem most likely to be relevant to my characters, either in terms of era, racial group, or geographical region, I read the whole of one section and parts of two others:
- Chapter 6, "'It Will be Quite an Object Lesson': R. v Phillips and the Ku Klux Klan in Oakville, Ontario, 1930" concerns a night-time Klan raid on the home of a black (or First Nations—his racial background was a subject of debate) man and his white fiancee. I posted at length about this chapter, which is probably the most relevant for my purposes: I'm specifically interested in attitudes toward white/Black intermarriage in eastern Canada in the early 20th century, and this had some really useful material, including specifically differing points of view from within the Black community of Ontario as various Oakville groups reacted to the fallout from the raid. 1930 is of course a little late for my purposes, and global politics had shifted substantially in the last 15-20 years, but it's still fascinating stuff. The contrast Backhouse draws between the Canadian government's (lack of) response to the rise of the Klan, and their (one might say draconian) reaction to the rise of the Communist Party of Canada, was also tangentially useful for me since a couple of my secondary characters are radical lefties (though anarchists of the IWW variety rather than Communists).
- Chapter 7, "'Bitterly Disappointed' at the Spread of 'Colour-Bar Tactics': Viola Desmond's Challenge to Racial Segregation, Nova Scotia, 1946" is one I'm halfway through and definitely want to finish, despite it being quite late for my purposes. Desmond was denied access to the more desirable ground-floor seats in a movie theatre in one of the steel-production factory towns that actually feature in my novel. As is obvious from the title, Desmond went on to challenge the discriminatory treatment she received, although I'm not far enough along in the chapter to report on details of what happened or what legal strategies were available to her. More to come!
- Chapter 5, "'Mesalliances' and the 'Menace to White Women's Virtue': Yee Clun's Opposition to the White Women's Labour Law, Saskatchewan, 1924" is a chapter I want to go back to, despite its being pretty far off my specific research goals. I posted about the so-called White Women's Labour Law here, and in addition to the fascinating history of the Chinese Canadian community's opposition to the law, there are a bunch of other, tangentially intriguing points too (e.g. the formation of 'Chinatowns' on the Canadian prairies; the double standards surrounding both immigration of Chinese women and intermarriage between white women and Chinese men; legal difficulties in defining "whiteness" in law, etc.).
Backhouse's "Married Women's Property Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada" article was also incredibly useful! I feel like so often when I'm doing research I'm triangulating from the sources I can find to the actual questions I have (i.e. what I talked about above re: extrapolating attitudes on Black/white intermarriage in 1914 Nova Scotia from, among other data points, voiced attitudes on Black/white intermarriage in 1930 Ontario and Chinese/white intermarriage in 1924 Saskatchewan), but this piece came very close to answering exactly the set of questions I went into it asking. It had a level of granularity on both the time and geography fronts that I greatly appreciated, and also discussed many examples of cases that were brought at various times & places, the specifics of which were even more generative. The only thing I wished was that the scope extended another 10 years or so, into the first decade of the 20th century; I'm not totally sure when a couple of laws that went into effect in the 1880s and 1890s became obsolete. (In particular: in Nova Scotia, from 1884 until ____, a married woman had to have written consent from her husband in order to retain control of her own wages; otherwise they would revert to his possession as they would have done under English common law. This was definitely still the case at the turn of the 20th century but I haven't been able to find any record of when it was eventually overturned or superceded by another law. I'm... assuming that it was overturned or superceded at some point, rather than still being the case. If anyone has any insight, I'm all ears.)
Much of the Backhouse research is in service of fleshing out a character who I hadn't really been intending to develop all that much, prior to starting the ficlet cycle: a decision I'm now... reevaluating. Maybe. Potentially. I still have a lot of unanswered questions about how it would look if I end up making her a more central character, though: whether it would mean alternating home-front and war-front storylines in the same novel; or two different, related novels; or some other possibility. Obviously either/any of those options brings up further questions about how to optimize narrative tension and best serve both women's stories. I love the "two or more interwoven narrative threads" story structure—love reading it and LOVE writing it—but it does introduce a lot more moving parts than the simpler "single narrator starts at the beginning and takes us through to the end" model that exists in my current outline. And especially in a setup where those two threads are geographically separate for the bulk of the story, I would have to do work to make them add to one another and pull against each other, rather than just existing side by side. I do think there are places in the current outline that would benefit from being pulled against in that way, but there are other places where I'd have to safeguard against dilution, or against giving the reader an "out." Food for thought, food for thought.
I also read a good chunk of Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater, which I'd just picked up on Libby last week. A number of people said they deeply appreciated but didn't exactly "enjoy" this book, and I can understand why one would make that distinction. It involves sexual and other trauma, and is told from the points of view of what western medicine would call the alters of a Nigerian girl/woman with Dissociative Identity Disorder (this is, unsurprisingly, not how the narrators of the book conceptualize their existence). The attitudes of the multiple narrating selves toward their host, Ada, is complex and sometimes disturbing: there's a fierce caretaking element, along with pity and occasional empathy, but there's also multifaceted hostility and contempt, and a dysphoric sense of wrongness: of being trapped when they should be free; of something being left open that ought to have been closed. The narrators' formulations of the relationship between themselves and Ada's trauma; between themselves and Ada's colonially-inflected Christian religious belief; and between themselves and the idea of "madness," are all nuanced and sometimes uncomfortable. I'm about 40% in at this point, so I'll be interested to see how Emezi develops their themes.
