For Thursday, I again had too much going on to read as much as I have been during the summer. After spending some time doing administrative tasks and reading about 20 pages of Caldeira's City of Walls, I took my husband to have a surgery that he had to schedule for this week. I thought I would be reading in the waiting room, but it turns out that his surgery was a very fast one! That was good news for both of us, but it meant that I didn't get my reading done.
At the end of the day, we decided to re-watch some of Deadwood. I have been thinking about the show since I've been listening to Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries as an audiobook. Despite her setting in Hokitika,New Zealand and Deadwood's 1876 South Dakota, there are many similarities. The time periods are close, the stories center around the brutal capitalist competition over gold mines, expressed as complicated intrigue unfolding in a small prospecting town, filled with smart schemers, city-slicker marks, and a whole range of assistants and opportunists involved in every detail of organizing daily life. In both stories, a seemingly tragic white woman is an opium addict, and in both cases, this woman is generally underestimated by most of the men in the story. The Luminaries develops more non-white characters. Catton's story includes a Maori character named Tea Rau Tawhare, who has some kind of relationship with Crosbie Wells, whose dead body is discovered at the outset of the novel. There are also two Chinese characters, Sook Yoonsheng and Qui Long, who are fully described and involved in the center of the plot. This is a contrast with the one Chinese character in Deadwood.
I'd say that fiction about gold mining towns is a good place to look at similarities in the dynamics, both historical and mythic, of settler-colonial societies across the globe. As I was just discussing with my students the other day, we can call music from Australia and New Zealand country music, even if it's not produced in Nashville.
At the end of the day, we decided to re-watch some of Deadwood. I have been thinking about the show since I've been listening to Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries as an audiobook. Despite her setting in Hokitika,New Zealand and Deadwood's 1876 South Dakota, there are many similarities. The time periods are close, the stories center around the brutal capitalist competition over gold mines, expressed as complicated intrigue unfolding in a small prospecting town, filled with smart schemers, city-slicker marks, and a whole range of assistants and opportunists involved in every detail of organizing daily life. In both stories, a seemingly tragic white woman is an opium addict, and in both cases, this woman is generally underestimated by most of the men in the story. The Luminaries develops more non-white characters. Catton's story includes a Maori character named Tea Rau Tawhare, who has some kind of relationship with Crosbie Wells, whose dead body is discovered at the outset of the novel. There are also two Chinese characters, Sook Yoonsheng and Qui Long, who are fully described and involved in the center of the plot. This is a contrast with the one Chinese character in Deadwood.
I'd say that fiction about gold mining towns is a good place to look at similarities in the dynamics, both historical and mythic, of settler-colonial societies across the globe. As I was just discussing with my students the other day, we can call music from Australia and New Zealand country music, even if it's not produced in Nashville.
nice presentation. keep the boutofboosk fun!
ReplyDeletethanks! I hadn't been able to link music earlier in the week, but that's been my goal with this blog.
Delete