The Steampunk Postcolonialist is DONE SCHOOL!

I rarely post here these days, and it's not from a lack of desire to do so. I've had multiple reasons not to:

- I've had to focus on writing my dissertation and other such papers. Writing blogposts for a public audience is very different from writing for an academic audience: the discourse differs, the language loosens. I would start writing a chapter the way I hoped I would write about for this blog, and my adviser would remind me that when I write a dissertation, I can't write it as I would a blog. And fair enough! However, it became very difficult for me to switch gears regularly and write posts that I would be happy posting. But writing is also so very difficult, and expending energy on more than one thing seemed unproductive. Graduate school (and academia generally) is an anxiety-producing space and I would feel tremendously guilty for wasting my time thinking about blogging than writing my dissertation. Now that I am free, I am going to take my time re-discovering my ideas in a fast and loose fashion, and re-acquainting myself with you, my audience. 

- This blog gets cited, sometimes. While I believe in the freedom of ideas, I am also deeply cognizant of the power dynamics involved in the ways that ideas are circulated: that certain people are given credit for saying things already said by others. Other people are in a much better position to lift ideas and while citation should be a form of giving credit, the non-academic often loses out. When Diana and I began writing on multiculturalism in steampunk, our critiques fueled other people's work. Unlike many other people, I don't tend to get terribly excited about being cited; it's nice, but the chances of misinterpretation, especially by white academics, are high. And I hold nothing against these white academics--often they are doing this because it's important to acknowledge the racialized elephant in the room when it comes to steampunk. I don't have to be comfortable with something I acknowledge. (And, of course, neither do you.) And because I am also a jealous person, I didn't want my ideas, half-formed and incoherent, out there to be picked up upon before I was ready.

- Most of the things I've had to say about steampunk and race have already been said, are in my archives, and I don't like repeating material. I get that people need things hammered into them but honestly I'm not anybody's parent, and there are only so many ways to say "stop being a racist." New material would require me to remain plugged into the steampunk community, and I had to withdraw because of graduate school obligations: I've attended very few steampunk conventions due to lack of transit options and connections; I sort of stopped buying books because there is only so much white steampunk I can tolerate (works featuring non-white protagonists written by white authors fall into this category); there is so much work to do to share things with you.

- And I just.... got tired. And I didn't feel like blogging as much anymore. I left this blog up as a general repository, and also because every so often someone on Twitter whinges about how come there is no POC in steampunk and I need to deploy a list of links at them. Folks don't know what they don't know but I don't need to see people who are new to steampunk talking about POC in steampunk as if we were a new idea. This is not a "get off my lawn" sentiment; this is a "welcome to the party, the bar is there, the washrooms are at the back, please stop talking about improving the club when you literally stepped in five minutes ago and aren't more than five feet from the door." (I am not a very gracious person, as you may have noticed.)

Either way, this bitch is back in the club. I would really like to get back to steampunk, to blogging about steampunk. I've seen some really marvelous things, read some really marvelous books, met some really marvelous people. This blog will remain about postcolonialism and steampunk. You can read a more general view of my academic journey at my other blog, and I will go into further detail here. I'm also hoping to put up the whole of my dissertation here on Silver Goggles in some fashion, so that it gets wider dissemination. (This will be a different blog post.)

Happy new Gregorian, steampunks. I look forward to getting to know you again. 

PhD Adventures: Inscrutably Oriental--Some Sartorial Observations on Intention and Reaction

Some of you readers may be familiar with my steampunk magistrate outfit that I've worn to conventions across North America:

This is not me; this is the designer, Jeanette Ng.
I look like this, as well you know, or should.

I commissioned this in 2010 from the Costume Mercenary, a history-graduate-student-moonlighting-as-designer for Live Action Roleplaying (LARP) outfits. The idea was this: the character I was gestating would be a magistrate for one of China’s colonies in Maritime Southeast Asia, most likely one of the Malay sultanates (present-time Malaysia, where I am from). Chinese traders had established their own port communities since the 1400s at least, and until China closed its borders after the Zheng He expeditions, clearly had imperialist ambitions abroad. The character would be a lead in a LARP game Ay-Leen the Peacemaker and I had thought up. 

