Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog

Welcome to February’s installment of Classroom Takeover, a new monthly feature here at Birdbrain(ed)! Every month, a new blogger creates an ideal college class featuring a subject, author, or genre that they think doesn’t get enough attention in mainstream college classes.

This month’s class was created by Clare of The Literary Omnivore. Clare’s one of the most thoughtful and insightful book bloggers I know; she’s always thinking about books on about five different levels, and her class choices reflects that perfectly.

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Intro

Fantasy, as a genre, is perceived as sparklingly white, to the degree that fantasy that is explicitly non-white often gets whitewashed when transferred to the screen—according to this 2007 USA Today article, Neil Gaiman has turned down offers to adapt Anansi Boys to the screen, as studios want to turn the predominantly black cast white (even though that would severely cripple the story). And let’s not forget M. Night Shamalayan’s The Last Airbender or Sci-Fi’s Legend of Earthsea, which did just that with characters of color. (DiMartino and Konietzko will not talk about what happened to their show and you can read Le Guin’s thoughts on the whitewashing of her books here.) Speculative fiction has the power to force us to look at our own beliefs and society, but I think the power of fantasy to examine race is vastly underrated. But to explore that, we must also investigate the evolution of the depiction of people in color in fantasy, stemming from post-Tolkien racism by white authors to modern authors of color creating realistic depictions of people of color in fantasy.

Reading List

The Horse and his Boy, C. S. Lewis
While the racism in The Last Battle is much worse—the dark-skinned Calormene are revealed to be devil-worshippers—there’s so much going in that book (such as the problem of Susan, which could easily derail discussion into gender in fantasy—a worthy topic, of course, but not pertinent to this class), The Horse and his Boy has Aravis, a girl of color, as one of the main characters and spends more time with the Calormene culture, allowing us to see more problematic elements than a novel set entirely in Narnia. Lewis himself considered this book to be about “the calling and conversion of a heathen”—while the heathen he is referring to is most likely the white Shasta, the idea that Calormen is heathen remains. The Horse and his Boy is a good example of racism in fantasy.

Banewreaker, Jacqueline Carey
While the Lewis can be downed in a day, I would probably have the students simply read the pertinent passages from Banewreaker. Carey, in thoroughly deconstructing The Lord of the Rings, also deconstructs race in fantasy by literalizing the Renaissance theory that black skin is charred skin. I think this is a good way to discuss European medieval or Renaissance views towards race and how fantasy, in often being based on medieval or Renaissance Europe, can absorb or leave unquestioned those views.

Magic Under Glass, Jaclyn Dolamore
Magic Under Glass is a young adult novel that follows a woman of color from an India-inspired country operating in a Victorian London-esque setting. I’m awfully fond of colonization being addressed in fantasy, especially from the perspective of the colonized. There’s a moment in Magic Under Glass where Nemira explains to her employer that, in this society, he’ll always be above her. It also addresses exoticification of women of color, as Nemira makes a living trading in on that very concept.

The Gaslight Dogs, Karin Lowachee
The Gaslight Dogs explores colonization more readily, as it was inspired by American relations with Inuit tribes during the American Civil War. While Lowachee turns this on its head, she uses her fantastical setting to explore the ramifications of what happens to people of color treated as brutally as the Native Americans, as well as intertribal interaction, as well as the co-option of Native American and Inuit spirituality by white folk, which was one of my favorite stories in The Gaslight Dogs.

Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman
By my own strict literary taxonomy, Anansi Boys is supernatural fiction rather than fantasy fiction, but Gaiman is beloved by fantasy readers and this book is brilliant, so there… me… In any case, Anansi Boys, in following the adventures of the children of the African spider god Anansi, naturally focuses on black characters—black Britons, African-Americans, and people of Afro-Caribbean descent. But it’s not simply the cast that makes this a good novel to study in terms of race; it’s the depiction of race. Only white characters are tagged racially, and while the characters are obviously of African descent, it’s never pointed out.

Racing the Dark, Alaya Dawn Johnson
Johnson’s universe in Racing the Dark is utterly devoid of white people, hence its selection as the last book for this class. The culture is a blend of ancient Japan and Hawaii, with more Japanese inspiration in the inner islands, where Lana, the main character, is forced to go, as well as a Native American-inspired culture later in the book. Divine beings also complicate the racial spectrum here. While the pace can be slow, I think it’s a good example of non-European based fantasy worldbuilding as a contrast to the huge amount of European-based fantasy worldbuilding in the genre (which is often a conscious or unconscious imitation of Tolkien). An alternative to Racing the Dark could be a showing of an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the aforementioned fantasy series based on Asian and Inuit culture.

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Thanks so much for participating in Classroom Takeover, Clare! It was a pretty freakin’ amazing class, if you ask me. I’ve only read two of the books Clare mentioned, but I definitely want to read the others! How about you lot?

If YOU’D like to create your own class, check out this post here. For previous Classroom Takeovers, check out the Classroom Takeover tag. I’ll probably end up doing a page for all the Takeovers later on?