tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14572713625021731742024-03-05T08:27:52.360-08:00Diverse FictionsHelen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-60780994825118821682014-06-16T01:03:00.003-07:002014-06-16T01:05:30.593-07:00Historical authenticity. AgainAfter a longer than usual (even for me) break between posts, I've been inspired to revisit some things I've written about before, on this blog and elsewhere, to talk about racism and historical authenticity. I follow the 'People of Color in European Art History' Tumblr, aka 'medievalpoc' (<a href="http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">here</a>), an excellent, and important, resource which challenges the assumption that everyone who lived in Europe during the Middle Ages was white. A few months ago, someone asked a question on the Tumblr page about whether a<a href="http://www.medievalists.net/2014/01/25/dungeons-but-no-dragons-new-video-game-wants-to-give-a-realistic-portrayal-of-the-middle-ages/" target="_blank"> video game which was making big claims about being historically authentic</a> could realistically include people of "other-then-white descent," and asking for books or academic sources that might give answers. The Tumblr post response in full is <a href="http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/75252294049/hi-ive-been-looking-at-a-kickstarter-for-a" target="_blank">here</a>. In short, it suggests that suggestion that the game <i>could</i> include characters of colour realistically, and a short aside that the makers were not interested in representing either women or racial minorities. When it was posted to Reddit under a dismissive and prejudicial headline, there was an enormous wave of vicious abuse in response, covered, among other places in <i><a href="http://suggestion that the game could include characters of colour, and that the makers were not interested in representing either women or racial minorities. " target="_blank">The Daily Dot</a>.</i> A recent post at the Tumblr site, <a href="http://suggestion that the game could include characters of colour, and that the makers were not interested in representing either women or racial minorities. " target="_blank">here</a>, shows that this includes continuing death threats. <br />
This is the most serious incident of something like this that I'm aware of - but I know of an awful lot more that approach it. The idea that everyone in Europe (including travellers) was white for the entire Middle Ages, and that this (fundamentally incorrect and anachronistic) assumption means that ALL modern re-imaginings of them should thus only have white characters, is an incredibly pervasive one. It crosses over different genre fandoms. I've written about this idea in the <a href="http://ejournals.library.gatech.edu/medievalism/index.php/studies/article/view/11" target="_blank"><i>Year's Work in Medievalism</i></a>, and have a couple of other articles about it forthcoming too. <br />
It's important for us to remember that 'which anachronism in Game of Thrones annoys you most' game can be fun at conferences, but academia is actually a fairly safe space. Looking outside it can show up just how seriously some people take the idea of historical authenticity. Which is, I think, ultimately one of the things that makes articles like the one I posted on a few days ago at the Tales After Tolkien blog important. I don't think that reading it would change the mind of anyone who might make death threats or write abusive comments about the issue, but if we let inaccuracies pass unchallenged, we perpetuate ideas that support them. Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-69167768237852271102013-11-19T15:21:00.003-08:002013-11-19T15:22:12.489-08:00Tales After Tolkien: Medievalism and Genre in the Twenty-First CenturyIt's been an even longer break between posts that usual for me here. This is a very quick one to advertise a collection of essays on genre and medievalism I am editing. Here is the call for papers.<br />
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Contributions
are sought for an edited collection titled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tales
After Tolkien: Medievalism and Genre in the Twenty-First Century</i>. The
collection explores the ways popular genres engage with the history and
literature of the Middle Ages, and with the very idea of ‘the medieval.’ What
are the intersections of medievalism and genre in modern popular culture?</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">The
questions chapters might ask include, but are not limited to: how genre
conventions shape the use of medieval material and vice versa? In what ways do
contemporary social, cultural and political issues intersect with the medieval in
popular genres? How do authors approach the Middle Ages and medieval material? What
is the role of audience expectations and beliefs? Is historical authenticity
important, to whom does it matter, and how is it defined? </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Chapters may
focus on any popular genre, but contributions exploring romance, horror,
mystery, science fiction and historical, westerns, cross-genre works or
comparing genres are especially welcome. They may focus on works in any medium,
e.g. fiction, film, television, graphic novels, and games, or consider multi-
or transmedia medievalisms. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chapters exploring
fan communities, audiences, and adaptations are also welcome. They should focus
on works first published in the twenty-first century, although series which
began before that date could also be considered, as could comparisons of recent
works with earlier publications.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Chapters
will be 6,000 to 7,000 words, including all footnotes, references etc, with
first drafts due 1<sup>st</sup> June 2014, and final versions on 1<sup>st</sup>
October 2014. The volume will be offered to Cambria Press, which has expressed
interest in seeing the manuscript proposal.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">In the first
instance, an abstract of approximately 300 words along with a brief CV should
be sent to <a href="mailto:Helen.young@sydney.edu.au">Helen.young@sydney.edu.au</a>
by 8<sup>th</sup> January, 2014. Any queries may be directed to the same
address. </span></div>
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Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-77104956922236807892013-07-17T23:33:00.001-07:002013-07-17T23:34:28.013-07:00Tales After Tolkien Kalamazoo 2014I'm organising a session for the Tales After Tolkien Society at the Kalamazoo International Conference on Medieval Studies, May 8-11th 2014. Here is the CFP.<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-AU">The
