Transcript: "Claiming Narratives, Re-Telling History: Bringing Southeast Asian Steampunk to the World Stage"

Recently I went to a conference held by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, entitled "Making Southeast Asian Culture: From Region To World." Thanks to Dr. Gui Weihsin, I was on a panel on literary transformations in Southeast Asia.

I wouldn't really say I'm a Southeast Asianist. In my main blog, I describe myself as being involved with UC Riverside's SEATRiP program not by research, but through my creative pursuits. I DO study Southeast Asian history and cultures, but that is because I write stories that are meant for a Southeast Asian audience. So when Dr. Gui invited me to submit an abstract for this conference, I wracked my brain trying to think of a good usable topic (that could, in the interests of an academic career, transform into a publishable paper) and thought of something completely different, but completely untenable, and he said, "why not just talk about your book? You edited it, you know the field, you'd be the only steampunk specialist there, and it's Southeast Asian literature."

I can do that?

And turns out, of course I can, which put me into the position of speaking as an academic about a book I personally edited. I was very uncomfortable because on the one hand, Dr. Gui was right, it IS Southeast Asian Literature (we've got one white woman in the entire Table of Contents; white women are very diverse these days) and I AM an expert on the field and it IS a great opportunity to tell people about the book, but on the other hand, I have been taught, in so many ways, that being proud of my work and what I've done and talking about it is kind of big-headed, arrogant, and kinda rude. But I have the support of many lovely people here at UCR, including my adviser, so I wrote it, and made a very nice Powerpoint (which I'm not actually putting up here). 

So here is the transcript!

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. 

#SteampunkHands: Steampunk as Unlearning

For those of you who are new to me, my blog, and my work, you should probably be forewarned that I have a reputation for being hyper-critical, rather ornery, impatient with fools, and dissatisfied with the way most steampunk works. 

When I first discovered steampunk, it seemed like a whole new world of thinking about history had been opened to me. I emailed my friend Ay-leen the Peacemaker incessantly. Our emails kept getting longer and longer. My writing had new life, new purpose. 

Around the same time, I discovered postcolonial theory. I didn't know what it was, exactly, only vaguely knew about it from conversations surrounding RaceFail. I was finally coming to terms, years after leaving home, with what the word "identity" meant, and what ignoring it meant for my writing. While visiting a friend at St. Francis Xavier University (the Nova Scotian one), I grabbed a book off a shelf that caught my eye, an introduction to postcolonial theory (because Nova Scotia has a delightsome inter-library loan system that is prompt, timely, and flexible, and I still miss it). 

I fell in love with it, and fell in love with myself in a more full way, neither of which would have been possible without discovering steampunk. 

A lot of people think of steampunk as a subgenre. Some call it an aesthetic (finally!), because it moves between mediums easily. In 2011, I cited Martha Swetzoff, calling steampunk a conversation with the past, a conversation with ghosts who cannot be laid to rest, because they are not addressed. I wrote about the ghosts that relive the violence of the past, and how cultural appropriation is the demand for access to these ghosts, in order to inflict further violence on them under the guise of benign consumption. 

There are other ghosts one must be in conversation with. 

When I began writing steampunk stories, I created a new world in which the British never took over the Malay sultanates, while they certainly have a presence. In this world, the Golden Age of Islam never ended, and has developed all kinds of technologies at a sophisticated level, enough to create an airship that can cross great distances. The Malay peoples have learned how to breed birds that carry messages from depot to depot. The kingdoms of what we now call South Asia too have seen inventors rise despite the boundaries of the caste system. 

Like my fellow writers, I have suffered from anxieties of authenticity. I quietly scream pain at how much of my ancestors I don't know, and how little access I have to them. By dint of colonial history, my primary language is English, and by dint of personal history, I have access only to a language of the majority of my home country, which is not the language of my ancestors either. (Note that I do not lament knowing this language, which I have made bend to my will.) There are stories I will never have, never recover, there are gaps in the alternate history I have written.

