Lovecraft’s racism is a difficult subject, but one that this article meets head on. When I began reading it I thought, ‘oh here we go, another rant about the old racist’. However, Jeff Grubb makes a lovely point about how we can take Lovecraft’s creation and make it our own. In many ways this has been happening since the early days of ‘mythos fiction’; other authors sharing Lovecraft’s creations for their own stories.
Quote:
In this I and the players have taken it all away from Lovecraft. We have said. “No. This is not solely yours anymore. We recognize your creation, but all like creations, it has gone beyond you.”
http://grubbstreet.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/beyond-mountains-of-bigotry.html
I’d really like to do an episode about Lovecraft’s racism. It definitely informed his writing, both explicitly in The Horror at Red Hook and implicitly in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, for example.
It’s a sensitive subject, and easy to tackle badly, so we’ll have to do some serious preparation.
I agree with pretty much everything from this article. But I’m sure if Lovecraft was alive today he’d have a totally different set of ‘-isms’ such as we all hold.
People and thoughts change over time, and the introduction of new media paints our prespective on the world. I’m drawn to link to this (https://twitter.com/AnaSamways/status/374077529000128512/photo/1) and wonder if these 4 men really represented the beliefs of the time and place (New York in the 50s) or where simply examples of extremist comment.
(I could also go into the changing face of sexuality in the world, and the observations one could now draw from the article I linked to, but I’m sure that could and will change over time as well).
Regards,
Marcus