Real Genre Middle Ages</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-AU">How does twenty-first century genre-literature engage with
the history and literature of the Middle Ages? This session invites submissions
which explore genre medievalisms from any angle. How do contemporary social and
cultural trends and concerns intersect with the medieval in genre fiction? Are
shifts within a genre or across genres discernable? How do genre conventions
shape the use of medieval material and vice versa? Do modern works reflect
medieval history or literature? How do authors approach the Middle Ages and
medieval material? What roles do audiences and/or publishers play? How
important the idea the a work reflects historical reality, and to whom does it
matter? What is the role of research? These are just some of the questions
papers might consider.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-AU">Papers addressing works first published in the twenty-first
century, including ongoing series which may have begun earlier, are sought.
They may address individual works or series, the corpus of any author or broad
trends in any popular genre including, but not limited to: fantasy, science
fiction, crime, westerns, children and young adult fiction, horror, historical
fiction and cross-genre works. </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">The session is sponsored by the Tales After
Tolkien Society </span><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="http://www.talesaftertolkien.org/"><span>www.talesaftertolkien.org</span></a></span><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
which supports all scholarly work on medievalism in genre literature. All
submissions should be directed to Dr Helen Young via </span><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="mailto:Helen.young@sydney.edu.au"><span>Helen.young@sydney.edu.au</span></a></span><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> by
31<sup>st</sup> August 2013. They should conform to </span><a href="http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/policies.html"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span>conferencepolicies</span></span></a><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> and be accompanied by a
Participant Information Form, available<a href="http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/"> </a></span><a href="http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span>here,</span></span></a></span>Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-17854286816742287992013-06-10T04:11:00.000-07:002013-06-10T04:11:24.843-07:00The Weekend's Reading<span style="font-family: inherit;">I read some interesting pieces this weekend. The LA Times had <a href="http://herocomplex.latimes.com/books/beyond-game-of-thrones-exploring-diversity-in-speculative-fiction/#/0">'Beyond "Game of Thrones": Exploring diversity in speculative fiction'</a>; the Guardian had a review of <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/06/science-fiction-australian-writers?INTCMP=SRCH">Australian SFF</a> last week, and N/ K. Jemisin's <a href="http://nkjemisin.com/2013/06/continuum-goh-speech/">guest of honour speech from Continuum 9</a> in Melbourne. I'm annoyed that I missed hearing the last of these, being in London not Australia at the moment. </span><div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Guardian piece doesn't sit immediately obviously with the others, although it does talk about how the SFF market is a little more open to Australian - as opposed to British or US authors - than it used to be, which is one kind of diversity. It mainly caught my eye because there has been quite a lot of discussion on the IAFA listserv this weekend about how to decide an author's nationality and if it matters for academic work. My take on the issue is that unless the argument you're making - or question you're asking - is directly to do with nationality, then it's probably either irrelevant or not the best category to be using. And it is central to the argument/question, then you should think - and write - carefully about the ideological implications of using 'nation' as a category are, and about where the labels attached to an authors come from. Who decided that x person - who might be born in one country, raised in another, and having their work published globally - is of y nationality? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Jonathan Strahan, who runs the Coode Street podcast (nominated for a Hugo this year), is quoted in The Guardian article suggesting that Australian SFF is characters who are "<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">alienated from landscapes – they see themselves and the places they come from as being outside the mainstream of events" and the impact of the colonial experience. This is the kind of argument that does make sense out of using nation as a way to group authors together so that you can compare work. The tendency towards alienation from the landscape has been part of non-indigenous Australian culture since colonisation. </span></span></div>
Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-3879111837333925182013-06-05T04:26:00.002-07:002013-06-05T04:30:53.479-07:00Tales After Tolkien Society<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It’s now almost a month since the Kalamazoo IMC, and an
update on what were a couple of excellent ‘Tales After Tolkien’ sessions is
long overdue. Thank you to everyone who was involved – giving papers,
presiding, and turning up to be part of great discussion with the audience
during question time! The panels went so well participants were keen to do it
all again next year, so we’ve formed the ‘Tales After Tolkien Society’ to
sponsor two (proposed) sessions and a round table. I sent off the proposal tot
conference committee last week, so fingers crossed it all goes ahead as
planned.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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The sessions this year were focused around fantasy - with a little bit of science fiction thrown in - but the Society expands on that and is interested in medievalism in all kinds of popular genre fiction: fantasy, sci-fi, horror, westerns, romance, YA, children's, historical writing, crime and cross-genre work as well. The proposed sessions for next year's Kalamazoo will include speculative and non-speculative genres, so watch this space for full details.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">See our website <a href="http://www.talesaftertolkien.org/">www.talesaftertolkien.org</a>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for our mission statement – we have
sights set on more than Kalamazoo 2014! The website exists through the efforts
and generosity of Associate Professor Carol L. Robinson from Kent State
University Trumbull, who was one our presiders and first suggested a society.
