Thank goodness for Ari over at Reading in Color—and for Ah Yuan at Gal Novelty who was the first in our little community to break this story…remember the LIAR cover controversy? Well the exact same publisher has done the exact same thing—they put a white girl on the cover of a novel about a dark-skinned girl. Head over to Reading in Color and be sure you click on all the links…this is a book I would have judged by its cover, and now the author may be harmed b/c it looks like folks are going to boycott Bloomsbury and this title in particular. I get most of my books from the library anyway, but GRRRR. There’s already been talk of “donor fatigue” around the disaster in Haiti—will the kidlit blogosphere prove just as indifferent? Was the outrage over LIAR’s cover a one-time deal?
To complicate matters, visit the author’s website and this link in particular—maybe Ms. Dolamore’s idea of “dark-skinned” is different than ours…
WTF! As long as I’m breathing, I going to fight. Visited all the links and I’ve blogged.
Thanks.
I checked out the sketches and I agree, I believe Ms. Dolamore and I have different ideas of what it means to be dark skinned. I updated that post, but I’m going to be away from the computer for a good portion of the day. Thank you for blogging about this! I sincerely hope that the outrage over Liar is not a one-time deal, the book blogging world can’t let me down like that =/
Thanks for the heads up, I’ve been away from blogs for about a week but I’m off to check my feedreader for Ari’s post now.
Thank you for posting about this. Just for the record,
A) I am encouraging people to *buy* the book and contact Bloomsbury, not to punish Dolamore for something that was beyond her control;
B) the author has stated she would have preferred a non-white model and hopes one can be used for the paperback.
Weeeeell, about the link to the author’s sketches, I don’t think it’s a sign of the author’s different image “dark-skinned” person. Because she’s drawing in black and white comic form, and to me, a comic-drawn figure is determined by what the creator says about character he or she drew. Just like, how a default smiley face is *not* representative of ANY race, and when people draw ‘racialized’ smileys it makes me want to smack the artist because it would mean that the artist is ASSUMING that a default cartoon (in this case, a smiley) would always equal white and to prove non-whiteness they have to exaggerate stereotyped ‘racial’ features and thereby just making a racist smiley. Er, but now I’m just going on a tangent…….
*shrugs* But then again, my form of comics are strictly manga/manhwa based, so maybe my perceptions are different or something.
LOL I’m flipping back and forth between this post and Ari’s and thought I’d c+p a bit of my reply on Ari’s post because I think it explains how I’m influenced by the black-and-white manga/manhwa style better:
From my experience with manga/manhwa, race is not implicated so much as from the *looks* of the characters but more from what the author shows us through context of the story or clothes or just background information about their cast.
And don’t you know this has turned into rallying around a white woman who needs reassuring she’s not a bad person for not noticing? WTF.
I’m boycotting Bloomsbury. Do I care about the author, yes. Will the practice stop without pain, no. Money talks.
We need to grow a pair and talk with our wallet. You can’t politely wage a protest.
Ok, so someone on the Child_Lit listserv just wrote in to say she spent a considerable amount of time on the author’s blog, and it seems clear the author loves the cover. Again, it’s hard for a first-time author to publicly complain, and elsewhere she *has* stated that the cover should have shown a person of color. I think it’s clear that she’s using “dark-skinned” in a way that’s different from its use in US racial discourse…”dark” is a relative term, so compared to her white characters, Nim is obviously still meant to be a person of color.
[...] Fledgling [...]
Wow–the “scandal” has reached Salon, folks:
http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/feature/2010/01/19/cover_whitewashing/index.html