CBR11Bingo – School
So the connection to Bingo here is that when I first got to grad school, I was a TA for a Children’s Lit class that mostly focused on the kinds of writing that Victorian children would have been exposed to in their childhood, when the concept of children’s writing was pretty slim in general. This book is an interesting artifact and an interesting historical text in terms of seeing what kinds of cultural teaching was happening through literature, especially as a time (the late 1880s) when literature was the absolute king of cultural product. But that said, this book is:
Ah! A deeply racist book that greatly explains the fondness of this book to certain people I’ve come across before. This book either invented and greatly played in the field of the English explorer (hunter who murders the shit out of Native peoples) who goes into places he’s not wanted and when the shit gets too heavy, murder his way out. And what is this all about? A bunch of diamonds, a product that has no actually value in the 1800s. Not that diamonds have ever had much of any real value (even as drill bits) and of course a product that had led to millions of lives being destroyed and lost. So at least give Allen Quatermain credit for directly murdering people for diamonds and not just enslaving and destroying their lives to do so. Cut out the middleman and all that.
So presenting this book entirely without irony and it being a direct representation of this drive, and the racist ideology (oh and by the way, he refuses to use the N-word because he “hates that word” cool, because it doesn’t stop you from murdering the crap out of them.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/King-Solomons-Mines-Rider-Haggard/dp/1790211360/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?crid=W5EPACEJRRMN&keywords=king+solomons+mines&qid=1563136657&s=gateway&sprefix=king+solom%2Caps%2C173&sr=8-1-spons&psc=1)