The end of the year approaches, and so does the end of Ethnos submissions and our 25 Books project.

This week is your last chance to submit writing on ethnicity and race for our second anniversary issue. We are particularly in need of art submissions!

Also, the 25 Books polls close December 31. So speed-read those last few books on your yearly reading list and get voting.

The Ethnos issue is coming, and we’re still looking for submissions.

We’re looking for writing that navigates the complexities of ethnicity, race, and identity, and are accepting work in the genres of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, criticism, and cross genre, as well as original artwork. Experimental and political work are always welcome. See the site for complete guidelines.

We have extended the submissions period — it now closes DECEMBER 31, so there’s still time to get your work in.

While we always judge your work on its literary merits alone (using a blind submissions process), we are are particularly interested in publishing minority writers, and intended this special anniversary issue to help us get the ball rolling.

Why wait? Send us your stuff!

This is the tenth of a many-part series written by the staff and editors of Fringe Magazine, who will be reviewing books from the Pool as part of the 25 Books Project.

There’s something about reading a book by someone you see on a regular basis—something that makes the book somehow more personal, more complex, more relevant to your own daily life than it would be had it been written by a complete stranger. This is how I felt, at least, when reading Jump at the Sun, the newest novel by Emerson Writer-in-Residence Kim McLarin. With each page, heroine Grace Jefferson’s story seemed entwined with my own.

Except that Grace Jefferson is an affluent, married, African-American mother of two—demographics I know nothing about. Also, though McLarin is a familiar face around Emerson, I have never had her as a professor or really even spoken to her. So why was reading this book such a personal experience? McLarin’s writing is so visceral and her characters so real that we, as readers, are drawn inside the book.

Jump at the Sun tells Grace’s story from her own point of view, with flashbacks woven in throughout telling the stories of her grandmother and mother. As this triumvirate of narratives unfolds, McLarin deftly explores questions of race, marriage, class, and motherhood—questions that span geography and generations.

Though Grace Jefferson is blessed with a beautiful home, healthy children, and a loving husband, she feels like an impostor in her own life. Confronted with her feelings of regret and doubt, she must try to find a happy medium between the two models of motherhood in her life—her mother’s nearly self-destructive degree of devotion to her children and her grandmother’s tendency to cut and run. Grace’s search for answers culminates in a breath-taking climax you won’t soon forget.

Jillian D’Urso is a second-year graduate student in the Publishing and Writing program at Emerson College. In her abundant spare time, she enjoys coffee, The Office, and 90s music.

I’m pleased to announce that submissions for Fringe’s second anniversary theme issue, Ethnos, writing about race and ethnicity, are open from now until December 15, 2007. You can read more about the theme on our submission guidelines page.

We had some hot debate about this theme. At first we couched it as “Racism,” but that seemed too combative and in opposition to last year’s Feminism issue — racism is a problem while feminism is a movement trying to help people. We wanted to read empowering work. The less-slanted theme of “Race” was suggested, but discarded because it seemed American centric. Finally we arrived at “Ethnos,” a Greek word that seemed geographically neutral, but likely to garner us the kind of submissions we want.

I think we discussed the word to be used so extensively, because at the editorial level, we’re predominantly white (with one Chilean), and sensed we were treading on delicate and unfamiliar ground. Early on in our development, we all agreed that the struggles of feminism are linked with the struggle for racial equality. We felt and still feel empathetic to brown writers, many of whom face the same challenges as women writers — the difficulty of early publication when so many niche journals have folded, and institutionalized racism at publishing houses. One acquaintance, a fresh Southeast-Asian-American writer with considerable publication credits is having trouble landing a book deal because of tokenism — there’s another new hot Asian writer of short stories out there, and publishers don’t want two.

But it is problematic that we are, by and large, a white-run publication. We know we will face questions that have no easy answers:

• Is asking the brown community to send us work replaying our racist history? In a certain way, yes — we, the largely white, will be selecting work for publication. We are going to do our best to be open to possible prejudices, to hear and appreciate work that expresses sentiments that may make us uncomfortable. Would it be better for us to do nothing, or to risk being insensitive but try to publish on political issues that are important to us?

