NP? "the formerly colonised coming back to haunt us"

[Dave Monroe]

Okay, here's where it all started ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0212&msg=73680&sort=date

Or, rather ...

http://www.blink.org.uk/pdescription.asp?key=1486&grp=1

Anyway, from Michael Moorcock ...

A piece in the Guardian about a month ago also
broached this idea and David Brin, somewhere recently,
also mentioned this idea. I think it's as well to have
a knowing attitude towards LOTR, but I suspect
Tolkien's racism was the inherited and unconscious
racism which permeates the literature of pre-1960 in
the UK and US. 
The holocaust had something to do with changing
attitudes as did black immigration to the UK, when the
people they were talking about became 'real'. But
there was a lot of direct and implied anti-semitism in
the middle class fiction, in particular, of pre-war
times -- it's especially noticeable in Hemingway and
some of his contemporaries (though by no means all)
includin, of course, Hemingway's great mentor Ezra
Pound (who was a strong fascist supporter). It's
appallingly direct in the likes of thriller writers
like John Buchan, Edgar Wallace and 'Sapper' (Bulldog
Drummond) and it's casually evident in many of the
middle-brow literary novels of the day. It began to
disappear by the 1960s, when the Race Relations Act
came in in England and the Civil Rights legislation
came in in American. This was casual, unexamined
racism often written by people who, like Tolkien,
would have claimed not to have had a racialist bone in
their bodies... In some ways Lord of the Rings is a
product of the 1930s. I suspect Tolkien, a moral man,
would have been more careful to remove implied racism
from his story if he were writing it today. However,
one of the reasons I prefer Peake is because there is
almost none of that stuff in his work. 
He saw the world with a far more unprejudiced and
truly visionary eye. That said, his early juvenilia is
full of racial assumptions, typical, I suppose, of his
time and stemming, to a degree, from the attitudes of
his missionary parents! 
I've talked about Tolkien's attitudes in Wizardry and
Wild Romance (the specific chapter is reproduced at
RevolutionSF, off the SF site) and I see a lot of
class assumptions there, too. However, this is common
to middle-brown fiction of the 30s (see also Christie,
Sayers and Co -- though far less in Allingham) and
while it is usually removed from TV and movie
adaptations, these days, it's rather harder to remove
it from fantasy. What is perhaps more troubling than
Tolkien's inherited racialism, is the racialism of
those who have inherited it by imitating Tolkien! 
That's probably not tolerable in a decent society.
What I've always tried to do is counter that kind of
thing in my fantasy -- including most recent Elric/von
Bek stories -- and consciously address the issues.
Some of this was deliberately in contrast to Tolkien
and the fiction of his times. I wish there was a lot
more fantasy trying to do the same thing. Sadly, most
of it seems interested in reproducing a frisson rather
than using the medium, and therefore perpetuates the 
problems. 
Without wishing to seem too pious, I do believe that
writing is 'action' and that you have to be
responsible for what you write, though you can't stop
somebody, in the end, using your work to an immoral
end. You can, however, be very careful to try to
off-set the immoral assumptions of the form you're
using. 
All very best, 
MM

http://www.multiverse.org/sport/qa-print-solo.jsp?printme=2219

And see as well ...

Brin, David.  "J.R.R. Tolkien--Enemy of Progress."
   Salon, Tuesday, December 17th, 2002.

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2002/12/17/tolkien_brin/index.html

Sorry, don't have time to post highlights ...

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