ladybusiness | Entries tagged with theme: history

I’m occasionally asked to recommend some books about Chinese history to people with very little knowledge of Chinese history. So I thought it would be nice to write up a rec list with a bunch of different places to start.

I’m not an expert on Chinese history and I have no formal training, but I do read a lot of academic history about China for fun. This started about four years ago, after I got very into historical Chinese dramas. Some of what I read is for fic research but a lot of it is just for fun (thought the fun stuff sometimes inspires fic).

I read history in a similar way to how I read SFF, slowly piecing things together as I learn more and more. I like the feeling of building up a picture and deepening my understanding as I go along. This does mean that I just read books about specialized topics that interest me without necessarily reading more broad overviews. (If you do want an overview of Chinese history, I’ve heard that The Open Empire: A History of China Through 1600 by Valerie Hansen is good, though I haven’t read it myself.) I’m sadly monolingual and can only read sources in English.

For this list I wanted to pick books and papers that will make sense to someone with very little background in Chinese history. I also tried to pick things with more accessible, less jargony prose. And of course this list is influenced by my own interests, which are material culture (basically any type of stuff that is useful or meaningful to people), gender and sexuality, Daoism and the Tang Dynasty. I tried to offer a nice variety of topics and time periods to help give you lots of possible starting places and create a sense of the vast amount of history out there.

One of my struggles with finding sources for Chinese history is that there's a lot of orientalism and frequently Chinese nationalism in texts in English. Sometimes both at once! Both Chinese nationalism and orientalism over-emphasize continuity with the past. So I’ve become very wary of anything that talks about “5000 years of Chinese history” —actually it's a lot more complicated than that, and I think it obfuscates the imperialism of various Chinese dynasties by making “reunification” aka conquest seem inevitable and desirable. It certainly wasn’t inevitable and whether it was desirable really depends on your point of view.

I've included both book-length works and academic papers in this rec list. For papers, where possible I’ve linked to the academic database JSTOR. Anyone can make a free account on the site and access (but not download) up to 100 papers a month. For books I’ve tried to keep to the cheaper end of academic publications, but I always recommend checking your library or looking for used copies.

For want of any obvious order these are listed alphabetically by author.

( Read more... )

bookgazing

White, yellow and red book cover of Kameron Hurley's The Geek Feminist Revolution featuring an illustration of a llama

It's the start of July. I am trying to review Kameron Hurley's essay collection, The Geek Feminist Revolution. In my wisdom, I have decided an analysis of her essay, "I'll Make The Pancakes: On Opting In And Out of the Writing Game", would make a great entry point for my review. I reread it to remind myself of the piece's fundamental points:

The more women writers I read, from Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler to Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Toni Morrison, the less alone I felt, and the more I began to see myself as part of something more.

It wasn't about one woman toiling against the universe. It was about all of us moving together, crying out into some black, inhospitable place that we would not be quiet, we would not go silently, we would not stop speaking, we would not give in.

It's hard to see the keyboard when you're trying not to cry.

( Read more... )

renay

I've been driving everyone around me up the wall with my complicated reactions to City of Stairs, a fantasy novel that dropped last September. I'm still a little angry about it, but less so now that I have some distance from my immediate reaction of "NO!!!", followed by ugly crying, followed by fuming for hours. When I meet a story that's so wonderful, and I love all the characters, the adventure is fun, the setting is fascinating, and there's a rich sense of history to the world, I want it to be perfect so I can recommend it without reservation. This is another good example of what happens when a book you love just hauls off and socks you in the jaw. Not maliciously, but as we all know, we don't read stories in a vacuum!

City of Stairs is doing so many things right that I'm crushed over the fact that I came away from the book so conflicted. I went through this with God's War by Kameron Hurley, too, where I had to leave the book alone for awhile because I was just so utterly disappointed that everything I loved also existed with one story element that made me so unhappy. Everything we love is problematic, the saying goes, so what's the right balance? What do we do with otherwise excellent books that repeat troubling patterns? Because obviously burning them in a pile while crying bitterly isn't cost effective or a good way to not smell like dead, burned books. Also, you just burned all those other parts you loved. Crap.

( cover and blurb )

Shara Thivani, who comes to Bulikov with her secretary, Sigrud, to investigate the murder of historian Efrem Pangyui, is so wonderful. I loved her immediately after her first scene with her Aunt Vinya, a politician of note in Shara's home country of Saypur. She's intelligent and clever, but a little bit arrogant and condescending, too. In a scene very early on she talks about jingoism and is rather holier-than-thou about it, which is fascinating as the story that follows dismantles her self-satisfaction over being better than the people who engage in the sort of overt patriotism versus her own, more shadowy version. She's compassionate and kind, but she has important things to learn about the policies she's been enforcing, and it's a treat to go along with her as she unravels the mystery of what's happening in Bulikov and on the Continent itself. Her companion, Sigrud, is interesting on an interpersonal level because how are these people, of all the people in the world, partners? But he's also delightful — he got some of the best action sequences. There's multiple professional and personal relationships here between women like Mulaghesh and Vinya, as well, which is so wonderful. The top Saypuri leaders we get to know are all women, which was extremely satisfying. If they cut each other down or challenged each other, it wasn't because they were women, it was because they were politicians.

But to me the heart of the novel is about history — both personal and national — and how history can shape so much of what we do and who we are, and what the consequences are if we learn new things about history and misuse that information. What kind of people do we become when we learn new truths or have what we think we knew challenged? We often have a choice, and that choice has far-reaching consequences much longer and more influential than we can see. What's more important: the truth or our egos? People or power?

City of Stairs is lively in its writing, canny with its revelations, and boasts a crunchy critique about colonialism that unfolds until the very end, all wrapped up in an intriguing spy narrative package. Even in dark moments there is hope, friendship, love, and compassion. I enjoyed it so much. A summary:

PEOPLE IN POWER: Shara, don't do it.
SHARA: I did it.

and

SHARA: Vohannes, no.
VOHANNES: Vohannes YES.

and

BAD GUYS: *terrible actions*
SIGRUD: *silent decision to beat some guys down*
SHARA: Oh, not again...

But I have some caveats. Although, when don't I? 10,000 points to the person who can name the last book I didn't have caveats over. ( Character spoilers beyond this point. )

Special Thanks!

To Sunil (

ghostwritingcow) for assuring me I wasn't a jerk, and providing excellent edits. ♥

( Other Reviews )

nymeth

Cover for The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore, showing a vintage comic picture of Wonder Woman

A riveting work of historical detection revealing that the origin of one of the world’s most iconic superheroes hides within it a fascinating family story—and a crucial history of twentieth-century feminism

Wonder Woman, created in 1941, is the most popular female superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, no superhero has lasted as long or commanded so vast and wildly passionate a following. Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she has also had a secret history. Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman’s creator.
(...)
The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a tour de force of intellectual and cultural history. Wonder Woman, Lepore argues, is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s rights—a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later.
Source

Wonder Woman has been fighting for women’s rights for a very long time, battles hard fought but never won. This is the story of her origins—the stuff of wonders, and of lies.
Before I start telling you about Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman, I need to tell you a little bit about myself: my history as a reader has undoubtedly influenced my experience with this book, and so it seems reasonable to talk about it.( Read more... )

Lady Business

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Entries tagged with theme: history

Chinese History Starter Pack

The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

Special Thanks!

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

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