Signal Boost: Mansfield Park and Slavery

stultiloquentia posted: Mansfield Park and Slavery

Austen isn't exactly writing an overt screed against the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. What she IS doing is inexorably LINKING the moral corruption of slavery with the moral corruption of the patriarchy. Largely through a series of subtle but crucial language choices and situational comparisons.

This post is an excellent read, and would have made a welcome intro to the editions of Mansfield Park I read as a child and teenager, because I completely failed to get that stuff. The bias in the American school system is well known, so it's probably unsurprising that the focus in my education was on the North American side of the politics of slavery and abolition, although of course the English role is integral - but mostly the English actions which affected the US directly, like the abolitionist movement and the outlawing of the trade there - I didn't learn anything about Lord Mansfield and the judgment that rendered all people free when they set foot in England until Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, I don't think, even though we did Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre at the same time in high school.

Anyway, tl;dr, but this makes me determined to reread MP again with some additional historical background this time. And it accords entirely with my general view that Edmund is terrible and undeserving of Fanny. (Edmund: THE WORST Austen Hero? DISCUSS.)

imagining a better future and exploring the dystopian present with sf are complementary, not opposed

Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction: Why can’t we move past cyberpunk? By LEE KONSTANTINOU Jan 15, 2019 at Slate:

But none seems capable of generating the sort of excitement cyberpunk once did, and none has done much better than cyberpunk at the job of imagining genuinely different human futures. We are still, in many ways, living in the world Reagan and Thatcher built—a neoliberal world of growing precarity, corporate dominance, divestment from the welfare state, and social atomization. In this sort of world, the reliance on narratives that feature hacker protagonists charged with solving insurmountable problems individually can seem all too familiar. In the absence of any sense of collective action, absent the understanding that history isn’t made by individuals but by social movements and groups working in tandem, it’s easy to see why some writers, editors, and critics have failed to think very far beyond the horizon cyberpunk helped define.

This essay is quite odd to me, in that it does a good job of exploring what it is that makes *-punk genres "punk", and (IMO) had a really compelling summary of why those appeal and apply equally today as in the 1980s - it's there in that quote: We are still, in many ways, living in the world Reagan and Thatcher built—a neoliberal world of growing precarity, corporate dominance, divestment from the welfare state, and social atomization.

But then it wants to also diagnose the subgenre (or its market share) as a 'problem' in the science fiction genre. ( A problem of both imagination and... ideology...??? )