Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
I originally posted this at the end of the previous page - I'm moving it so it won't get lost.
Keep in mind that the latest update took place in the better-run parts of West Africa, which in turn is one of the richest and most developed parts of the continent. Few secondary students would want to visit universities in war-torn Mauritania, or in the worst-off parts of Central Africa.
That was deliberate in this case: I've shown some of the "other Africa" in the narratives and will discuss more of it in the academic updates, but I wanted to show how the cultures of some of the peaceful middle-income countries (or at least middle-income countries where conflict is mediated through politics and law) had developed.
Anyway, are there any other thoughts on the update? I tried to put a good deal of cultural detail in there.
It's more common than OTL, if only because anti-miscegenation laws have been a dead letter since the 1920s. There's still a lot of social opposition, though: even many white people who are comfortable with civil rights believe that people should marry their own, and the more nationalist black people feel the same way, especially toward white man-black woman pairings. The legacy of the civil rights struggle also casts a shadow: in general, the less bloody the civil rights conflict was in a given area, the more interracial marriages are accepted.
There probably is a class division, although it might go different ways in different places. On the one hand, the black and white upper classes move in the same circles by now; on the other hand, old-line Boston Brahmins or Southern aristocrats would probably want to keep their relationships with rich African-Americans on a strictly business level. Mixed upper-class marriages would be most common in the parts of the country where money is more important than blood.
There might also be a significant number of marriages between working-class families that worked at the same jobs and lived on the same streets. Intermarriage between Christians and Jews in 18th-century London, for instance, was most common among the working class: the social dynamics of 20th-century America are different in obvious ways, but there's something to be said for intermarriage occurring among those who have the most day-to-day contact.
There's still unfinished business from the civil rights era, as we'll see in the next update, but you're correct that race isn't an overriding fault line the way it is IOTL. I'd expect the primary fracture points ITTL to be economic: business-friendly social market versus populism versus social democracy, and environmental conservation versus short-term economic benefit. There will also be cultural fault lines, especially as the consensus of the 1940s-50s erodes and the sexual conservatism that came in with Congo fever is challenged.
Fair enough - which shows all the more than shining cities by the sea have their seamy sides.
Keep in mind that the latest update took place in the better-run parts of West Africa, which in turn is one of the richest and most developed parts of the continent. Few secondary students would want to visit universities in war-torn Mauritania, or in the worst-off parts of Central Africa.
That was deliberate in this case: I've shown some of the "other Africa" in the narratives and will discuss more of it in the academic updates, but I wanted to show how the cultures of some of the peaceful middle-income countries (or at least middle-income countries where conflict is mediated through politics and law) had developed.
Anyway, are there any other thoughts on the update? I tried to put a good deal of cultural detail in there.
It's more common than OTL, if only because anti-miscegenation laws have been a dead letter since the 1920s. There's still a lot of social opposition, though: even many white people who are comfortable with civil rights believe that people should marry their own, and the more nationalist black people feel the same way, especially toward white man-black woman pairings. The legacy of the civil rights struggle also casts a shadow: in general, the less bloody the civil rights conflict was in a given area, the more interracial marriages are accepted.
There probably is a class division, although it might go different ways in different places. On the one hand, the black and white upper classes move in the same circles by now; on the other hand, old-line Boston Brahmins or Southern aristocrats would probably want to keep their relationships with rich African-Americans on a strictly business level. Mixed upper-class marriages would be most common in the parts of the country where money is more important than blood.
There might also be a significant number of marriages between working-class families that worked at the same jobs and lived on the same streets. Intermarriage between Christians and Jews in 18th-century London, for instance, was most common among the working class: the social dynamics of 20th-century America are different in obvious ways, but there's something to be said for intermarriage occurring among those who have the most day-to-day contact.
There's still unfinished business from the civil rights era, as we'll see in the next update, but you're correct that race isn't an overriding fault line the way it is IOTL. I'd expect the primary fracture points ITTL to be economic: business-friendly social market versus populism versus social democracy, and environmental conservation versus short-term economic benefit. There will also be cultural fault lines, especially as the consensus of the 1940s-50s erodes and the sexual conservatism that came in with Congo fever is challenged.
Fair enough - which shows all the more than shining cities by the sea have their seamy sides.