There’ll be plenty of cross-posting between TAT and here, but if you’re
interested in being a member and on our mailing list please contact me on <a href="mailto:Helen.young@sydney.edu.au">Helen.young@sydney.edu.au</a></span><o:p></o:p></div>
Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-40643789608574421942013-05-28T04:30:00.000-07:002013-05-28T04:30:08.149-07:00Racist Discourses in Fantasy Fandom
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<br />
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Amid the usual flurry of other things – not least organising
session proposals for the 2014 Kalamazoo IMC – I have been thinking about
inclusion and exclusion and how they work in fandoms. It seems to me that being
a fan is not the same as being part of a fan community, or that at the very
least, being the former doesn’t guarantee membership of any given iteration of
the latter. In <i>Textual Poachers </i>(1992),
Henry Jenkins wrote about the conventions of interpretation common to fan
communities, and those conventions have been shown to be the basis of identity
work within those communities – reading the ‘right’ way means you are in (e.g.
Bury 2005). I’ve been looking at the ways that discourses which exclude people
from fan communities get attached to discussions of race and racism on <i>westeros.org</i>. When threads which raise
problematic issues around race in either George Martin’s novels or HBO’s <i>Game of Thrones</i> are raised, community
members tend to respond by challenging the fandom of the original poster using
discourses that align very closely with those identified by Eduardo
Bonilla-Silva in his <i>Racism Without
Racists</i> (2006). The eurocentricity of the fictional world is justified in a
few main ways (in varying order):</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: -18pt;">1)</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; text-indent: -18pt;"> </span><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">the
personal choices of Martin as the creator of that world – the OP is constructed
as not a real fan for criticising Martin’s choices.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: -18pt;">2)</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; text-indent: -18pt;"> </span><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">the
monochrome Middle Ages argument which says that the works are based on medieval
Europe which was populated by whites and that therefore only a majority white
cast of characters should appear – the OP is not a real fan because s/he is
more concerned with political correctness than the authenticity of the story.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: -18pt;">3)</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; text-indent: -18pt;"> </span><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">dismissed
as unimportant without a reason, or on the basis that it’s made up and not ‘the
real world’ – the OP is pathologized as an over-zealous, ‘rabid’ fan who cares </span><i style="text-indent: -18pt;">too much</i><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: -18pt;">4)</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; text-indent: -18pt;"> </span><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">said
to be non-existent – the OP is constructed as ignorant, or as having not paid
enough attention to the text, and is, in either case, not a real fan because
s/he lacks knowledge.</span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The first and second
fit very closely with Bonilla-Silva’s Abstract Liberalism framework which, he
says, consists
of “using ideas associated with political … [and] economic liberalism in
abstract manners to explain racial matters” (28), “the idea of individual
choice is used to defend whites’ right to live and associate primarily with
whites” (36). This argument is used to justify writing and reading about whites
and cultural heritage – the Middle Ages – which is identified as white. The
second is a clear example the “Anything but Racism’ rhetorical strategy
Bonilla-Silva identifies; history, rather than racism or exclusion, is used to
explain eurocentricity. The third and fourth fit closely with the framework of
Minimization. For Bonilla-Silva this “suggests discrimination is no longer a
central factor affecting minorities’ life chances” (29); on <i>westeros.org</i>, minimization suggests that
the experience of the OP, or any who takes that perspective, is either not
important, or not real. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Westeros.org</i> is far
from the only fan site where this happens – I’ve found very similar patterns in
other fantasy fandoms, especially on forums for games like <i>World of Warcraft</i> and <i>Dragon
Age</i>. I’ve written before about using Bonilla-Silva’s work to explore
RaceFail 09 – a project that’s on the backburner right now but will come to the
front later this year I hope. It’s not that there are no voices challenging
eurocentricity as the default setting in fantasy and the racism that results,
but the arguments are ongoing, and in some places they are being fiercely
resisted. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-left: 24.0pt; text-indent: -24.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-no-proof: yes;">Bonilla-Silva,
Eduardo. 2006. <i>Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the
Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States</i>. 2nd ed. New York:
Rowman & Littlefield.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-left: 24.0pt; text-indent: -24.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-no-proof: yes;">Bury,