It is too easy to say that into that aphoria we write new things, because it is an alternate history, not true history. However, to say that is to ignore whole histories of erasure, of writing over, of having been written over. Those of us who write today know well we write from lenses tinted by the knowledge of the colonizers. (There are those who would defend those anthropologists and explorer for having "preserved" knowledge of these lost peoples and stories; to them I say, why could they not have stopped their own from performing the genocide?)

In writing steampunk, I must carefully consider that which I know, and how I know them. I must think about how I know and speak of the knowledge I have. I must be careful to consider whether I do an injustice to the histories I am writing of. If I craft something new into this empty space, I must think: does this reproduce what I know? Does it push back in such a way that it reinforces colonial structures, rather than move beyond them? Do I reproduce stereotypes? Am I writing characters who are full, complex human beings, with varying intentions and drives in life? Is this a logical way for this history to develop, given the resources, values, and priorities of these particular communities and characters?

Through steampunk, I commit to a process of unlearning a lot of things that have shaped my life, my views of history and of different peoples and cultures, even my own. I commit to listening to other people reprimanding me if I write their people in a way that reinforces prejudicial views of them. I commit to finding new ways of telling stories, of re-discovering, of re-shaping, and commit to the knowledge that to find out what would be truly new, truly transformative, I must know what has passed.

In this workshop and classroom of steampunk, where the mainstream idea is to learn learn learn and absorb as much knowledge as possible, I ask that we carefully consider letting go of certain things we have learned, self-consciously, carefully. In this way, we can say, we are truly re-writing history, in a way that reflects the values and ideals of the present that we wish to adhere to, that upholds a standard of being we aspire to.

Because, especially for those of us with these gaps, we must write, we must fill those gaps with our own visions rather than the ones we have been fed. If we do not do it for ourselves, someone else will, someone with blithe disregard for the history of the gap.

We must unlearn that which continues to shape the present that harms peoples.

Otherwise, the steampunk we perform is all steam, sound and fury, signifying nothing. 

Link: Racism Without Racists by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Surfacing from writing my prospectus, editing the SEAsteampunk manuscript, and preparing for the end-of-quarter madness to drop off a few important links.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's book, Racism Without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, is a 2006 book in PDF and it's basically what it says on the tin. 

If the book is too tl;dr for you (and it is, after all, a BOOK), here is a Pyschology Today article on the same topic: "Colorblind Ideology is a Form of Racism"

The Colours of Steampunk Shopping

So, I am one of those geeks who get JoAnn's discounts (thanks, Andrea, for introducing me to this franchise, I really needed a moneysuck in my life) and yesterday I went to the store to have a look at what wares they offer. 

I've bought a couple of books that have "Steampunk" somewhere in the title, mostly DIY craft books that aren't functionally different from most other craftbooks, except the examples they give are things that are labeled "steampunk" which, I have to say, aren't really functionally different from other things either... they've just got a certain shape and colour.

Goggling at Goggles

Sometime last year, I received an email from the proprietor of Steampunk Goggles, Dennis Consorte, for a plug on the site, possibly a review of goggles. Yes, this was last year, as in 2013, when I had practically no life, because grad school. I did not reply because of school, among other reasons. 

Among the other reasons is the fact that I... don't really wear goggles.

"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. 

Customization and Class Privilege

In conversations and research, certain concepts, ideas, pop up repeatedly, as if they're core principles of How To Do Steampunk. Among them is customization, the idea that you can take something that may or may not have been mass-produced, tinker with it, and make it "your own", so to speak, fitting your taste and persona. Sometimes customization means ordering it made just for you, and paying for the service. Sometimes customization also means using something as it is, but in a way that is different from what it was originally made for. 

We can call this knack any number of names. Pastiche, the bringing together of elements from many different places into a cohesive whole, in which the elements are recognizable, is one way. Bricolage, my other favourite, the twisting of elements from their original purpose into another cohesive whole, is another. Sometimes we go whole hog, and sometimes we just pilfer little things here and there. 

