I got my B.A. in East Asian Studies, so I've been thinking about this issue since I first heard about steampunk. On the one hand, one of the glorious things about steampunk is imagining a past that could have been...for example, we tend to rewrite issues of gender so that women like me are not shut up as their husbands' possessions, but are out building and piloting airships if we so choose. And it is lovely to imagine a world where there had been no colonizing and exoticizing, only mutual respect. But who gets to do that rewriting and how, such that we don't trivialize the terrible things that were done? If you're a white person who is interested in and inspired by asian cultures, is there a respectful way to incorporate that in your steampunk? And if so, how?

At the risk of being flamed to a crisp:

I love riding my rusty Goodwill bike - while my neighbor stays up late studying composite frames and fretting over his max-metabolism cycling diet.

My compost heap happily remains a heap - while I am ridiculed by other gardener friends for not using an open Tanoku matrix. ( http://achewood.com/index.php?date=01312010 )

I appreciate being earnest and conscious in the areas of life where work takes place, but is it possible to take all the fun out of fun by being a little too serious? The can-do (sometimes at the immediate detriment of indigenous populations) attitude of colonial powers gave us all these wonderful historical fragments to riff on. While proven the superior strategic fighting force in the battle of IsandlwanaI, I don't recall reading about a lot of Zulu airships or steam engines. I think this may be how religious fundamentalism begins.