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A review by nghia
The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas
2.0
I think I would have enjoyed this more if it catered more towards a popular audience. Instead it feels like Thomas is trying to a lot of intellectual groundwork to make this a foundation for very academic future work. She has no problem writing sentences like
I know what all of that means (though I have no idea who Holloway or Rodriguez are) but...sheesh, talk about writing like an academic. She also name drops a metric ton of references that mean nothing to the casual reader but presumably mean something to a bunch of academics?
In just two sentences she name drops three people. The following sentences add in: Paul Ricouer, Robert J.C. Young, Anne McClintock, Hazel Carby, Michelle Alexander, and Dorothy Roberts. That's just a single page. This kind of thing happens constantly and...I dunno. It somehow gives the paper a feeling of the kind of thing an undergraduate writes with tons of references they expect their professor to pick up to give off a vibe of "I did all the required reading".
Eventually, I got tired of wading through all of this. Especially because I just didn't find anything particularly interesting here. I mean, she's right. You can't really argue with what she writes. But I also feel like I've read a hundred Tweets, blogs, and articles making the same points over the years and I never really felt like Thomas brought a lot more to the table. Do books and media tend to use dark-skinned characters are some exotic Other? Absolutely. Do characters continually get whitewashed in ridiculous ways? Definitely.
It is crazy that some fans of The Hunger Games freaked out when a black actress was cast to play the part of Rue, a black character? (Something that apparently many fans didn't even notice in their readings...) Sure.
Ultimately I guess I just wasn't invested in the massive amount of literary analysis and academic theorizing engages over single instances. The book has 5 chapters and one entire chapter is devoted to Rue from The Hunger Games. It was just...more than I needed, I guess.
Therefore, in the tradition of memoirs by readers of color, such as Karla Holloway’s BookMarks and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, my theorization of the construct of the dark fantastic is autoethnographic as well as phenomenological
I know what all of that means (though I have no idea who Holloway or Rodriguez are) but...sheesh, talk about writing like an academic. She also name drops a metric ton of references that mean nothing to the casual reader but presumably mean something to a bunch of academics?
The first step of the dark fantastic cycle, spectacle, extends beyond the marble halls of the fantastic into the real world. As Daphne Brooks and Qiana Whitted observe, audiences in the West have long marveled at the presence of the Dark Other in genres ranging from theater to comics. Visual difference has fueled the Western fantastic imagination since medieval times, creating what Stuart Hall terms the “spectacle of the Other.”
In just two sentences she name drops three people. The following sentences add in: Paul Ricouer, Robert J.C. Young, Anne McClintock, Hazel Carby, Michelle Alexander, and Dorothy Roberts. That's just a single page. This kind of thing happens constantly and...I dunno. It somehow gives the paper a feeling of the kind of thing an undergraduate writes with tons of references they expect their professor to pick up to give off a vibe of "I did all the required reading".
Eventually, I got tired of wading through all of this. Especially because I just didn't find anything particularly interesting here. I mean, she's right. You can't really argue with what she writes. But I also feel like I've read a hundred Tweets, blogs, and articles making the same points over the years and I never really felt like Thomas brought a lot more to the table. Do books and media tend to use dark-skinned characters are some exotic Other? Absolutely. Do characters continually get whitewashed in ridiculous ways? Definitely.
It is crazy that some fans of The Hunger Games freaked out when a black actress was cast to play the part of Rue, a black character? (Something that apparently many fans didn't even notice in their readings...) Sure.
Ultimately I guess I just wasn't invested in the massive amount of literary analysis and academic theorizing engages over single instances. The book has 5 chapters and one entire chapter is devoted to Rue from The Hunger Games. It was just...more than I needed, I guess.