I'm not sure if I'm speaking for everyone, but maybe you're getting less feedback on updates now because we're overwhelmed by the world building - we're so far from the POD now that most of this world seems more dependent on you and its own internal history, that I feel I can't comment properly on plausibility, or talk about personalities, since they are most definitely your creations.
All I can do is marvel at this world you've shown us, at the characters we feel deeply invested in (I really want to find out what happened to the little witch girl in the Congo) and just try and offer you encouragement to continue creating.
Thank you so much for writing this - and curse you for the 3 nights I lost reading this when I first discovered it!
All I can do is marvel at this world you've shown us, at the characters we feel deeply invested in (I really want to find out what happened to the little witch girl in the Congo) and just try and offer you encouragement to continue creating.
Thank you so much for writing this - and curse you for the 3 nights I lost reading this when I first discovered it!
I agree. It's difficult to comment the last update in terms other that enthusiastic praise.
Speaks for me as well
Fair enough, and thanks. I'll admit that's one of the reasons I went from 7-year to 10-year to 15-year cycles and why I plan to do 1970-2000 in a single cycle: that by now everything has taken on a life of its own, and the story is only alternate history (in the strict sense of extrapolating from pre-POD trends) in a very general way. Still, the updates often do lead to discussion of where cultural trends are headed, and the insights that all of you have given over the past three years (!) have shaped the story a great deal. I'm always grateful for these insights - there have been many times when readers have noticed something I didn't, or made suggestions that never occurred to me but which made perfect sense once considered.
Anyway, you obviously have no obligation to say anything, but I always appreciate when you do. Hopefully the US-Canada academic update - including Quebec, civil rights 2.0, the fruits of the post-Congo Fever consensus on sexual morality, and the tumultuous politics of the 1960s, will give everyone something to talk about.
The short-term answer is that Andreas took her home to Kazembe. The long-term answer... well, we may see her again.
Maybe, maybe not. Some aspects of Southern demographics and culture are the same ITTL - for instance, high concentration of African-Americans and residual white supremacist sentiment, - but others have been altered beyond recognition by the South Carolina example, worse but less universal Jim Crow, the early civil rights era, and the absence or early end of one-party Democratic dominance.
In OTL, Census Bureau statistics for 2010 indicate that intermarriage between black and white Americans is most common in the DC metro area, and the individual counties with the highest rate of intermarriage are home to large military bases. I'd say that the factors that make intermarriage more frequent within the military and in the nation's capital would already be in effect in the 1960s ITTL, and that TTL's United States would also have clusters of interracial couples in the large cities and in those parts of the South where the civil rights era was least bloody. Also, the military vector means that much of the intermarriage would be working-class, but the concentration in the capital would also point to intermarriage among middle-class government workers.
What an update!
I have to say, Dakar certainly sounds like it would be high up on the list of "TTL places we'd love to visit". It sounds like the mix of futurism and traditional designs that is present in Timbuktu and Ségou is replaced with a fully modern, or "Futurist" in TTL outlook. A question about the cycles, you mentioned that the next one is likely to be 1970 to 2000. Does this mean that this TL for all intents and purposes stop in TTL's 2000?
I have to say, Dakar certainly sounds like it would be high up on the list of "TTL places we'd love to visit". It sounds like the mix of futurism and traditional designs that is present in Timbuktu and Ségou is replaced with a fully modern, or "Futurist" in TTL outlook. A question about the cycles, you mentioned that the next one is likely to be 1970 to 2000. Does this mean that this TL for all intents and purposes stop in TTL's 2000?
Dakar is the birthplace of African futurism, and has taken modern design to an extreme - too extreme, as far as some people are concerned. It's the city that an African Art Moderne movement would have built, or maybe a scaled-up version of the futurist structures the Italians built in Asmara IOTL - curved lines, lots of glass, heavy emphasis on mass transit and planned commercial and cultural districts.
Ségou has borrowed futurist ideas but on a more human scale - it isn't a high-rise city, and its planned suburbs are low-density and designed to facilitate cooperative living. The architectural style is a cross between classical Niger Valley Islamic and the "desert modern" of the OTL American Southwest.
Timbuktu isn't futurist at all. The old city is very carefully preserved - as in Jerusalem, all new construction has to be of similar style and facade to the existing structures. The new city grew without a master plan until relatively recent times, and a lot of it is ugly, although there are some individually striking buildings and there's currently a movement to bring growth under more control. All this is an artifact of the Tall dynasty viewing cities as a necessary evil, and therefore not paying much attention to planning them; since the inception of parliamentary government, that has started to change.
