Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

:: Where do, say, the Italians, the Czechs, or indeed gnomicutterance fit in her schema? ::

Thank you. I'm not sure I managed to pull together everything into actual words on the screen last night.

:: but I thought that Thanksgiving served precisely this purpose: not just a myth but a eucharist to boot! ::

Yes! This article about the social history of Thanksgiving as a holiday -- when did it start being celebrated, how did it spread, who was pushing it, why did the school system get so deeply involved -- does a really nice job laying that out. (The article is not nearly so long as those 17 pages of links makes it look: not much text on a page, and a huge chunk of those pages are endnotes.) The article describes an effort to push immigrants from Asia and Eastern and Southern Europe into celebrating a common national mythology.

:: To be fair, we always have had lesbians here in Britain... :

I worded that badly, thank you. Not so much Britain-with-lesbians (because as you point out, of course Britain always had lesbians), as a Britain that is not heteronormative, and which doesn't use sexuality as an identity-construct. Cinderella goes to the ball, leaves with another woman, and no one cares beyond the gossipy "Oh, they've hooked up now? Why does no one ever tell me these things?" This thread and the linked essays might explain better.

As to how it's relevant to Woo's essay, Lo wrote a Cinderella fantasy in which East Asians are just there in fairytale society, and present without any race/ethnicity/nationalism construct that applies to them. They're unremarkably default English like everyone else in the story is unremarkably default English. In Woo's terms (as I understand her), Lo has written a fantasy that is deliberately designed to "close the chasm" between "their origins and Britain", mostly by saying that East Asians were there in the societies of these stories all along, and present in a completely undifferentiated way.