Speculative fiction reflects broader racialized tropes that reifies violence and turns the case

(Dr. Ebony Elizabeth - professor in Literacy, Culture, and International Education at the University of Pennsylvania, “Toward a Theory of the Dark Fantastic: The Role of Racial Difference in Young Adult Speculative Fiction and Media,” Journal of Language and Literacy Education Vol. 14 Issue 1—Spring 2018, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1175839.pdf)

In the West, the mysterious unknowability of darkness in nature was extended to a corresponding fear of unknown and unknowable dark things, including imaginary monsters beyond the boundaries of the known world during medieval times, and, in the modern period, conquered and enslaved people from beyond Europe’s borders. This fear of dark people was written into the United States constitution, denoting for the ages a “threefifths compromise” that at the time of the Founding and well beyond, enslaved African Americans were not fully human. The colloquial term by which people of African descent were often known during pronouns to refer to individuals that correspond with the pronouns that they use to refer to themselves. H Journal of Language and Literacy Education Vol. 14 Issue 1—Spring 2018 3 this late 18th century period—darky—signals that in modern English, darkness has never been just a metaphor. Even in language, darkness is personified, embodied, and most assuredly racialized. My quest to seek the origins of fantastic darkness within history, culture, and society is part of a long intellectual tradition. Critical medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s (1996) frequently cited edited volume Monster Theory is but one of many influential texts that views fantastic beasts, witches, zombies, vampires, dragons, manticores, shades, and the rest of a monstrous menagerie as an analogy for those who are positioned as different in the real world. Cohen’s seven theses of monster culture echoed some of the observations that I began making as I read text after text. Furthermore, Toni Morrison’s (2010) Playing in the Dark provides an even better starting point for locating the Dark Other in the fantastic, especially when many traditional fantasy novels, fairy tales, comics, television shows, and movies seem not to have any discernible characters of color: The situation is aggravated by the tremor that breaks into discourse on race. It is further complicated by the fact that the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference. To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. According to this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse. (pp. 9-10; emphasis in original) In other words, the reason why our culture does not often notice the ways that race, difference, and darkness are hailed in the fantastic is that we have been carefully taught not to notice it. The supposedly raceless terrain of the fantastic thus becomes a means of escape from our raced, embodied existences, even for White readers and viewers. However, enforced invisibility through colormuteness (Pollock, 2004)in the fantastic does not render dark bodies shadowless. Quite the contrary. The shadow cast becomes darker and more ominous still for its very unspeakability. Beyond the magical landscapes of fantasy, stories set in the future and on alien worlds seem to uncannily imagine alien Others subjugating the West in the same way that Europe did to the “rest.” John Rieder (2008) observed in Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction that “scholars largely (though not universally) agree that the period of the most fervid imperialist expansion in the late nineteenth century is also the most crucial period for the emergence of the [science fiction]” (pp. 2-3). Science fiction, fantasy, and fairy tales for children and young adults are not exempt from colonial themes. Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint (2012), quoting José Monleón, find that fantasy emerges from dialectics of reason and unreason that arose with modernity, dividing the world into “us” and “them” (p. 103). In the fantastic, vampires and werewolves, witches and wizards, and seers and shifters often function as recognizable stand-ins for majorities and minorities, and the inevitable conflicts that emerge between and among identity groups. Dark Others cross all of these boundaries—generic, categorical, and rhetorical — as embodied material sites of accumulation and fungibility. In my book manuscript in progress, I focus on textual narratives for young adults that have been turned into television shows and movies. It is one thing to read and imagine a character who is the site of difference; it is quite another to see that character on the small or large screen. Participatory culture also plays a role in this phenomenon. When Morrison asked rhetorically about what happens as we imagine “an Africanist Other,” she might not have foreseen that twenty years later, not only would fans run to social media to share their reactions after finishing a narrative, they would also use the Internet to discuss books and shows during readings and viewings. Thus reader, viewer, and fan responses are being shaped much more collectively than at any time in the recent past. And so is imagination. When people read fantastic texts from the perspective of the monster, not the protagonist, they find themselves in completely different terrain. Thus, rooted in both critical race theory and Afropessimism, the central claim that I am making about the dark fantastic is this: In the AngloAmerican fantastic tradition, the Dark Other is the monstrous Thing that is the root cause of hesitation, spectacle, and violence. The Dark Other is the present-absence that lingers at the edges of every fairy tale. She stalks the shadows of the futurist visions of science fiction, lurks along the margins of the imagined magical pasts of high fantasy, and renders the uchronia of alternate history into a nonsensical cipher. Perhaps what is most chilling is that even when those who are endarkened and Othered dream in the fantastic, the Dark Other is still the obstacle to be overcome. Even in stories where all of the characters are “White and blue-eyed” —recalling Adichie’s (2009) influential talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”—the Dark Other is always already there. When readers who are White, middle class, cisgender, heterosexual, and able-bodied enter the fantastic dream, they can be empowered and afforded a sense of transcendence that may be elusive within the real world. However, this perspective often means that the implicit message that readers, hearers, and viewers of color receive as we read these texts is that we are the villains. We are the horde. We are the enemies. We are the monster. For many readers, viewers, and fans of color, I suspect that at the level of consciousness, to participate in the fantastic is to watch yourself be slain (and justifiably so, as the story recounts). In fairy tales, you terrorized the hapless villagers, kidnapped the fair princess, dared wage war against the dashing hero. You are the jealous darker sister who wishes to steal the fair maiden’s pedestal for yourself. If you are present in the story at all, you are relegated to the margins. To watch a science fiction film is to learn that you have no future; there are only two or three people of color on most fictional spaceships. Very often, when you appear on the page or on the screen, you are a slave, a servant, or a prostitute— even your very body is not your own. If you have words, your speech serves only to support the narrative, never to subvert it. Rarely is the narrative focalized through your eyes. You are rendered abject. Fungible. Socially dead. You are the alien Other. You are the Orc. You are the fell beast. The very presence of the Dark Other in a text of speculative fiction (across genre and mode) creates a profound ontological dilemma. This dilemma is inescapable, for readers and for writers, and must be reconciled. This dilemma is most often resolved by enacting narrative violence against the Dark Other. This dilemma is what the readers and hearers of the fantastic expect, for it mirrors the unending spectacle of violence against the endarkened and the Othered in our own world. The fantastic has need of darkness, for these innocent “stories about stories” require both heroes and villains, fair princesses and evil crones, valiant steeds and nightmarish beasts. The fantastic requires Medusas and Grendels, chimaeras and manticores, cunning tricksters and cowardly fools. It needs the Dark Other as its source of hesitation, the very spectacle that causes the heart to skip in fear. It desires the Dark Other’s violent end in a form of ritual sacrifice, purging the very source of the darkness and righting the wrongs of the world before returning to haunt the happy ending.