• Do we have the right to judge such work? We think we are good aesthetic judges of literature and art. Since no ethnicity has a monopoly on good writing, and we can recognize good writing, we hope this issue will be full of awesome lit.

• Are we ghettoizing writers of color by printing them in a single issue? Good god, we hope not. Our record for publishing writers with a variety of backgrounds is pretty good — take a look through our archives to see (within each archived issue, click on author’s names to read bios and see pictures of them). In the same way that we love feminist submissions at any time of year, so too do we love to read writing by authors of color during any season. We are doing this to celebrate diversity and welcome it into our publication.

• Isn’t it racist to exclude white people from publication? We are not excluding white people. The bottom line is that your writing must be on topic and excellent to be considered for this issue. We have a blind submissions policy for all our issues. This means the writer’s name and contact information is wiped when our readers see it.

Through this issue, we hope we will do what Fringe does best — take risks. We look forward to reading submissions.

As a promotion for the Simpsons Movie, 7-11s around the country have been turned into Kwik-E-Marts. My first thought was “how cool,” but after reading both Angry Asian Man’s and Ultrabrown’s blogs about the promotion, I’m not so sure. Both bloggers think the character of Apu is racist, or at least that the promotion focuses on the racist aspects of his character (Too Sense applauded the Simpsons for complicating Apu’s character, but noted that the Kwik-E-Mart promotion included none of this complexity). One particular objection was that actual desi owners of stores participating in the promotion are having this racist caricature thrown in their faces — they have to dress up in a uniform modeled after Apu’s.

Well, color-me educated! As a clueless white chick, I didn’t realize that many South Asian folks were offended by Apu. For all the other clueless white folks, here’s why Apu is/might be racist(please add reasons I may have missed in the comments):

• He has a poorly done Hindi accent, and is voiced by a white dude. Some have likened this to white dudes who put on blackface for minstral shows. Desidreaming has an interesting post on this — the discussion in the comments is also intriguing.
• His catchphrase, “Thank you, come again” has evidently been used to taunt Indian convenience store workers across America.
• The broken english on the signs in Kwik-E-Mart stores, or for that matter, on the show, is condescending and ignores the fact that many immigrants speak English well. In short, it’s a cheap shot.
• Apu is the stereotype of the hardworking immigrant business owner.

The potential racism of the accent seems self-evident to me, but from reading the various blogs linked above, I’m seeing a subtler line emerge: some Indian folks think Apu is racist, some don’t. Everyone agrees that he represents a stereotype, and it seems to me that there are a lot of racist folks out there who use the Apu stereotype to make racist comments to Indian-Americans. So the question becomes, “Is a stereotype that is sometimes used for racist purposes racist in and of itself?”

In this Advice Goddess blog, Amy Alkon discusses a piece by Christina Hoff Sommers from the Weekly Standard. The Sommers piece beats the old horse, stating that American feminists have blinders on when it comes to helping out women in foreign countries. As the article points out and Alkon foregrounds, it is tempting for American feminists to draw sweeping and inaccurate parallels between the oppression of women in America and the oppression of women in other countries. For example, Eve Ensler compares optional vaginoplasties to female genital mutilation.

My take on this is that yes, American feminists often do have blinders on when it comes to international feminism, but also that engaging in international feminism is more ideologically complicated than it seems for two reasons:

1. Many non-American cultures feel (justly) threatened by globalization. Feminism is often equated with western/white culture. Therefore, adopting feminism can be perceived as abandoning one’s own culture. Many women chose to cling to the old (and often misogynist) ways because it is more important to them to preserve their culture than to gain freedom.

2. Given the above situation, what is a western feminist to do? Let’s say I want to free a community of women from the burka. Let’s say that they do not want to be freed from the burka. I can either a) insult their intelligence (certainly not the goal of feminism) by telling them that they don’t know what they’re doing, or b) accept and validate their choice, which then doesn’t effect any change.

I think there are ways around this seeming impasse:

- One way is to include men in the feminist movement. Check out Women for Women’s awesome report on how they are involving men in feminist struggles. Including men in the discussion helps move along a feminist agenda the same way we did it in the west — by explaining to men why it is to their advantage to educate and allow their women more freedom.