What interests me is this intersection of customization and class privilege, which is another thing I've seen come up time again.... from people who would like to get into steampunk. They don't, because that entails the disposable income to firstly buy these things, and secondly, the further disposable income to customize them. 

Even if you make your own things, or modify them yourself, you have to be in possession of a few other things that enable this: the requisite skills, and the requisite tools. 

The skills one may be lucky enough to have learned, through exposure. Some of us do still grow up in families that preserve these skills. Some of us are lucky enough to meet others who are willing to share their knowledge (like me; I knew some basic stitching from Home Economics in secondary school, but without Wilma I certainly would never have developed past that). 

The tools, one may be lucky enough to have inherited, or maybe one picks them up over a long period of time at the same time one picks up the skills. 

But let us assume a lack of access to either--let us remember that most of us don't have the disposable income to buy the tools, nor the disposable time to learn the skills. What then? What are their options? Payment. 

I hesitate to say that steampunk can only be exclusive as a result of this. I'm sure that there are ways in which working-class people are participating. It may be more accurate to say that they are living the steampunk life, not merely participating in the subculture. 

At this conjecture, anyone who feels compelled to point to steampunk books in which working-class characters are strong, admirable protagonists---PUT. THE BOOK. DOWN. I am of course aware that many fine authors feature working-class protagonists, and have reviewed a few such books. I'm not talking about the literary imagination, I am talking about real life, and in real life, at our real-life steampunk cons, we would not openly open a conversation on our income background.

Mostly because that's not the function of these cons. These are escapist spaces where we move to get away from the real world for a bit. 

This exists in tension with the fact that we have to support our artists, who are dedicating their time and often a lot of emotional investment in making money through their art. I've never really seen a discussion that honestly tackles the fact that we encourage the development of specific skill-sets and then also encourage the consumption of the production of these skill-sets. The idea is that the community has space for both: not everyone has the inclination to develop skills, so they buy instead. And this isn't necessarily contradictory, but I think it is worth interrogating how it is really working out for us and asking what dynamic our communities are supporting. 

This sort of DIY personal expression is very appealing--that you could fit into the group and yet still maintain a unique look that you could wear to perform a role. I don't think there is any real tribalism going on in steampunk communities, but certainly like other aesthetics past, it's congealed communities around itself. 

Jha's Very Own Steampunk 101

So, SDCC, where I am next scheduled to appear (alongside Kaja Foglio! And Anina Bennett! And Claire Hummel! And Dina Kampmeyer! It will be a righteous all-girls'-morning-in and you all should come) will have a Steampunk 101 panel. 

I get a bit confused because it seems to me that many times Steampunk 101 panels always get scheduled after several panels have been scheduled, and wouldn't you want the 101 to come first? (Of course, upon further reflection, it then occurs to me that the 101 panel tends to be scheduled on a day when more people can make the con.)

Then it makes me wonder what happens when people come onto my site and whether they think their definition of steampunk is in line with mine. I am sure that my definition of steampunk is in no way contradictory with theirs, but I have met people whose definition of steampunk seem to me a woefully inadequate way of speaking about it in a way that encourages growth and inclusivity (I am looking at you, "Victorian science fiction" people!) rather than continued derivatives.

For Dickens Fest in January, the minister of the local UU invited me to speak about steampunk, just for a few minutes. One of my department colleagues snarked at me and said, "oh? can you REALLY give an introduction to steampunk in less than five minutes??" And I was like, "sure, why the fuck not?" Nobody needs an accurate history of the nuances of steampunk; folks just need a general outline of how it coalesced and a description of what it is now.

So here it is, after, haha, four years of blogging, my definition of steampunk, paraphrased the best I can from my Dickens Fest speech (the outline of which I have since lost but I sort of remember the basics). Let's see if we're on the same page!