R. 2005. <i>Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online</i>. New York:
Peter Lang.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-88646210990976623092013-05-15T12:15:00.003-07:002013-05-15T12:16:37.537-07:00Diverse Game CharactersWhile I catch up the great things that happened at Kalamazoo, <a href="http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1017819/Diverse-Game-Characters-Write-Them">here is a link</a> to a video from GDC of Jill Murray talking about writing diverse characters in games. Some interesting insights into the process of writing race in games.Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-72019621209556472022013-05-03T00:30:00.000-07:002013-05-03T00:31:29.747-07:00Going to the (Kalama)zooIn less than a week I'll be off to the Kalamazoo International Medieval Congress - my second visit. It's been a very busy lead-up in the month between when I got back from my last trip and now. I re-visited a couple of the Middle English romances I worked on in my thesis for an undergraduate course, which was great. Looking at <i>Of Arthour and of Merlin</i> and <i>Guy of Warwick</i> - both in the versions from the Auchinleck MS - was, I think, a challenge for the second-year students who hadn't read a lot of Middle English before, but they seemed very engaged. When I asked a couple who were whispering in the lecture if they had a question, it turned out the two of them were arguing about whether the translations of "hores stren" I'd put in my Powerpoint slide was correct. They were right that it was a loose translation not a literal one on my part. After not doing a lot of teaching last year as I was getting my research project really up and going, it's been great to get back into it. I'm also supervising a PhD project - on Kim Stanley Robinson's <i>Mars</i> trilogy and Frank Herbert's <i>Dune</i> - which is different to Middle English romance, but a lot closer to the research I'm doing now.<br />
<br />
But Kalamazoo is on the horizon now - not quite literally until I'm on the Amtrak next week - but close enough. I'm really looking forward to it. There are the two panels I organised on "Tales After Tolkien," and all the panelists I don't know yet to meet, as well as some medievalism panels, the roundtable I'm in, and the general round of sociability that is Kalamazoo.<br />
<br />
My paper, as they are often wont to do, has developed from what I originally had in mind. Perhaps evolved would be a better word. With some focus on my part, it will still fit the session though. I've been thinking a lot about medievalism, and neomedievalism, and if there are really differences that can be pinned down. And about what 'the Middle Ages' really means, not just to scholars, but in popular culture, and in which sections of popular culture. Is it the same to fans and authors and publishers and game-makers? Or to the different groups within those groups? The obvious answer is no, culture is just not that homogenous. But if that's the case, how can medieval references possibly be so powerful and omnipresent right now? If there aren't some core similarities, certain 'things' (and I really do lack a better word right now) that are common to all invocations of 'the medieval' wherever they occur and whoever uses them, how can those invocations have any meaning? 'The Middle Ages' is like any other linguistic sign - it can have multiple overlapping and sometimes contradictory meanings. But are there constant denotations among the connotations? Or vice versa? My paper at Kalamazoo (8:30am on Sunday morning for anyone attending) will try to answer these questions.<br />
<br />
Medievalism - neo or otherwise - never happens just for its own sake. It's always attached to, or deployed in the service of, some other discourse. My research focuses on racial/ist discourses, but there are multiple, multiple others. Medievalism is so adaptable, and so are the Middle Ages.<br />
<br />Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-29710937032629076252013-03-27T13:25:00.001-07:002013-03-27T13:25:51.684-07:00Medieval and modern racisms
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Right now I am in the middle of the first of two
international conference and research trips I’m taking this year. My first stop
was the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, a great event
down in Orlando, Florida. My paper there worked through some aspects of fan
medievalism and its links to racist and misogynist discourses around ‘Game of
Thrones.’ It was interesting to test it out in a space where there are a lot of
authors and fans, as well as the regular conference crop of academics. I got
some interesting responses – and I use interesting in a genuine,
not-euphemistic way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Popular Culture Association/ American Culture
Association conference is my current stop, in Washington DC this year. It is
huge by my standards – for you medievalists, the book/program is about twice
the size of the one for Kalamazoo. My contribution to this behemoth of
scholarship seems rather small, but is hopefully still a worthwhile one. It’s a
paper that explores exploring how ‘race’ was constructed in Middle English
romance – the popular culture of the Middle Ages – comparing and contrasting
how ‘race’ as a category is represented in contemporary fantasy. The ICFA paper
is about how whiteness is constructed as Self, but the PCA paper is about how
non-whiteness of all kinds is constructed as Other. In the PCA paper I draw on
