Good grief, no! Delany is one hell of a lot more interesting than that. (For whatever it is worth, he is also brown himself, and very thoughtful on the subject of race and, especially, of race-as-social-construct.)
There are a lot of inversions, one of which is that the "civilized" people are brown, or maybe black; one gets the sense the stories are set somewhere in Africa, a bit the way R.E. Howard's Conan stories are presumably somewhere in Europe (or so I believe; I've never read the latter).
So brown (or black) people are oppressors and some of the white characters are slaves, but Delany is after much bigger fish. The nature of slavery —, economic and political and even sexual — is among them, but so too are the origins and nature of written language, the nature of cities and economics, and not to mention relations between men and women, homosexuals and straights.
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branchandroot
Re: Subversion is good
Date: 2012-01-16 10:00 pm (UTC)There are a lot of inversions, one of which is that the "civilized" people are brown, or maybe black; one gets the sense the stories are set somewhere in Africa, a bit the way R.E. Howard's Conan stories are presumably somewhere in Europe (or so I believe; I've never read the latter).
So brown (or black) people are oppressors and some of the white characters are slaves, but Delany is after much bigger fish. The nature of slavery —, economic and political and even sexual — is among them, but so too are the origins and nature of written language, the nature of cities and economics, and not to mention relations between men and women, homosexuals and straights.