Love YA Lit
There’s a great new YA site in the blogosphere—check out Em and Nora over at Love YA Lit. Emily and I met at the Hudson Book Festival this past spring, and she was kind enough to interview me in advance of her review of Wish, which will go up next week…
This is an interesting blog that focuses on the history and experiences of black people in Europe. This particular post only includes images of black men (Ignatius Sancho, below), but I’ve already got a novel in mind about African-descended women in London…
Queen Charlotte (below), wife of King George III, is considered by some to be a woman of African descent—which means Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II also have African ancestors. I’m not really invested in the project of tracing our roots to royalty, but also wasn’t impressed by this reporter‘s assessment of the value in claiming black ancestry:
The suggestion that Queen Charlotte was black implies that her granddaughter (Queen Victoria) and her great-great-great-great-granddaughter (Queen Elizabeth II) had African forebears. Perhaps, instead of just being a boring bunch of semi-inbred white stiffs, our royal family becomes much more interesting. Maybe – and this is just a theory – the Windsors would do well to claim their African heritage: it might be a PR coup, one that would strengthen the bonds of our queen’s beloved Commonwealth.
Or would our royal family be threatened if it were shown they had African forebears? “I don’t think so at all. There would be no shame attached to it all,” says the royal historian Hugo Vickers. “The theory does not impress me, but even if it were true, the whole thing would have been so diluted by this stage that it couldn’t matter less to our royal family. It certainly wouldn’t show that they are significantly black.”
What does it mean to be “significantly black”? or, conversely, “insignificantly black”? I’m storing up all these problematic ideas for the novels yet to be written…
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