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cda posted:BYOB poster HappyKitty wrote a real good essay about Philip Pullman, Geography, Imperialism, and the residential school system in Canada. It just covered Golden Compass iirc though. Weird, somebody just requested that article from me on ResearchGate like, a few days ago! OH GOD A GOON IS GOING TO KNOW MY REAL NAME NOW I JUST KNOW IT Edit to make this less of a shitpost: It might be a bit of a spicy take, but a Catholic analogue of the British Empire snatching children (usually from marginalized communities) and sticking them in institutions in the far North of the world so that they can "fix" them and make them good productive Christians - especially when those responsible for it (Mrs Coulter) would balk at the idea of putting one of their own kids in such an institution - and the public has general support of the project so long as it's done on "undesirable" children, and where the people running the institutions keep knowledge of exactly what goes on and how many kids die from it far from the public eye - kinda, sorta, maybe, just a bit, seems like you got yourself an analogue for residential schools. I don't claim that Pullman set out to make that part of his allegory deliberately; I would, in fact, be pleasantly surprised if I discovered it was on his radar at all (I didn't see it in any interviews or anything). What I do claim is that Pullman, because he is invoking the Imperialist spirit of those "Boy's Own Paper"-style adventure narratives that formed the bulk of late nineteenth-century novels for boys in the British Empire, will inevitably end up having to also create a British Empire to justify the fact that Lyra is able to have her own "plucky British child travels to the margins of the world and also fixes the problems of the backwards noble savages (who here are bears rather than actual-rear end people)" adventure. And if you create an Empire that has an imperialist mindset, then you have to expect some patronizing attempts to "enlighten" the marginalized people of that empire. Pullman understands imperialism pretty frigging well when his imaginary empire ends up doing things eerily similar to what the actual British empire did, and for some really similar reasons, and with really similar justifications. HappyKitty fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Nov 16, 2019 |
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Nov 15, 2019 03:36
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