A bit of a rant on cultural imperialism

After reading The World Republic of Letters, I was pretty horrified. The basic thesis of the book is that international literature is largely formed by a small group of editors in Paris and to a lesser extent in London and New York. That these editors decide what bits of literature the world over are internationalized.

The horror came over me because I realized how homogenizing this must be - and, indeed, I find international literature to be very much of a particular cast. I mean, take magical realism. It is very much the sort of thing that white middle class people like - it's about extraordinary renditions of fairly ordinary things but with shades of the exotic. Some time later I recall talking to a South American - I don't even know who he is! - about magical realism and though I do not remember the person, I remember what he said very well. He said, "That's not what South Americans really read." He told me that science-fiction is huge in Latin America. I read science-fiction so I said I'd never heard of it, and he said that almost none of it has been translated. Then my mind veered towards this world republic of letters. A group of college educated middle-class Frenchmen (and almost certainly most of them are French men) would have little interest in Spanish language science fiction. What those French editors want is literary fiction - the same stuff that literary fiction writers in the US, and England, and France write, but written exotically. The quality of international literature is being defined as nothing more than what appeals to Western educated French people. It was right then that I really understood what cultural imperialism meant - the attitudes of those white well-to-do Western college educated French men were defining world literature and by doing it, they would create a self-fulfilling system. The more they define "international" literature as what appeals to white well-to-do Western college educated French men the more the continuing standard of quality will be so defined. Like how it's impossible to talk about English literature without someone bringing up Shakespeare, even tho' . . . he's not that good by today's standards, and even by the standards of his day he was . . . sorta . . . shallow. But you can't say that, because Shakespeare has come to define English language literature.

The only place that I have a good idea of what I'm missing is Japanese fiction. Due largely to the efforts of a small group of Japanophiles in the United States, to some extent the "republic" of letters - which is a misnomer, really, it's far more like the oppressive racist aristocracy of letters - has been circumvented. Japanese animation has brought over Japanese comic books which is now translating into bringing over Japanese popular literature. But it's limited, and rare. What goes on, even in fields I'm very interested in, like science-fiction, remain opaque to me.

The same thing happens everywhere. So, the Wikipedia article of the day - yeah, yeah, I know some of you don't like Wikipedia, but I do in large measure because it is way more likely to have information I want than a traditional encyclopedia, like up-to-date comic book summaries - they have it an Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray He does stuff like the Apu trilogy, Ghare Baire and Shakha Proshakha. He would influence people like Mrinal Sen.

Ray's movies are . . . I mean, they're what almost all foreign movies I see are. They're these personal and family dramas! Look at what Ray did, what Sen did! Nothing but personal and family dramas. And with both directors the articles will go on and on about how wonderful and splendid they were and I found myself thinking that we're back in the territory of the international republic of letters. That what we praise is what art house movie people praise.

I know what Indians actually watch - and it isn't these movies! Indians watch a lot more stuff like Dhoom 2 than they do the Apu trilogy. Who watches stuff like the Apu trilogy? Well-to-do Western educated Indians, who contact their well-to-do Western film contacts and international acclaim is given to movies that are not representative of India cinema.

What I feel is going on is that . . . they're not interested in Indian cinema. They're interested in seeing the reflections of the Western artistic aesthetic outside of the West. What Indians are actually interested in isn't nearly as important, to the people who decide what the world sees about all of the parts of the world, as a narcissistic reflection of their own aesthetic. It's a racist pat on the head. We'll acknowledge Indian cinema, or South American literature, if it conforms to the standards of a tiny section of Westerners - almost all of whom are rich, college educated white men. We'll be glad to let them into our circle if they act like us.

I hate that, and I just had to say something.

Hayes Code, Women in Movies

This post was inspired by this Krystalline Apostate post that mentions the the Hayes Code. There's something of a hidden story there that I feel the urge to talk about, so I shall!

What was happening in cinema during the early years was that a lot of the income was being derived from white, middle-class women who stayed at home. Well, since it doesn't actually take eight hours to keep the house clean and cook dinner for the "man of the house", after they got the kids off to school they often had several hours in the middle of the day with, functionally, nothing to do. And this was before not only the proliferation of TV but also radio. But every neighborhood had a cinema. So a large number of movies were being produced directed at the housewife audience with the values, scripts and stars that would appeal to that audience.

The sort of movie I'm talking about was The Sheik by George Melford starring Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayres. It's the story of an English noblewoman who doesn't want to get married because she's fearful of losing her independence (played by Ayres), but on a trip to the Algerian desert she's kidnapped by a sheik (played by Valentino). During the course of the movie, the woman falls in love with the sheik, who learns to treat her as an equal. The movie is orientalist crap, and in our day and age the very idea of a backwoods Muslim warlord treating a woman with respect and dignity is absurd, but women loved it. That housewife matinee movie crowd saw it as many times as fourteen year old boys would see the first Star Wars movie.

The male establishment . . . did not like it. It was about a woman who saw marriage as a burden, who eventually falls in love with a sand nigger. The very orientalism I detest they feared -- the notion that "out there" were men willing to treat women as equals. And not just The Sheik, either. These movies were filled with independent women taking lovers, and dismissing them, being in charge of their sexual destiny, rejecting the traditional roles that society was forcing on them. Obviously, this had to be put to a stop, which is what ultimately lead to the creation of the Hayes Code.

The Hayes Code did everything in it's power to destroy the movie culture in America. Initially, it was simply ignored. But the big distributors got together and eventually demanded certification as a precondition of distribution. And then there was a whole generation of movie makers and audiences that simply refuses to submit to the code peacefully and pushed, pushed, pushed against it -- so you have all these movies that still had powerful female leads (and actresses) such as Bette Davis. By the fifties and sixties, however, there was almost no movie being made where women were allowed to have powerful roles. Women, as important characters in movies, had been almost eliminated. Entertainment Tonight's list of the 100 greatest movies is illustrative in this regard. The top ten movies are The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Chinatown, Raging Bull, La Dolce Vita, The Godfather Part 2, Gone with the Wind, Some Like It Hot, and Singing in the Rain. The ones with female roles that aren't merely love interests are Casablanca (where the female lead is a Resistance fighter) and Gone With the Wind (Scarlett O'Hara, duh). The Godfather movies, Citizen Kane and Raging Bull functionally lack a female presence at all, in Chinatown the women are dilettantes and victims. In La Dolce Vita, Some Like It Hot and Singing in the Rain they're merely the love interests of the male characters. Most of the top one hundred movies follow this pattern, and it is noteworthy that the movies that do include women as something other than love interests are almost all from the fifties and earlier. Like I said, by the sixties, women as serious people had been virtually removed from cinema.

As a writer, I think this is a shameful episode in American literary and cinematic history. It deeply offends me that the forced removal of powerful women from cinema is virtually unnoticed by . . . virtually anyone at all, not to mention the deep damage this has done to American cinema as the rules of the Hayes Code functionally forced women into passive roles.