The game would involve my character accusing Ay-leen’s partner of smuggling opium into the colony, and Ay-leen would lead the players through the game, collecting clues to both clear her partner’s name, and educate the players about the extent of the Opium Wars that led to the establishment of a British colony in what is now Hong Kong. 

Although the LARP Game never happened (I'm still holding out that it will, though), I still wore the outfit to steampunk conventions across Canada and the United States, firstly out of a sense of satisfaction with how fantastic the whole outfit is, secondly to kickstart conversation in which I talk about the Opium Wars and of Chinese diaspora communities, and thirdly to embody what steampunk could look like when divorced from the Victorian aesthetic. 

Now, if you read this blog, you presumably know a bit about steampunk, so you know that roleplaying a steampunk persona, or a “steamsona,” is very popular, because it gives newcomers a thematic idea around which to start building their costume. One goes in or out of character to steampunk events, and theoretically, if all else fails in finding things in common to talk about, we can always ask each other about our steamsonas. 

Theoretically.

PhD Adventures: A Brief Bibliography of Articles About Mad Scientists

A while ago I posted my transcript for the paper I wrote on mad scientists, and promised to post the articles I found and used (not all cited). Some of them are easily found on JSTOR, others on Project MUSE. 

The bib is also annotated in case you cared to know what the articles are about, from my perspective at least. I really enjoyed reading them, especially the Allen piece, so I hope you find them too!

Transcript: "Steampunk Mad Scientists: Exclamation, Effect, Affect" @ ICFA 36

Recently I had the chance to present a paper at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts, which is like a major East Coast Science Fiction conference, and rather than save myself some trouble and present a paper I'd already written, I decided to write a whole new thing! Because after all this could get folded into my dissertation project and get me thinking about more coherently. This was the abstract I submitted:

In steampunk, the figure of the mad scientist looms in the background, either benign inventors who enable the technofantastical imagined setting, amoral villains threatening the world, or the space in between as morally-ambiguous sympathetic enactors of change with questionable methods. Literarily, they provide an avenue to explore the darker side of human choices; theatrically, they offer a chance to chew the furniture. This paper will survey how the figure of the mad scientist has been taken up in various steampunk media—Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan series, music by steampunk bands Vernian Process and The Clockwork Quartet, and the webcomic Girl Genius. Though the narratives and the scientist figures are wide-ranging, they retain similarities in the depictions of their methods and psychological profiles even as they are deployed self-reflexively. The paper will then compare these mad scientists with one of the original mad scientists, Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and evaluate the influence of the trope on the steampunk subcultural values and aesthetic.

However, as I developed the paper, I realized that this abstract was full of lies and I didn't actually want to do a survey of steampunk mad scientists, because that sounded totally boring! I betook myself to the databases to learn everything I could about mad scientists (which was, actually, a lot of fun, will post my annotated bibliography if anyone is interested) but just couldn't figure out an angle with which to tackle the subject.

Then I had to fix something in my apartment, and it needed some problem-solving skills and some other knowledge, and when I was done, I threw my hands in the air and shouted, "SCIENCE!" I am sure everyone in this room has done this. If you have not, I 100% recommend this experience. 

Outside Looking In

A couple years ago, I sat on a panel at SteamCon*. I'd proposed the panel, the title of which I no longer remember, as a think-tank on how the steampunk community presents itself (or how steampunk communities present themselves, or how steampunk is presented by anybody), and how the public at large sees steampunk.

Achievement Unlocked in PhD Adventures

Before I forget again, just to officially announce it here, I recently sat for my qualifying exams over the first two weeks of June, and defended on the 19th. My committee was very interested in what I have to say about steampunk and generally agreed that I had too many ideas and not a single cohesive argument. Which, yeah, it's true. I forgot to cite Mwanda Ntarangi's Reversed Gaze: An African Ethnography of American Anthropology, as the type of project I want to do on steampunk (although more a POC Ethnography of Eurocentric Steampunk, I suppose). 

I have advanced to official PhD Candidacy, and reached the much sought-after ABD status.

