Weird that people seem to think Heckblazer is excusing and minimizing Christie’s racism, when he’s describing her racist practice of having sympathetic characters say casually racist things to endear them to the racist audience she was courting.
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Yeah, a lot of usage was “ooh, this prim character said something insensitive! How positively daring! Look at how human this character is!”
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This was the era when anti-colonial activists were holding transnational conferences on racism…
Literary movements like Negritude goes back to this period as well:
etc…
So… yeah, people were talking about race and racism and white people were not ignorant of this stuff.
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Is he, though?
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“It was fine then because everybody expected racism,” is certainly a defence but it’s a bullshit one.
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It was a common name for the city in the Ottoman Empire too. They didn’t suddenly change the name in 1453; Istanbul – also derived from Greek! – just sort of became more popular over time.
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T. R. Ybarra of The New York Times wrote in 1929 that “‘Istambul’ (our usual form for the word is ‘Stamboul’) has always been the Turkish name for the whole of Constantinople”.[26] The Observer wrote that “To the Turks themselves it never was Constantinople, but Istanbul.”[27] In 1929 Lloyd’s agents were informed that telegrams now must be addressed to “Istanbul” or “Stamboul”, but The Times stated that mail could still be delivered to “Constantinople”.[28] However The New York Times stated that year that mail to “Constantinople” may no longer be delivered.[29] In 1929, Turkish nationalists advocated for the use of Istanbul in English instead of Constantinople.[30] The U.S. State Department began using “Istanbul” in May 1930.[31]
Names other than استانبول (İstanbul) had become obsolete in the Turkish language after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey.[15] However, at that point Constantinople was still used when writing the city’s name in Latin script. In 1928, the Turkish alphabet was changed from the Arabic to the Latin script. Beginning in 1930, Turkey officially requested that other countries use Turkish names for Turkish cities, instead of other transliterations to Latin script that had been used in the Ottoman times.[32]
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And to @Melizmatic point, people were pointing out the damage such casual racism did THEN… it’s not a bunch of woke people projecting onto the past. I’m pretty confident that such things as Christie’s racism was discussed at the time in a critical way.
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Wikipedia says:
The modern Turkish name for the city, İstanbul , derives from the Greek phrase eis tin Polin (εἰς τὴν πόλιν), meaning “(in)to the city”.[19][23] This name was used in Turkish alongside Kostantiniyye , the more formal adaptation of the original Constantinople , during the period of Ottoman rule, while western languages mostly continued to refer to the city as Constantinople until the early 20th century. In 1928, the Turkish alphabet was changed from Arabic script to Latin script. After that, as part of the 1920s Turkificationmovement, Turkey started to urge other countries to use Turkish names for Turkish cities, instead of other transliterations to Latin script that had been used in Ottoman times.[24][25][26][27] In time the city came to be known as Istanbul and its variations in most world languages.
still, the novel was published in 1934, and uses Constantinople 3 times, and Istanbul 6 times.
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