"Friendly" Tech

So I was having a conversation on steampunk today on Tumblr, as it occasionally happens, because that is the kind of thing that happens on Tumblr, and then remembered a friend dropped a link to an article on BoingBoing which is really a link to another Tumblr post about Why Steampunk Is Good And Important. I'm not going to lie: I thought the essay itself was kind of inane and boring and didn't say anything that hasn't already been said, and even brackets off some really important concerns with all sorts of handwave-y stuff.  But I was really in a procrastinating mood, so I broke with my policy for a bit and read through the comments. Most of which are the regular run-of-the-mill critiques of steampunk (“it’s not really punk” “it’s just LARP” “it’s not a real movement”) but then I came across this gem of a comment from Scott Saunders of Dieselpunk Industries (which is pretty much an online archive of old movies and serials from that period dieselpunk looks at… pretty neat stuff):

He writes that steampunk “values our bounded selves” and “insistently re-makes technology as something friendly” under a (self?) portrait of a man wearing technology that augments his human sight and strength and carrying a very large handgun. The technology he makes up for his costume is focussed entirely on projecting strength and wielding power. It is not friendly, nor does it value the bounded human condition. It is quite the opposite.

And I want to have ALL THE “THIS!” GIFs attached to this comment because, well, THIS. There is so much talk about how steampunk makes technology friendly, or even how steampunk is a friendly subculture in the first place, that THIS is what gets missed in the conversation: the fact that if you actually pay any attention to the props people are carrying? Steampunk is not friendly, and reflects pretty much all the violence of the period it draws inspiration from, whether it’s outright, like the gun props, or the violence of colonialism implied in the costuming. 

One could read the prosthetic arm and oculars as aiding a disability (because, hey, violent times, you have to expect your eye and arm to get blown off, amirite?) but very often there is this gaping hole where conversations of disability should be—relegating this performance to little more than crip drag. 

And Scott Saunders is right: this is not friendly. This is not a vision of the past or present or future that encourages community. And while rayguns may no longer be the defining item of steampunk anymore that I can see, it’s still pretty prevalent because we haven’t latched onto anything else yet that shouts “steam era, and bad!”

Anyways, discuss if you please.

Functional?

My fabulous comrade Ay-Leen wrote an interesting piece called "Yes, I Did Stick A Gear On It" for Steampunk Canada and it harks back to a long-time debate over whether a prop needs to be functional before it can be truly called steampunk. Or something! 

Since my way of navigating steampunk has to do with words (and more words and conversations and discussions) and less performance, I've never really dipped my toe into that debate. It seems a little odd to me! Not all of us are capable of mastering the skills needed to create something functional. In fact, not all of us have the resources and tools needed for functional stuff!

It's not that I'm against the position, either! I fully believe that all my steampunk gear should be stuff I can wear on a regular, non-performative basis. (As an aside, I've started gardening, and considering agricultural forms of engaging with steampunk. Moniquill and Steampunk Emma Goldman had this very brief, interesting chat about how steampunk can use anachronistic tech to help people which is unfortunately frustrated when the focus instead turns to unthinkingly celebrating militarist aesthetics.) (This conversation of theirs was spurred by this Kickstarter Project of a ship that will sail from port to port selling local farmers' produce... a kind of floating farmer's market. It is a hark back to how food was distributed Back In The Day.) I think it's cool when stuff works, just as much as I appreciate the effort that goes into making something that needs no function beyond supporting the imaginative. 

Because I've never been invested in the debate, not being a Maker myself, I don't really know anybody who says "functional is the superior" to the weird extent that keeps being brought up in these debates. (Cory Gross was yelled off Brass Goggles because he didn't Make, period.) I know a lot of people who are in the camp of "non-functional is just as legit" but who are these people who purport that steampunk props must be functional or else it's a form of "glue a gear on it"? Do they have names? Surely they have to have been fairly big names in the past in order to have their opinions become entrenched so firmly into the discourse, but my Google skills... kind of fail me =( *wails "I'm a faaaaaiiilluuuuure" you know how it is* Are they a myth, a strawman? (THEY'RE REAL, RIGHT?)

