To start off this interesting debacle at the Bruce D. Nesbitt African-American Cultural Center (or as everyone calls is BNAACC or even more commonly Black House), I arrived a few minutes before the talk was supposed to start. There were very few seats left and the space was awkward to maneuver around. This is not BNAACC's fault, we all have shitty facilities and we do what we can with them. But this talk was part of the "Lunch on Us" series. As I said previously, I usually avoid these talks because they often are bad. But the topic of black sci-fi doesn't come up every day so I thought I would check it out.
BNAACC had pb+j's as well as cereal. It is cool in theory, but once you add trying to balance a bowl, milk, sandwich, cup with water, backpack, and coat/notebook/anything else you might be carrying... It was awkward. I spent the first five-ten minutes trying to figure myself out. I had to put the bowl down and take off my coat and then get up and reposition and get water and then sit down and then pick everything up for someone who wanted to get out... I ended up spilling milk on myself and the ground and then had to get up to find a napkin or paper towel... ugh.If there was any lecturing taking place I would've missed it, but luckily there was ten minutes of announcements... -_- This worked for me because I was figuring my life out (and by life I'm referring to cereal and pb + j). But if I had decided food was irrelevant and was ready to learn, I would've been waiting and hearing every schmo's two-cents about their upcoming internship opportunity, community vote, and zit they recently popped. I only was focused for about two-three minutes of announcements and I was already done. It was a waste of valuable time.
Anyway... when Nnedi Okorafor actually started to talk, I was impressed. She started off by giving a brief list of black sci-fi authors to look into: Sam Delaney, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson. She also explained the differences between fantasy (mystical, unexplained) and science fiction (technology, science). Then there was a blurb for an anthology we could look into called AfroSF. It contains sci-fi written by Africans. That would be interesting to investigate.
Nnedi then started to talk about her life. She grew up in South Holland, Illinois and said it was very racist during the 80's. She would go to Nigeria every year and was astounded that race had no significance there (although their big issue was tribalism). She attended UIUC and ran track and then was diagnosed with scoliosis after her freshman year. She had surgery and was supposed to be fine but ended up being paralyzed from the waist down. She had to go through rehab and teach herself how to walk again. While she was going through rehab she had a lot of down time and started to write to escape her bed. Then she kept writing.What I loved was when Nnedi started discussing the fears that come with being a black writer.
- Fear of being too black. This includes revealing your black name. She said if there is an African name and the audience can't pronounce it, they will probably not read the story. She also related it to J.K. Rowling not revealing her name out of fear that young boys wouldn't read Harry Potter.
- Fear of showing your black picture on the cover. They worry about sales dropping when they see a black person on the book sleeve or inside cover.
- Fear of writing a black planet. This one relates to sci-fi, but the idea that the majority is black or an entire culture is black. She later tied this into her character development and maintaining black characters.
Another interesting anecdote came up when Nnedi discussed the cover art for her novel "The Shadow Speaker." She brought up the point that we assume characters are white until further notified. She knows of this and continually mentions the dark skin of her heroine throughout her story. But when the cover came back to her it showed a white woman in the desert. She was outraged and had them retry. They sent the same cover back but had darkened her skin a bit on Photoshop. She was still outraged and asked for them to re-do it. But they said they had no black people in their stock archives. HA. That was ridiculous to me... but it was not surprising. Anyway, they re-shot a cover with a black girl and Nnedi was still upset because her character was supposed to be bald but decided it was a compromise she could live with.
So I just keep rambling and going but at the end of this all I was intrigued and inspired by black sci-fi. You don't see a lot of it (the same goes with most black media in America) and when you do it often never focuses on Africa (except for Egypt and S. Africa). This recent work I've been doing has been dealing with black and white and Africa hadn't crossed my mind. ...it did, but I don't think it's going to come into play anytime soon in this series of work. I just want to read now...
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Trans Screening ...This movie sucked ass.
trailer: http://vimeo.com/34482159#
Should I even say more about it? I don't know, maybe I am biased from my history in LGBT issues, but I feel like this film pretended as if it would shine a light onto trans* issues. If it did anything it was teach a very very simplified (in a bad sense) view of transgender people and fed into stereotypes.
First, the cinematography was similar to local downtown shopping adds (it looked like local furniture store quality) and the editing was horrendous. We would suddenly switch back and forth from 6-10 (I lost track) stories of different transgender people and then suddenly someone else would be brought back into the mix and it was a mess of confusion that made me want to leave the room. The music was all royalty-free music that could probably be found on iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. It was horrendous and was used poorly in a way that made these serious topics almost appear a mockery or a joke.
Technical aspects aside, the content was poor too. They only focused on people who felt a full shift from male to female or female to male and relied on stereotypes to reinforce that switch. The little boy who "loves to play with dolls and wear dresses" or the girl who "played with trucks and liked sports." It is a very limiting and generalizing view of transgender.
They didn't mention any other parts of trans* identities. (I found out a few weeks ago that you should put a * after trans to include everyone on the gender spectrum. Always want to be inclusive.) They had males who became females and got vaginas made and they had females who became males and had their breasts removed and looked into penis grafting and such. But what about the females who never get a penis or their breasts removed? What about males who get breasts but keep their penis and still consider themselves trans? What about someone who one day feels like a man and dresses the part and the next day feels like a woman and dresses the part? What about them?Apparently there is only female to male or male to female.
Eh, at the end of this story I was disappointed and would not recommend this film to anyone ever.
But my teeth look good and Alejandra looks cute.
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