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A review by petitpoucetreveur
The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas
4.0
A thought-provoking essay on the role that racial difference plays in our fantastically storied imaginations, based on an analysis of YA culture through the case of Rue in the Hunger Games, Gwen in the BBC's Merlin, and Bonnie Bennet in The Vampire's Diaires.
My first observation would be that it reads a bit like an academic paper, there are a lot of theoretical references that sometimes felt a bit like name/concept dropping to me, as I didn't know most of them, except Toni Morisson, Todorov and Paul Ricoeur. The writing style can be a bit intimidating (it was for me, especially in the first chapter, which lays the groundwork for the main theories), so I wouldn't necessarily recommend this book to people who are just starting to read essays. But if you're interested in the subject or curious, please dive in! Because it's rooted in popular culture, it gives us something to hold on to, we're not in terra incognita.
Anyway, the dark fantastic. Ebony E. Thomas explores the representation of the "dark other" in fantasy, pointing out a dissonance between the reader and the representation in books. She explains how darkness and monsters are always racialized, and the monster body is a cultural body, a conscience, and a projection. I'm explaining it really badly, I'm sorry. But it leads her to postulate what she calls The Dark Fantastic Cycle which has 5 stages :
1/spectacle 2/hesitation 3/violence 4/haunting 5/emancipation.
Her book is an illustration of this cycle through various characters. Black people seem to be hard to accept in fantasy settings because it jolts the reader back to reality, but more and more people of color are writing themselves into existence through new stories, but also reading themselves into existence through the stories that are already there, reclaiming characters and storylines. The author talks a lot about the role that fanculture plays in enabling but also stopping this representation through online discussion, transformative and counter-storytelling.
The chapters on HG, TVD, and Merlin were the most enlightening for me; I was less convinced by her remarks on HP (which are kind of disturbing to read because they don't acknowledge everything that's problematic in JKR, since they were written before the whole drama made itself known). I found the "hesitation" and "haunting" phases of the Dark Fantastic cycle to be the most eye-opening.
This review is a mess, but if even a small part of it made you curious, my work here is done.
My first observation would be that it reads a bit like an academic paper, there are a lot of theoretical references that sometimes felt a bit like name/concept dropping to me, as I didn't know most of them, except Toni Morisson, Todorov and Paul Ricoeur. The writing style can be a bit intimidating (it was for me, especially in the first chapter, which lays the groundwork for the main theories), so I wouldn't necessarily recommend this book to people who are just starting to read essays. But if you're interested in the subject or curious, please dive in! Because it's rooted in popular culture, it gives us something to hold on to, we're not in terra incognita.
Anyway, the dark fantastic. Ebony E. Thomas explores the representation of the "dark other" in fantasy, pointing out a dissonance between the reader and the representation in books. She explains how darkness and monsters are always racialized, and the monster body is a cultural body, a conscience, and a projection. I'm explaining it really badly, I'm sorry. But it leads her to postulate what she calls The Dark Fantastic Cycle which has 5 stages :
1/spectacle 2/hesitation 3/violence 4/haunting 5/emancipation.
Her book is an illustration of this cycle through various characters. Black people seem to be hard to accept in fantasy settings because it jolts the reader back to reality, but more and more people of color are writing themselves into existence through new stories, but also reading themselves into existence through the stories that are already there, reclaiming characters and storylines. The author talks a lot about the role that fanculture plays in enabling but also stopping this representation through online discussion, transformative and counter-storytelling.
The chapters on HG, TVD, and Merlin were the most enlightening for me; I was less convinced by her remarks on HP (which are kind of disturbing to read because they don't acknowledge everything that's problematic in JKR, since they were written before the whole drama made itself known). I found the "hesitation" and "haunting" phases of the Dark Fantastic cycle to be the most eye-opening.
This review is a mess, but if even a small part of it made you curious, my work here is done.