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Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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You’ve mentioned that unreliable narrators are characteristic of African storytelling and myth.
✏️ this is great.. I should use arabic storytelling characteristics as a way to tell new stories (such as the framing device etc.) but turn that into multiple stories overlapping each other somehow (without it turning into cloud atlas)
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But representation doesn’t just mean heroes—it means the whole spectrum. We need the villains as well. It’s true we don’t want the villains as they’ve been in the past, where a Black villain or an Asian villain is just a projection of a white fear. That’s not going to cut it; we’d rather just not have anybody at all. When Faulkner talks about Black people in The Sound and the Fury, he just said, “They endured.” That’s of no use to me. That’s of no use to us. But if we want to show the full range of human experience, it must include the bad. It must include the difficult. That’s what I mean by representation. I want the characters I love, and I also want despicable characters, characters I really can’t stand, characters I have a deeply conflicted relationship to. I want heroes, I want villains, I want victims. I want the whole range. But I also want to believe they’re people, as opposed to types. Otherwise we’re just going to end up with a bunch of one-dimensional villains and magic Negroes.