From the comments – which you’re reading, of course – some rumblings on racially incongruous casting in period dramas.
It began with this item, shared by Aelf, on the BBC’s enthusiasm for over-representing minorities in its dramatic programming, including ahistorically, in period dramas, and to a degree one might consider wildly improbable and therefore distracting.
Regarding which, ComputerLabRat noted,
And yet a BBC production of The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency would likely represent the cast faithfully according to the books, the time and the place, with no qualms at all about whether every possible skin colour and ethnicity was included.
Indeed. The 2008 BBC production of The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency was dutifully observant in terms of racial casting. Which does rather throw into relief the unilateral nature and casual, practised arrogance of the underlying conceit. The urge to insert diversity, in one direction at least, regardless of incongruity.
As seen, for instance, in the pages of British Vogue, where Ms Hanna Flint, “a mixed-race woman, of British and Tunisian heritage,” expressed her dismay that new adaptations of works by Emily Brontë and Jane Austen have “cast the protagonists as white once again.” As if this were some kind of scandal or transgression, for which apologies and recompense were in order.
Presumably on grounds that it is somehow unfair that the Yorkshire moors of the eighteenth century did not entirely resemble twenty-first century London. Where Ms Flint happens to live.
Ms Flint bemoaned the “factory setting of a white perspective” – in tales about white people – and the lack of “historical inclusivity” in adaptations of novels set in rural England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Given the racial demographics of rural England at the time of Brontë and Austen, it isn’t at all clear what historical inclusivity might mean. Indeed, what Ms Flint seems to want sounds more like ahistorical inclusivity.
Ms Flint informed us that she is “left somewhat cold” by period-appropriate pallor. A train of thought that terminated before arriving at the possibility that others, perhaps some larger number, might be left somewhat cold by modish anachronism and jarring racial contrivance. Neither of which seems likely to enhance any suspension of disbelief, which one might think a consideration when making television drama.
As I said at the time:
It is, needless to say, slightly surreal to see supposedly serious productions sharing behind-the-scenes footage, in which we’re invited to admire the craft of the set decorators, production designers, costume designers, etc., and their detailed, punctilious recreations of the period, while the people wearing the costumes and striding about the sets are demographically bizarre. As if we’re not supposed to notice.
It seems to have escaped Ms Flint that, for many, the appeal of period dramas is, as it were, a holiday in time – a brief respite from modernity, its politics and paraphernalia, and perhaps even from those “diverse, multicultural surroundings” that Ms Flint feels should be the foundation of all drama and period-specific programming.
Indeed, this sentiment of retrospective racial correction can be seen in other spheres, including galleries of landscape paintings. You see, depictions of the British countryside from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including those by John Constable, are “leaving very little room for representations of people of colour.” And obviously, even the past must be made “inclusive and representative.” Via the medium of pretentious agonising.
Such that gallery visitors must now be warned, thanks to new and ominous signage, that the sight of a Constable landscape may inspire “nationalist feelings” and, worse, “pride towards a homeland,” which is to say, thoughts of historical attachment, continuity, and belonging – thoughts that may be disconcerting or very much frowned upon. If only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.
Though, again, this ostentatious fretting, and the assumption of inserted diversity as some unassailable good, seems somewhat selective in its direction.
And so, we arrive at the idea, common among racial activists, that a country to which you’ve migrated, or to which your parents migrated, should reorganise its history, its cultural memory, in fanciful and jarring ways in order to accommodate you or your racial proxies. Thereby providing the most contrived and overreaching affirmation. As if that were some totally proper and incontestable thing.
With any whiff of hesitation or demurral, any suggestion of factual or dramatic inaccuracy, being hastily denounced as bigotry and wickedness.
In light of which, I’m trying to imagine upping sticks to, say, South Korea and expecting the locals to make their historical dramas flatter and affirm people who look like me.
It’s… odd. A weird thing to demand.
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