elfwreck:

yuri-alexseygaybitch:

sawasawako-archived:

link to thread

Hannah Arendt was also an extremely racist bastard who believed “totalitarianism” originated in “Oriental despotism” “encroaching” open pure, progressive European individualism.

From The Origins of Totalitarianism Like, it can’t be stressed enough how much the entire idea of “totalitarianism” is rooted in deeply racist, colonialist, orientalist thought.

Related:

The Ghost of Workshops Past: How Communism, Conservatism, and the Cold War Still Mold Our Paths Into SFF Writing - Reactor

This was nominated for the “Best Related Work” Hugo award a couple of years ago. It’s focused on the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, but it goes into its history and how that ties to the U of Iowa’s original writing courses.

Here was the answer to my confusion: Why is almost everyone using the same workshopping method? Because three-quarters of a century ago, a Cold Warrior named Paul Engle was wildly, ideologically successful in spreading that method to every corner of a brand-new field, all by managing to sell it as a weapon against the Red Scare.

You know, I once watched a friend try to go through a literature program…

watched it try to mold their wildly weird and unique writing into something following all the specific rules of what Literature is supposed to be…

…the removal of anything tying the narrative to anything specific, brand names or political events or even years, because Literature was meant to be timeless and placeless, to connect to everyone everywhere across the ages…

…the removal of anything tying it to a genre, any trappings of science fiction or fantasy or mystery, because the moment it was anything specific, it was no longer Literature…

and the last thing I would ever have thought about this program was that it was founded on anything related to “individual personhood,” or “personal narrative,” or “free will,” or even “resistance against totalitarianism”