Captain Confederacy

While perusing the web the other day, I came across this fascinating blog. It is an online reprint of a popular but highly (and I mean highly) controversial comic from the late eighties and early nineties, Captain Confederacy. Captain Confederacy tells the story of a world where there was an alternate Civil War, that the South Won. Now, the South is using superheroes to bolster up their propaganda campaigns, with the white superheroes always triumphing over the black ones. Eventually, Captain Confederacy resists, and gets involved in some serious miscegenation action with a black woman. The Southern forces of anti-racism eventually win and establish a more racially inclusive Confederacy.
As you can see, not for the faint of heart, and I can't say there weren't some parts that bothered me a little (and I have a very, very thick skin for such things.). But you got to admire a comic that so recklessly dispenses with both Southern stereotypes of blacks and Northern and minority stereotypes of Southerners. This comic sometimes seems to veer wildly from southern apologetics to daring anti-racist screed, often within the same issue (or even the same page). Whether you think it's racist or not, one thing is quite clear. The writers of Captain Confederacy had real guts, the kind of guts that got Norman Spinrad banned in Germany and Savoy publishers arrested in Britian. I'd rather have that kind of risk-taking than the intellectual conformism of the present, any day.

Category: diversity, multiculturalism

Bring the Jubilee

I am about halfway through one of the best alternative histories I've encountered so far, Bring the Jubilee. The novel portrays an alternate history in which the South won the civil war. Two elements of Bring the Jubilee make it exceptional: One is the philosophizing about time and free will. The novel delightfully explores the differences between predeterminism and free will, exploring the circular nature of time. The second aspect of the novel that makes it exciting is that it shows how a Union loss during the Civil War might have very well ended up creating a new form of slavery in the North using indentured servants. In many ways, Bring the Jubilee anticipates the daring anti-racist critiques of the recent film C.S.A. (itself an alternate history), but in a more science fiction, and less counterfactual manner. Bring the Jubilee also, unlike so much Civil War alternative fiction, does not subscribe to the cult of victimization that engulfs Southern narratives of alternative fiction. It's a great read, and I encourage you all to pick it up. I can't wait to finish it.