I think there could be interesting questions to ask here. The folks on the "doesn't have to be!" side use imagination and props together; there is no tension going on there because there is a tacit understanding that the props are exactly that: props. By divorcing themselves from the necessity of functional items, the imagination interacts with the physical items for a particular purpose. 

But those on the side of "function!" are also doing interesting things with their interaction with physical technology too. Maybe I am looking in the wrong places, but surely this conversation is happening somewhere? I don't really feel like theorizing about something if there's already stuff out there.

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. 

On Permission And White Writers

Because I have received this question for like the hundredth time, and thought I would dedicate an entire post answering the question, "does this mean we're not allowed to write outside our ethnicity?"

Well.

In order to do so, you need to file an application for a License to Multicultural Writing with your local Department of Multiculturalism. This department is either provincial or federal, depending on your country. Canada and the US, sharing very similar multicultural histories, share the same department which is on federal level, several branches across the two countries. 

You will need to first fill out the MC-01 form, which is a general license form. (The fee for this general license is USD$50.) Then you need to fill out MC-1837 (which is specifically the license for Steampunk: Multicultural). If you are creating a steampunk work specifically about non-white peoples, you will need MC-3100(BC). YOU MUST FILL OUT AND SUBMIT BOTH FORMS TOGETHER. Failure to do so will result in unnecessarily prolonged processing. 

Licensing for each multicultural work you aim to produce depends on the region you write about; check with your countries' department on the rate. As a general rule, rates will depend on how long your country has been involved with said country; the longer your country has colonized this particular culture, the cheaper the licenses will be. However, if you are of Western European descent, these rates can often be forgiven and you will get a 75% discount.

Processing will take at least 6 months, and it goes through several committees of People of Colour and Ethnic Representatives from the culture you are applying to write about. 90% of the time you will be asked to produce samples of the work you seek licensing for, especially if you are a new media creator. Approval is not guaranteed. It may be years before you are finally approved. Please be patient as there are many applicants to be processed--up to 100 million a year! 

In the United States, if your work is egregiously racist, you will be impounded for a fine of $50 - $50,000, to be determined by a Jury of Disapproving Negros. They may also involve representatives of NMNAs (Non-Mascot Native Americans). If your work features poverty porn of Africa, Side-Eyeing African Children will be allowed to take arbitrary votes on the extent of your fine. If your work features cultures of East Asian extract, Inscrutable Orientals, from Section YP-1882, will place final call on the result of your work.

These are only a few sections of the entire Department of Multiculturalism division that processes these applications. If a certain section is not available close to you, your application will be forwarded to another branch that has the relevant Ethnic Representatives. To save yourself time, research where the Ethnic Representatives relevant to your work are before applying, and submit your application to that particular branch.

You get the idea. Now go write. And don't quit your day job.

(Alternatively, you could read the answer I gave to SF Signal a month ago when I was asked this very same question, under the cut.)

We Interrupt Srs Bog Bzns to Bring You Twitter Feuds

Ladies, gentlemen, sweet non-binaries.

Tonight, this happened:

Let me tell you how this came about.

Link of Interest: "On Supertrees, Neocolonialism and Globalization"

Via Annabeth Leow Hui Min (whose short story is the opener for the Singaporean steampunk anthology The Steampowered Globe), I read this interesting essay exploring the nuances of Singapore's new trend on "supertrees," its ties to the globalization rhetoric of how cosmopolitanism looks like, and how it reflects a neocolonial undercurrent by attempting to be representative but still viewing Singapore through a specific, colonizer lens, offering up the little island for consumption by a Western Gaze, and using these Eurocentric standards to measure success.

