Finding books from various perspectives

[damned_colonial]

Anyone got tips for finding books from a range of perspectives? Many of the books we've been suggesting so far are by dead white guys (and dead white women). I'd be interested in any tips/ideas/thoughts people have on how to find books from other viewpoints.

rydra_wong suggested the following in comments elsewhere, for finding historical books by people of colour:

http://community.livejournal.com/50books_poc/tag/historical
http://community.livejournal.com/50books_poc/58797.html?thread=161965#t161965

Comments

[damned_colonial]

Yes, but (putting on my stupid hat here) how do we find said native authors?

One way that occurs to me is looking on Wikipedia for a category like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Caribbean_writers and digging around there.

There's a master list of writers by nationality here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Writers_by_nationality

But Wikipedia itself suffers from systemic bias. And those lists don't give us any hints on which ones are writing historical fiction.

[badgerbag]

Here is my fool proof technique. Use the lovely, lovely Internets and extremely biased Wikipedia to find an entry point or two. Then go to a big university library. Find those books. It helps to find htem in dewey decimal and in Library of Congress numbering systems (or whatever other system is in place) Then browse the shelves around that book and you can't fail to find amazing, wonderful, awesome books, hundreds of them. Look for big anthologies. I'm a huge fan of looking for the anthologies from right around 1920 or 1930. They will lead you to works that have dropped from the literary canon and yet are GREAT. I just bet you if I go to the basement of Stanford library (you can get in free to it as a guest easily) and look for Buchi Emcheta and Flora Nwapa I will then find a big range of other interesting novels.

The Palm Wine Drinkard is a great book (and a quick read)

History books are best done the same way because there are some truly horrible and inaccurate and colonialist histories out there. To get a picture you kind of have to triangulate. Anyway, to get a picture of Africa I totally recommend reading Ibn Battuta.

I have to recommend some travellers too though they will be somewhat racist you get a lot of information... read Freya Stark, and also Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa, all very good reads!

[nightmareink]

One could possibly also look for books on Amazon.com by searching for historical fiction and then narrowing down your selection.