Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness by Helen Young
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Necessary and Interesting Book Marred by Poor Editing Helen Young’s Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness (2016) has a lot of accurate, interesting, and necessary things to say. Young addresses a relevant theme (conscious and unconscious traditions of racism in popular fantasy), explores a wide range of texts (including novels and short stories, movies and TV shows, and paper-based games and video games), and writes from the perspective of both creators and audiences. Her book is readable and academic--its seven main chapters averaging about 110 footnotes each. Here is an outline of those chapters. Chapter 1: Founding Fantasy: J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard Anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings and Conan should be aware of the thesis of the chapter, that the foundational worlds of high/epic fantasy and sword and sorcery, Middle-earth and Hyborea, are dominated by Whiteness. Young also exposes the attempts by later writers and fans to explain race in Tolkien and Howard as being typical of an earlier less enlightened era. Chapter 2: Forming Habits: Derivation, Imitation, and Adaptation Explores the continuing habits of Whiteness by the successors to Tolkien and Howard in fiction like Fritz Leiber (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser), Michael Moorcock (Elric), and Robert Jordan (The Eye of the Wheel), comics like Dark Horse’s Conan the Barbarian, and games like Dungeons & Dragons and Age of Conan, with “counter-voices” from Ursula K. Le Guin (A Wizard of Earthsea), Samuel R. Delany (Neveryon), and Charles Saunders (Imaro) . Chapter 3: The Real Middle Ages: Gritty Fantasy Explains how writers like George R. R. Martin (GOT) and gamemakers like Bioware (Dragon Age) have tried to make their pseudo-medieval fantasy more “realistic” and less “escapist” than cleaner Tolkienesque “high” fantasy. Young points out that such gritty popular fantasy is still marked by “habits of Whiteness” and that typical defenses of such Whiteness like “The middle ages didn’t have black people” are inaccurate historically and inapplicable to fantasy worlds with dragons, giants, and white walkers. She argues that Whiteness fantasy fans say that gritty fantasy worlds are only fictional after all (so lighten up you pc fascists!) but also believe them to “represent the Middle Ages as they ‘really were’: full of violence, rape, mud, blood, and White people.” Young also connects the Whiteness of gritty fantasy to the white nationalism of some of its fans. Chapter 4: Orcs and Otherness: Monsters on Page and Screen Examines the depiction of Orcs in post-Tolkien fantasy, demonstrating that they’re usually coded as black and or Native American, even when writers like Mary Gentle (Grunts!) and Terry Pratchett (Unseen Academicals) try to do something new and sympathetic with them. Young explores paper and dice games like Dungeons & Dragons, miniature games like Warhammer, and computer games like World of Warcraft and summarizes a nuanced variation by R. A. Salvatore in his novel The Orc King. Chapter 5: Popular Culture Postcolonialism This chapter looks at popular fantasy and its treatment of (post)colonialism, with detailed examples from David Heath Justice (Way of Thorn and Thunder), Naomi Novik (Temeraire), and J. K. Jemison (Inheritance), explaining why there are so few indigenous writers of fantasy compared to the many White authors who write about indigenous peoples. The chapter argues that while future-oriented sf has often dealt with (post)colonialist themes, fantasy has tended to look back at the pre-colonial middle-ages, though 21st-century fantasy has begun critiquing colonialism and racism. Chapter 6: Relocating Roots: Urban Fantasy Anatomizes race in urban fantasy, which Young calls “sub-urban fantasy” because it often concerns fantastic beings and realms existing right beneath our everyday real world. She analyzes TV shows like Grimm (typical in being European-based and White) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (atypical in featuring three African American main characters) and fiction like Aaronovitch’s River of London books, and introduces the cultural appropriation topic developed in Chapter 7, asserting that the key point is how authors write about different cultures and colors, not the culture and color of the authors. Chapter 7: Breaking Habits and Digital Communication Focuses on the online RaceFail 09 debate between fans and authors like Jay Lake, John Scalzi, and Elizabeth Bear about white authors of SFF writing stereotypical characters of color and engaging in cultural appropriation. It began with a minor backlash against race in Bear’s novel Blood and Iron, which led to a backlash against the backlash, and so on. This chapter is disappointing, because it gives almost no detail about Bear’s depiction of race so that it’s difficult to appreciate the debate. I did like Young’s analysis of an unusual set of texts--online communications in a community of readers and writers. Young’s book should be read and discussed. Although she is balanced in her tone and understands how anti-pc people think, she favors more main characters of color in fantasy more accurately depicted. She points out important things concerning race in American culture, like that at the time her book was written, no writer of color had won a Hugo award for best novel, only two had won a Nebula for best novel, and only a few had won World Fantasy Awards, and that characters of color comprise only 10% of those appearing in television shows but 40% of those in the overall population. She also explains how “Fantasy’s habits of Whiteness” are gradually changing as more writers of color get into the genre. Unfortunately, pervasive typos and grammar errors mar Young’s book, so many that I started noting them down more than Young’s good ideas. There are missing possessive apostrophes (“Saunders world”) and missing articles (“Since early 1970s”), incorrect plural nouns (“as the first three chapters of this books demonstrate”) and incorrect verb forms (“The early editions of D&D show that they are tribal but giving very few details of their way of life”). Many wrong words spelled correctly (e.g., beings not begins, form not from, planned not played, identify not identity, tape not tap). And umpteen comma splices (“Belit thus becomes an emancipator from the evils of history and commerce simultaneously, her physical and symbolic Whiteness is literally a beacon of liberation which emblematizes her superiority over her followers”). Such errors are legion. They excruciated my experience with the book (published by Routledge). People interested in race in popular anglophone fantasy should read Young’s book, and I hope she'll be able to publish a revised edition in future. View all my reviews
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