Consider how there are 225,000 species of plants in the new Gardens, the vast majority of which were chosen because they were “not commonly found in Singapore.” In essence, the Gardens represent an attempt to mimic globalization in the specific geographical location of Singapore as it strives, above all else, to be a hub of transnational capital and investments. What exactly were the costs in terms of the carbon footprint to carefully ship all these plants to Singapore? Further, like colonial botanic gardens of old, the Gardens are a vision of governmental mastery over nature, dictated by planners, scientists, botanists and capital. They are experimental spaces for technology and environment modification, and attempts to combat the equatorial climate of Singapore.
...
These omissions seem less grave when we consider how the larger human and environmental costs of the project might be obscured as well. We might do well to reflect on who exactly was doing the heavy lifting in the transformation of site that did not have roads, drains, sewers or electricity. In a 30 June 2012 Straits Times article, the chief executive of the Gardens, Dr. Tan Wee Kiat reveals that of the $1 billion spent on the gardens, 80 percent went to the infrastructure works while the 700,000 plants were less than 20 percent of the budget. While we might assume that some of the money that went infrastructure went into labour, I would argue that this is optimistic at best. Consider another article: “Injured worker goes home, loses 13 kg in 7 months” [Footnote 3] this time by the organization Transient Workers Count Too, dated April 2012. This article chronicles the misfortunes of Asad who was injured while commuting to the work site at Gardens by the Bay. His painful injuries aside, Asad’s revelations of his working conditions makes us question the sustainability and humanity of relying and exploiting foreign labour. According to the article, Asad worked 24 hours every other day in May and April 2011 for $1,600 a month. What exactly were the working conditions for the 1,000 workers then, who were reportedly working “around the clock” to ensure that the Gardens could have their official opening without a hitch? What kinds of human costs are justified here?
...
One of the UK-based designers responsible for Gardens on the Bay had a memorable quip in the promotional video, saying “On a plate, this is what Singapore is about.” While I am not against Singapore becoming a more cosmopolitan and diverse place, we need to ask some hard questions as well: Do we need to be served up on “a plate”? Who defines and decides “what Singapore is about”? Is it a breathlessly instant garden, planned to exploit the tourist market, built on occasionally shaky reclaimed land without much regard to the foreign labourers’ welfare or the decadence of spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on importing plants from all over the world? When we are simplified and contained “on a plate”, what other stories and issues are obscured from this self-presentation? Could we have a more honest and fair spatial relationship with this land that we call our home?

Read the rest of the essay at Yawning Bread, or click the link below to read my thoughts on how it relates to steampunk.

Transcript: "Pangolin Bear?" "Just... Bear": Hybridity in Avatar: The Last Airbender @ Fantastic Narratives

This is a paper I presented on the 28th of April, at the Fantastic Narratives conference, Dalhousie University. Much thanks to Dr. Vittorio Frigerio and Dr. Elisa Segnini for accepting my paper and letting me present. And then there're a whole bunch of people who want to read it after I'm done presenting it. And I'm supposed to send it along for peer review. So I might as well have random people on the Internet also peer-review it. 

Keep in mind that this is just the talk and not as well-developed as I would like it to be... I may change the focus for the published piece, depending on feedback. If you see a point you would like to see expanded, let me know! 

The Implications of Less Devastated Empires

So let's talk about Scott Westerfeld's Goliath, ya'll. Did you like it? I liked it, just like I liked Leviathan, and I liked Behemoth, and I thought Goliath was very well done indeed. The slow dawning realization of Aleks that his best friend is, after all, a girl and the OMG AWKWARD chapters afterwards and the EVEN MORE AWKWARD chapters when he realizes Deryn is in love with him was indeed super-awkward and I enjoyed that, possibly to an unwholesome degree.

I was a bit iffy with the visit to Japan, but ehh, it's Japan, weird shit happens there all the time, I guess, and I thought it was nice that we took a trip down to Mexico and met General Francisco Villa. The little rivalry between the journalists was fun, and I, too, wished to punch Eddie Malone when he also discovers Deryn's secret and gets to writing all about it. And I love how Aleks puts himself out there to protect Deryn, because you know, that is what best friends do! 

