Last year I went to my first Renaissance Festival and I loved it. I loved the juggling, firebreathing, jousting, costumes, crafts, and the good-natured fun of the entire scene. To be honest, I was never a huge history buff, but I liked how it was this close to the Fantasy and Swashbuckling stories that formed a large part of my imagination as I grew up. The Princess Bride is still probably my favorite movie of all time. And so, as the geek that I am, I resolved to dress up next year, that’s when I had a problem. Being of Afro-Caribbean descent, it meant that during the time periods portrayed at Ren Faires, my ancestors were likely slaves. Obviously, I was not going to dress up as a slave. It’s possible that my ancestors weren’t slaves, but I couldn’t see where people of African Descent fit into the Ren Faire aesthetic.
From the article below it seems like Steampunkers of Color face the same issue. Here’s a quote.
Nevertheless, his talk about wearing the clothes of the imperialist doesn’t necessarily resolve one of my main issues as a steampunk of colour: if I buy into this aesthetic, what does it say about how I feel towards my own culture? Do I appropriate Victorianism as someone who’s clearly a minority? (Is that possible?) How does my cultural identity play into my steampunk’d sense of fashion?
This is a question that many a steampunk asks, even those who are white and descended from peoples that the Victorians oppressed. How do we take the trappings of the enemy and use it against them without simply assimilating into the imperialist’s culture?
Another major problem with steampunk is that it romanticizes a Victorian era. While the British empire was arguably cosmopolitan (cue the ORLY owl), it was still racist, classist, sexist, and all-round oppressive. The Victorians, busy with industrializing their country, couldn’t even be bothered to care for their own, and their Far East colonies were Oriental, spaces of Other, where they got tea, mined for tin, and imported their fine china from.
The Intersection of Race and Steampunk: Colonialism’s After-Effects & Other Stories, from a Steampunk of Colour’s Perspective [Essay] at Racialicious – the intersection of race and pop culture.
The big picture question is this: How can we make it so that minority children now and of the future, do not feel a conflict between their real life ethnic identity, and the adventure stories they are supposed to identify with?
The small picture question is this: What should I wear to RenFest this year?
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