It’s mentioned in the article that he’s the only black author of the bunch.
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That’s still somewhat problematic because if (say) Dr. Frankenstein had been a black person living in the time and place that his story was set it would have had a profound impact on his life and upbringing. So to tell the story of a “black” Dr. Frankenstein without any acknowledgement of the difficulties such a character would face would essentially be the same as pretending that racism didn’t exist.
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Yes, and it would take a different story – preferably by someone other than an aristocratic white woman – to explore those angles.
But people make precisely that argument against, for example, casting non-white actors in movies about medieval Europe. In most cases I’d say they’re wrong because, if the point is for a modern audience to identify with a character, then the casting should reflect the audience, ahead of the historical physical reality (if any) of the character.
When Boris Karloff played Frankenstein, no one saw it as a whitewashing of the issues that a middle-class Indian-British homo would have faced in upper-class 18th century Geneva. The audience is expected to supply some imagination of their own, after all, and a black Frankenstein ought not be that much more of a leap.
And this’d still be true if white authors were outnumbered ten to one from this day forth. Frankenstein doesn’t belong to white readers in any special way, unless we decide it does. To say Victor Frankenstein is black is just as true as saying he’s white.
But pretending that his story was written in such a way that he could have just as easily been one as the other is to lay a claim to diversity and representation where none exists. It’s like celebrating women’s history month by putting a gender-swapped version of Captain Ahab on Moby Dick instead of promoting stories by or about women.
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white novels can be escapist trash, but a novel featuring characters of color must advance the revolution?
That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that changing a cover illustration doesn’t magically transform a white novel into a black novel any more than it changes a male-centric story into a female-centric story.
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I suppose the New Criticism has had its day.
This caught my eye, too.
Frankenstein and Frankenstein in Baghdad: The Sovereign, Homo Sacer and Violence
I haven’t read those works but Frankenstein in Baghdad is a piece of new fiction by an Iraqi author that explores themes from Mary Shelley’s novel through a different and original perspective. That’s a very different prospect than just changing the illustration on the cover of the original text and saying “Check it out—Dr. Victor Frankenstein is an Arab now!”
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The cynical interpretation is that B&N can print public domain works very cheaply, and most of the better known African American works of literature are very much still in copyright. A marketing stunt that failed.
Meanwhile, Penguin books is releasing this.
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