And yes, I laughed out loud at that middle-of-the-book chapter where Aleks is really really really realizing that Deryn is, indeed! for realsies! a girl! And then Deryn takes advantage of it! And I was like, yea Deryn, you go for it girl, life's too short to spend it not kissing boys. Also, Dr. Barlow / Count Volger -- I WILL GO DOWN WITH THIS SHIP, understand? 

And Lilit! My revolutionary anti-patriarchy homegirl! I knew in Behemoth that she was going to get sent away. If possible, get your hands on Marilyn French's From Eve to Dawn series; it's a history of women from as much recorded history as possible, and is French's ten-year opus. In it, French points to how so many times, women become involved in movements that will help everyone, and they get with them specifically because they see potential, and are told, all the time, "wait your turn, let us get rights for the men first" and when the men get the rights they want, they set the women aside, telling them, "you're asking for too much." Women constantly contribute to political movements led by men only to get shafted as soon as the men's goals have been achieved, and women's needs are ignored in due course. I was sad to see this happen to Lilit, but it still made sense to me, and isn't it sad that it made sense to me that this was the logical way her patriarchal movement would play out?

Fine, yeah, okay, Deryn isn't a princess by the end of it, and Aleks goes into obscurity instead of taking up the throne, that's cool (although I sometimes have misgivings about this; I'd rather thought Aleks had proven himself as a good leader and could've found some way of returning to his people while still abdicating, but, whatever, I'm the kind of person who still believes in huge honking scapegoats ultimate martyrs vain and useless things symbolic functions of royalty.

And of course Westerfeld, whenever we exchange tweets, is a cool dude, and it's nice to have him out at #steampunkchat, and I teethgnash at having missed meeting him earlier this year in New York City (where he ruined his feet walking at BEA and thus missed the Steampunk Bible signing as a result), bla bla obligatory this-white-dude-is-cool-by-me disclaimer bla-di-bla.

Now that that's out of the way, I can move on to talking about what I really want to talk about. Also, spoilers.

Conversations with Ghosts

A lot of times, I have imaginary conversations in my head where I have to explain the approach I take with steampunk, because while most people have some sort of fuzzy notion of what it means to think about racial representation in steampunk, it’s rather more difficult to grasp with how it’s done. Among the many different ways to do steampunk is using steampunk—the idea of messing around with history—as a way to engage with the past.

I think Martha Swetzoff put it best when she said, “steampunk is a conversation with the past” because it fits nicely with my favourite notion: when we look to the past for cool stuff to learn about facts, the injection of our imagination, of anachronistic technology and knowledges, forces us to consider how the past would reply back—would it have been acceptable? What would it take for such a modern way of thought to be acceptable? What would have hindered such a trajectory, and how does it differ from how it played out in our history books?

           

Derrica, in Spectres of Marx, uses the metaphor of the ghost (Hamlet’s father’s ghost, in particular) to demonstrate a kind of engagement with the past. He was talking more generally about Marxist theory and the application thereof in this era, since the ideal Marxist trajectory didn’t come to pass and thus, Whither Marxism? (Aw, poor Marxists.) He begins by explaining what a ghost is, the implications of a ghost’s presence (the haunting), and possible interactions with the ghost (and there is some mucking about with economic materialist theory that is more or less beyond me, but someone else better than me will be able to explain, I’m sure).

You see where I’m going with this: steampunk is a conversation with the past, but the past is what has gone before, yes? Therefore, when we engage with it in steampunk, we are speaking to a ghost—like Derrida’s spectre, the past, even the alternate history, that we speak to in steampunk can only “begin by coming back” (11) through our efforts to bring it back, into our present consciousness. For many of us, this is how we begin doing steampunk.

For some of us, though, the past, like the ghost in Hamlet, has already come back. It keeps on coming back: the patterns of erasure, of discrimination, our histories coming back in the violence revisited over and over. Each new generation gains new ghosts from the different manifestations of past haunting.