The history wars target Dahomey: The slave-trading nation was not a feminist utopia - "And if the filmmakers had had the courage to tell the true story of Dahomey — a story in which bold, independent African women were sometimes just as cruel and exploitative as the most vicious Portuguese sea-captains — then it might have encouraged their viewers to move beyond the infantile goodies-and-baddies view of imperial history that’s become so common today."
PC fantasy or historically accurate? What World On Fire gets right – and wrong – about war - "Indeed, the contribution of ethnic minorities to the Allied War effort is a mine of drama probably not yet exploited. For example, the first female wireless operator in occupied Paris for Britain’s Special Operations Executive was Noor Inayat Khan, an Indian born in the Kremlin and raised in France. And the fact that she could live undercover in Paris demonstrates how such visible minorities were unremarkable there, as they largely were in cities such as London and Liverpool with global trading routes. And homosexuality had certainly been an accepted part of the Parisian arts scene for generations (hence Oscar Wilde’s self-imposed exile and death in France)."
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