Cupcakes of congratulations are much appreciated. With any luck, I shall be back to regular blogging (haha, as if I ever blogged regularly) soon enough to share with you the things I am reading!

Article List Update and other stories

As I procrastinate prepare for quals, have an updated list in the "Read These Before Engaging" tab. I've added four new articles (one of them is actually an ebook), all of them in PDF for you to read on your ereader of choice. They are also all academic articles. Please note the nuances between the different types of racism. Of course it is easy to slip into the "all racism leads to the same racist end" mode, but I think there is value in noting the different manifestations of racism. If anyone is interested I'll post a more much comprehensive reading list on studies of racism.

What is perhaps most depressing is how long these studies have been going on, how long the discourse surrounding racism has been rearticulated and given nuance, and yet still at large we are stuck with people who insist on using a faulty dictionary definition for their arguments on racism.

On a different note I finally read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and am disappointed there are not more kraken battles and anti-colonial fisticuffs and most of it is just Arronax and Nemo swanning around taking a tour of the oceans with a litany of cataloging sea creatures, geography,  shipwrecks and a Canadian whaler's constant whinging about being stuck in a submarine. (I also mistakenly thought, for some reason, that the submarine could go 20,000 leagues in depth, but no it's 20,000 leagues of a tour of the planet's oceans.) Clearly I am a philistine for my assumptions.

I don't remember if I mentioned meeting Balogun Ojetade; a very fine encounter of minds! Bryan Thao Worra, who works on Laotian speculative fiction, mostly Lovecraft but he's also thought through Laotian steampunk, was also there. Balogun spoke extensively of his new movie, Rites of Passage, which looks tremendously action-packed, and of the challenges he's faced, being cheated in the media production industry. 

WisCon put me at long last face-to-face with my publisher, Bill Campbell, of Rosarium Publishing! I have new books: Day Black (about a black vampire who, I guess, daylights as a tattoo artist) and John Jennings' new artbook, Pitch Black Rainbow. You should check out his catalog and buy stuff because you would be supporting POC artists. Besides THE SEA IS OURS, Bill will also publish an anthology tribute to Samuel Delany, edited by steampunk novelist Nisi Shawl! Keep an eye out for the Kickstarter.

I also got the chance to meet Tim Powers sometime last week when he came to UC Riverside to speak about a writing process through a paranoid lens on reading history. He is a funny speaker, much like KW Jeter, but of course I saved my steampunk question until after the talk, and he told me, "yeah, I don't know much about steampunk or why I got classified into it, but it keeps me at cons and brought the Anubis Gates back into print!" He is also incredibly gracious and warm.

I have three more written exams to go, and my oral defense is on the 19th. I will see you after!

"London Waka" by Robert Sullivan

I have just finished reading Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, edited by Grace Dillon, and Dr. Dillon ended the anthology with a superb poem by Robert Sullivan, a Maori poet (Ngā Puhi). In her introduction to Sullivan's piece, Dillon shares the gist of another of his poems, called "London Waka" which briefly lays out an alternate history in which Maori warriors take over England, ransack its museums returning the loot stored in them, and free the British colonies, thereby creating alliances with basically a quarter of the whole world. 

PhD Adventures: The Culture Industry

I was going to post an entire paper I wrote on the discourse of "adventure!" in steampunk, but I got lazy in converting all that academese into plain English, plus my wrist hurts so you get a quote instead:

 The culture industry, as Adorno and Horkheimer saw it, runs on technology owned by the powerful (121) and is designed to push out products that require "quickness, powers of observation, and experience" to apprehend, "yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts" (127). The culture industry is about style, "the predominance of the effect, the obvious touch, and the technical detail over the work itself" (125) that designed to overwhelm the consumer, "that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them" (133). The culture industry prevents the consumer from the opportunity to apprehend the systemic forces behind the spectacle, and "amusement itself becomes an ideal" (143). 

Adorno and Horkheimer wrote The Dialectic of Enlightenment after fleeing Nazi Germany for, of all places, California, where they saw the same shit happening all over again with how media was being used. 

And this is why we don't want to go mainstream, OK? So let's stop getting excited over the concept. We should totally celebrate when more people get into steampunk, but that's kind of different from going mainstream.