There will be a final series of updates set in 2015, bringing the story to the present. I haven't entirely decided whether they'll be all narrative or a combination of narratives and embedded academic essays.
I wish I could say something that everyone else hasn't said yet, but nope. Keep being awesome, Jonathan.
Wait a sec, just how developed is the tourist trade ITTL? Are there rich Senegalese exploring the temples of Angkor? Ethiopian titans walking through Kyoto? Angloan families vacationing in Sydney?
Keep being awesome, Jonathan.Wait a sec, just how developed is the tourist trade ITTL? Are there rich Senegalese exploring the temples of Angkor? Ethiopian titans walking through Kyoto? Angloan families vacationing in Sydney?
Just wanted to voice my opinion as well that I love checking here and then to read Mâle's updates. Living in a Senegalese neighborhood in Paris, I'm personally attached to the story at this point I believe.
I'll have to let you know if I'm ever in Paris again. The dibiteries there almost have to be better than the ones on 116th Street.
Most tourism is still regional, but we're getting to the point where middle-class families from developed countries (and upper-middle-class families in developing countries) can take distant vacations. A trip to Sydney wouldn't be the kind of thing that a middle-class Angolan could do every year - more likely, it would be once in a decade if not once in a lifetime - but it's possible in the 1960s in a way that it wouldn't have been thirty years earlier.
The Legatum Humanitatis concept, and the locally-controlled preservation of historic and cultural sites, is also a boost to tourism - and given the more developed state of much of Africa and Asia, the tourist infrastructure there is probably better than at this time IOTL. I'd imagine, for instance, that Great Zimbabwe and Lalibela are already getting a fair amount of traffic, and that Angkor is fully restored, for rich Senegalese families as well as everyone else.
"Here" meaning this thread, or AH.com in general?
But the answer to your question is... some of it. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but a few years ago, I was sure I had no stories left in me, and that the demands of running a law firm had taken away the last ounce of creativity. A trip to Athens and Crete in 2011 made me realize that wasn't so, and since then, I've been learning to look for and find the kind of ideas that I used to imagine came naturally. I like to think that the greater consciousness I've brought to the process has made me a better writer, and that's one of the things that Mariama is learning in the update: thinking about and systematizing poetic inspiration will make her a more mature poet.
Mariama's cultural milieu, on the other hand - including the Belloist notion that every student is an apprentice teacher, and the way the educational system is structured around that maxim - is very different from mine.
US-Canada update by the end of the week. Probably.
So basically, if we were to look at trends WRT this TL's civil rights battles, you'd see higher incidences of intermarriage in South Carolina, Mississippi and Texas (the "good" Southern states regarding Jim Crow here) and/or states with a high military presence? That sounds about right, at least from my perspective (the whole "we're all just shades of the same green/blue/olive-drab/etc." mentality the Armed Forces tends to have), although I'm not entirely sure D.C. will have the same effect in TTL. My reasoning for that is dependent on whether or not we see an explosion in the military-industrial complex (and subsequent Beltway growth, if you get my meaning) without having participated in any world wars. My gut feeling is, while the trend you describe as a whole is probable, D.C. may not be itself a major center of miscegenation without that massive Federal programs and projects beast that WWII and the Cold War/M.A.D. made. Then again, I'm in no way a Washingtonian, so maybe I'm way off here
.
On the gripping hand, the United States has a much more thoroughly developed welfare state, which will require a large amount of staff as per, well, any welfare system IOTL. It's likely that that will still draw a large number of government jobs in the D.C. area, even if many of those programs are primarily state affairs (some federal agency has to overlook the states and make sure they aren't spending their healthcare money on hookers and blow, after all)
TFSmith121
Banned
There's a lot of great world-building in this, Jonathan...
There's a lot of great world-building in this, Jonathan...just familiar enough to be comprehensible, just unfamiliar enough to be rewarding.
Very nicely done.
Best,
There's a lot of great world-building in this, Jonathan...just familiar enough to be comprehensible, just unfamiliar enough to be rewarding.
Very nicely done.
Best,
Kaiphranos
Donor
Some interesting modernist African churches--perhaps some similar buildings might show up in this world? I'm particularly intrigued by the Algerian one that looks like a nuclear power plant's cooling tower...