Reframing the Racism in "The Call of Cthulhu"

Although I have yet to read it in full, it would be very remiss of me to let this go across my radar without linking to it here, on my Cthulu blog. HPL's racism is very much in the limelight in the current debates on his work. This essay, by gamer writer and thinker, Morgue, goes into details of the racist phrases and issues within HPLs great work, the Call of Cthulhu, and disects it, finally asking the question,
"can the racist elements of “The Call of Cthulhu” be challenged and reimagined without doing great violence to the text?"
 Well, can it? I'll avoid the spoilers and just link you to the whole essay on taleturn.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Necronomicon Dissection: Part 6, Purchases

Image
Ok, so there were many reasons for going to a Con like this, but one of them is surely to pick up on products that you can't get elsewhere, or without spending too much on postage. With this in mind, I think I was actually quite restrained in my purchases. First off, I had a list of books to buy at the Chaosium stand (although I did spend my Cult of Chaos credit, and won one of these through the Extra Life Charity event prize draw). I was able to get the following: Pulp Cthulhu Two Headed Serpent Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic Doors To Darkness Dead Light Another tip to the vendors hall led me to find a couple of second hand book stores, who had all the kinds of books you'd want to find at a Con like this, including: H P Lovecraft : The Shadow over Innsmouth and other Stories of Horror, as well as a copy of August Derleth's: The Reminiscences of Solar Pons. The Necronomicon Press stand was there, where I hooked up with a copy of TED Klein's: The ...
Read more

RPG a Day: Day 7

Image
Question 7: What was your most impactful RPG session? Hmm, from which side of the GM screen? I guess I'll answer from both points of view. As a player : There was once a Buffy game played in Edinburgh called The Watch House  (it was only a matter of time before that game came up, no?). There are two sessions that stick in my memory. The first is the one where my character was possessed by his evil ancestor. The second was the breaking of the 4th wall episode, where some of us played our characters, the actors who played our characters in a TV show, and finally, played our versions of the actual players for another character at the table. It sounds confusing, but it was a hell of a lot of fun, and fun is the reason we're at the table. These sessions stuck with me, as they opened doors to my understanding of what you can do at the table, when the other people at the table are in it for the same reasons as you. As a GM/Keeper : Scaring the Players. A Call of Cthulhu ...
Read more