Read on Twitter
I watched it! It bears mentioning I really like this guy’s videos overall, and I really respect the way he’s handling politics on his Twitter account right now, particularly the way the climate is right now. But I think this video misses the mark on what cultural criticism does. https://twitter.com/muaddibstyle/status/1097494789908508672
Here’s a link to the video:
And here’s a link to the article in question. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/2019/02/08/dunes-paul-atreides-is-the-ultimate-mighty-whitey/
For what it’s worth, here’s a link to the TV Tropes entry for “Mighty Whitey,” and below are what I think are the most relevant excerpts (especially the last one). It’s DUNE! https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MightyWhitey
While the author of The Article is dismissive and snarky about DUNE, I think that calling an analysis of this sort an “attack” is missing the mark. Being able to point to the way a work is like other works or fits into storytelling traditions, or expresses the ideas of its time..
...is not itself a referendum on whether the work is good or bad. It’s just an analysis of the work through a particular lens. To respond to a later point in the video, maybe “not everything is about race,” but race is a valid lens through which to approach analysis.
Especially when the work is explicitly about cultural and religious clashes! Cultural criticism is more or less just looking, neutrally, at the way things fit into other patterns. It’s up to us to decide whether it’s good/bad/fine/forgivable. Lots of classics use tropes!
As such, the video misses the mark in using the backstory of the novel to dispel this list from The Article because, the narrator says, it’s all explained. The fact that Herbert created justifications isn’t relevant, or at least it doesn’t refute the point. It’s part of the point
(Sidenote: I think the novel has a slightly more ambiguous relationship to prophecy than this video claims. Yes, the Missionaria Protectiva exists, but Kynes recognizes Paul as the prophecied messiah before Jessica uses the MP’s groundwork to her advantage.)
(Sidenote 2: As for the BG’s groundwork in creating Paul, he’s the Kwisatz Haderach despite their planning, not because of it. He’s surprised them all by arriving early, due to Jessica’s disobedience, rather than a generation later.)
(Sidenote 3: Going back to the MP, despite it being a “fake” prophecy intended to protect a lost BG...Paul fulfills it. Herbert’s attitude seems to be more “it doesn’t matter if the prophecy is ‘fake’ if it comes true.”)
Anyway when The Article doesn’t literally mean that Paul’s skin color/phenotype grants him abilities. Rather, The Article is proposing that Paul fits into this trope where, for some reason, an otherwise canny culture needs a needs a neophyte outsider in order to win.
Again:
(Another sidenote: the author of The Article uses C3PO as an example of this trope in what I think is a joke. I’d offer the Ewoks are an amalgamation of “indigenous” iconography, and RotJ’s audience would have recognized this as a reference to stories like the other examples.)
Anyway, that Paul is flawed and less than perfectly heroic - and that later novels deal with the fallout of his actions - doesn’t refute this analysis of the novel, either, it just complicates it a little by implying that Frank Herbert had some self awareness.
(Yet another sidenote: I don’t think anything malicious was meant by it, but I don’t think Arabs like being called A-Rabs.)
All of this is to say that I think it’s important and valuable to engage with work and the ideas contains within that work from lots of different angles, and it doesn’t mean you’re attacking or, as the video says, “crap[ping] all over it.” DUNE is an old book.
This is doubly important when we talk about the work we consider culturally important and how it interacts with questions of marginalization.
Please excuse all the typos in this thread - and there are a lot of them wow - but I was writing all this while traveling.
