Exoticising diversity...

So, I was reading this post by amagiclantern (via alankria), Dear Western SFF: stop it with 'exotic' already.

It is an interesting post. And got me thinking about my own life experience (because it's all about me, of course [ed. note: snark in play]), growing up with certain things coded exotic/foreign/strange. (And other things, familiar things, romanticised in an unfamiliar way - but I am not going to get my hate on for US portrayals of Irishness and Irish mythology.)

Anyway. So, the coding of things as "exotic." I accepted it mostly uncritically. Because, you know. Fresh melons. Halva. Grapefruit. Fava. Spicy food that wasn't bad curry. Beans that weren't baked in tomato sauce. Polish sausage. These things didn't form part of my daily experience, so clearly they belonged to a bizarre and impenetrable world of foreignness.

Which, you know. I have come to acknowledge is bullshit framing. But only after getting a tiny bit of enlightenment kicked into me a particle at a time. And only after spending enough time in a foreign country - and reading widely enough; hard to see people and places and things as terribly Different when you spend a lot of time reading their own words, even in translation - to start to get in my gut that what's weird to me is perfectly ordinary to other people. And actually have stuff that started out weird to me become perfectly ordinary. (Rice flavoured with oregano. Fried cheese. Melon. Buying bread in a bakery and meat in a butcher's shop.)

I'm not special. And I fuck up bunches, especially navigating Greek culture - I get cut a bit of slack, because I try to use my pathetic infant Greek, but that rebounds when the nice Greek person assumes I understand more than I really do - and I have the option of taking the easy way out, of being the idiot tourist who assumes everyone speaks English and doesn't even try. I'll never get it from the inside. But if I keep working on learning the language, maybe I'll get it a bit better than I do now.

Lots of things still strike me as strange and weird and hard to understand, but that's on me. It doesn't make them objectively strange and weird and incomprensible.

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In an odd confluence of links, I was reading amagiclantern's post at the same time I was reading a certain writer of alternate histories claim that Europe and specifically Mediterranean Europe/the Levant/North Africa is not and was not historically phenotypically diverse.

Is this an American thing? Not seeing regional variation? Because even within a limited range of skin pigmentation (which was historically less limited than said writer claims, considering the amount of trade with sub-Saharan Africa during the medieval Islamic period), even today, there's a significant amount of regional variation in terms of body-type and features around Europe, and even around the Mediterranean.

(Otherwise there would be never be accusations of northerner-southerner prejudice in Italy. And the detective-type Greek policeman, when I reported my pickpocketing, wouldn't have asked me if the boys had looked like Macedonians or Serbs. And "he looked like a Turk" wouldn't be something I've heard.)

Dear Americans: just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there. And just because you can't see it doesn't mean I don't know Polish folks in Dublin who've been hassled for looking too Polish. Or that I don't know someone you'd probably call "white" have his shoulder dislocated because some young arsewipes thought he looked too foreign.

Not that I'm celebrating the fact that more visible regional variation usually equals more bullshit reasons for othering people. I'm saying don't use the bullshit argument that because you can't see diversity in the real world, there should be less diversity in fictional worlds. Because bullshit.

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I'm watching Marple, and recognising why it irks me so. Agatha Christie's work is astonishingly classist, and though the television series has toned down the xenophobia I remember from the novels, it's still there. Miss Marple, like many other cosy detective stories, elides the reality of all the intersecting oppressions that make a "respectable" rural middle and upper class possible. Marple is fundamentally unchallenging, fundamentally reinforcing a nostalgia for power structures in which people knew their places, in which "girls of that class" can be spoken of with a certain smug certainty. Those people aren't like us, don't you know, Freddy.

I identify with the murderers too much. Even the child-killing ones. Because I'm one of those kind of people too, aren't I? Not respectable. Not polite.

I mean, it's lovely to see a mature lady be the smart star. But *shudder* the values of the "respectable" middle class...

So very alien.