-Another way to get around this impasse is to try to separate misogyny from other aspects of a culture so that cultural concerns do not seem to be competing with feminist ones. In the Weekly Standard article, Sommers quotes Katha Politt:

“The word “terrorism” invokes images of furtive organizations. . . . But there is a different kind of terrorism, one that so pervades our culture that we have learned to live with it as though it were the natural order of things. Its target is females–of all ages, races, and classes. It is the common characteristic of rape, wife battery, incest, pornography, harassment. . . . I call it “sexual terrorism.”

While this parallel is taken too far, I think Politt is attempting to get around the cultural-trumps-feminist dilemma by endeavoring to build up the sisterhood of women. Are there better ways to do this? Oh yes. But that’s another blog

-Finally, we do have the option of calling it like we see it — a culture that oppresses women is no kind of culture. But this seems to be a good way to alienate the folks we are hoping to convince. On the other hand, it may be that multi-perspective feminism has become too inclusive and in doing so has lost the will to aggressively act for change.

I’m not sure when it first hit me: the moment my professor announced that she agreed that Muslim women in the UK should have to remove their veils, or later, when she looked directly at me and told me that postmodernism doesn’t exist—that my American education had essentially mislead me down a path of ignorance. Wait, no—maybe it was Tony Blair’s speech on the need to assimilate if you want to live in Britain. Ah, who can keep count… Regardless, it’s been hard to ignore the fact that perceptions on race and nationalism here in the UK are not nearly as advanced as many would like to believe.

As an American living abroad, I expect to become the effigy at times of all things evil. Bush has managed in the last six years to not only reduce the value of our dollar, but to create a stereotype of Americans that is deeply disturbing. And, to be honest, the anti-Americanism I’ve experienced thus far living in Scotland has not been too bad. They’re subtle things, like the gentleman that heard me speaking to a friend the other day and pointed, courteously enough, saying: “You—back home.” What I don’t expect is to see it in academia. Academia is supposed to be advanced. We’re supposed to be more aware, more socially conscious than the layman; more respectful of other cultures, especially if we are working in the humanities. (The very root of the word suggests cultural openness.) But what I’ve discovered here is the exact opposite. Race is suppressed, pushed to the margins and ignored.

“Is there really such a thing as a month for black people?” one Scottish lad asked me. He thought Philip Roth was taking creative liberties in The Human Stain. “Why are American’s always whining about race?” another one complained, as if all American’s were constantly lying on the couch moaning over their childhood. “Surely, colour is not the first thing someone uses to assess a person,” a nice girl from Essex commented. I have to admit, the knuckles were white and the face red when I listened to these people, whom to this point I had considered friends, rant about the inferiority of Americans. Though I had my say, including pointing out the fact that the only “people of colour” in Glasgow are either Indians or highlanders and so race is simply not an issue that anyone has to address, it was a sad reality that diversity is rather poor here. And as a consequence, any discussions on race are easily pushed to the side and trivialized as belly-aching. In the wake of the Don Imus comments, I have to give the US some props. Though it is a tension, though it is still atrociously an issue in our culture, at least, once in a while, we let it sneak out of the closet and address it. The fact that people reacted to Imus’ idiotic remarks is a positive sign in the wake of immigration changes and Big Brother’s constant hovering.

Kudos to the Washington Post for running a feature on feminist art in last weekend’s outlook section. I found the section to be well rounded — it focused on individual artists, like Judy Chicago, the ghettoization of feminist art, and modern female artists as well as the history of feminist art.

Of course, what section on feminist art would be complete without a new action by the Guerilla Girls? This time around, the girls point out the ABYSMAL representation of women in our nation’s art museums, and in the chat, GG Frida Kahlo points out “The Hirshhorn Collection for example is 85% male, 15% female yet the art work on exhibit right now is 95% male and 5% female. Women artists, under-represented in the collections, are being further edited out of the exhibitions. It’s even worse for artists of color. And these museums are our national museums, supported by our tax dollars. Everyone has the right to complain about it.” The stats for white artists vs. artists of color are even worse.

Want to complain? Here are the contact emails for the museums mentioned in the GG Action:

Hirshorn – hmsginquiries@si.edu
National Gallery of Art – curatorial-records@nga.gov
National Portrait Gallery – NPGExhibitions@si.edu
American Art Museum & Renwick Gallery – HarveyE@saam.si.edu