Would I prefer a "de-racialized" version instead? Actually, maybe I'll get to that in later posts....Some guy apparently wrote his own Little House series, in which Laura, living in Mansfield, takes up the causes of various oppressed peoples, in ways she never actually did in real life.
That sounds like an Anvil Chorus version of historical fiction -- i.e., people from the past are reassuringly just like us! The racists were the bad apples! ...Which, on the one hand, may be the kind of corrective that child-readers need, at a certain stage. But on the other hand, is both crap fiction and crap history and makes me grumble. But on the third hand, most of the techniques one might use to portray an accurate historical perspective, in a way that doesn't approve of it or encourage you to identify with it, are generally difficult for young readers (irony, satire, resistant reading techniques, etc.).
I don't think you could tell the Little House stories without race; erasure is no strategy. But I like to think about it sometimes: rewriting one scene here and another scene there, see what can be salvaged.
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Actually, maybe I'll get to that in later posts....Some guy apparently wrote his own Little House series, in which Laura, living in Mansfield, takes up the causes of various oppressed peoples, in ways she never actually did in real life.
That sounds like an Anvil Chorus version of historical fiction -- i.e., people from the past are reassuringly just like us! The racists were the bad apples! ...Which, on the one hand, may be the kind of corrective that child-readers need, at a certain stage. But on the other hand, is both crap fiction and crap history and makes me grumble. But on the third hand, most of the techniques one might use to portray an accurate historical perspective, in a way that doesn't approve of it or encourage you to identify with it, are generally difficult for young readers (irony, satire, resistant reading techniques, etc.).
I don't think you could tell the Little House stories without race; erasure is no strategy. But I like to think about it sometimes: rewriting one scene here and another scene there, see what can be salvaged.