work that’s been done in the past 10 years or so which challenges the long-held
assumption that the Middle Ages used religion as opposed to race as the most
significant framework to account for human difference. Geraldine Heng’s
“race-religion” construct is, I think, a useful one because it foregrounds the
interconnectedness of biology and culture in medieval thought <span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">(Heng, 2003)</span>. Modern race theory takes
race as a concept based purely on biology. This is a kind of self-fulfilling
prophecy because by this definition, any approach which considers the concept
to have any other dimension is not talking about race at all. Therefore, race
is a feature of modernity, but one which can now be left behind because science
has demonstrated that there is in fact no biological, genetic, empirical basis
for it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">But race is no less real to people’s experience of the world
because it is a social construct dependent on thoughts, actions, experiences
and ideologies rather than biology. Medieval formations, Heng argues,
overlapped race, religion, and nationality significantly; my paper argues that
this is happening in contemporary times as well. It looks at how the ways orcs –
conventionally a racialised Other – are constructed in fantasy from the past
decade or so. Tolkien thought about where orcs came from, their culture, why
they served evil and a lot more, but he didn’t write about it much in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord of the Rings</i>. The various
imitations of them – the faceless hordes of evil’s footsoldiers – that featured
in genre fantasy for decades, and still sometimes do, are monsters onto which
social fears and racial hatreds were mapped. Although books like Stan Nicholl’s
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Orcs </i>trilogy and Terry Pratchett’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Unseen Academicals</i> challenge many of the
conventions significantly, they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">don’t</i>
explore orc culture in any depth at all. Games are more likely to do so, eg <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">World of Warcraft</i> and the like, but they
still, as Tanner Higgin and Jessica Langer have shown, deploy biological
constructs of race <span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">(Higgin, 2009; Langer, 2008)</span>. Even a recent game, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Of Orcs and Men</i>, which castes orcs as
the good guys, a forest-dwelling indigenous-type people resisting the evil
human empire <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>thinly disguised as the
capitalist West does the same. My paper argues that works like these use a
formation in which culture and biology overlap in ways that are very similar to
those identified by Heng in her race-religion construct. I suggest that looking
to broader definitions of race than just the now discredited race-as-biology
formation constructed by Enlightenment pseudo-science will help us understand
some of the dynamics of modern Western society better. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-left: 24pt; text-indent: -24pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-no-proof: yes;">Heng, G. (2003). <i>Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the
Politics of Cultural Fantasy</i>. New York: Columbia University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-left: 24pt; text-indent: -24pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-no-proof: yes;">Higgin,
T. (2009). Blackless Fantasy. <i>Games and Culture</i>, <i>4</i>(1), 3–26.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-left: 24pt; text-indent: -24pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-no-proof: yes;">Langer,
J. (2008). The Familiar and the Foreign: Playing (Post) Colonialism in World of
Warcraft. In H. G. Corneliussen & J. W. Rettberg (Eds.), <i>Digital
Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader</i> (pp. 87–108).
London: MIT Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<o:p> </o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<o:p> </o:p></div>
Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-26770386227730571702013-03-05T17:50:00.002-08:002013-03-05T17:51:42.639-08:00TV interviewHere is the link to the TV interview I mentioned in my last post: <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/tv/goodgame/stories/s3703899.htm">"Racial Representation in Games"</a> It was on Australian TV so may not work for anyone who's international.Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-81618959169634511812013-03-02T17:25:00.000-08:002013-03-02T17:25:19.852-08:00Busy but absentIt's almost three months since I've posted here, which is FAR longer than I'd planned to be away. In my own defense, I haven't just been lying in a hammock the whole time. Among other things, I've been watching the Oscars, and writing about it. This piece on <a href="http://theconversation.edu.au/quvenzhan-wallis-race-and-misogyny-at-the-oscars-12474">Quvenzhané Wallis, misogyny, and racism in Hollywood</a> got quite a few people who rad it worked up, but that's part of the territory, and part of the point. I'll also be making my TV debut this week on the ABC (in Australia) as a talking head in a segment of racist stereotypes in video games on their <i>Good Game</i> program (link to follow when it's up).<br />
Besides being good for my ego and (I hope) my career, doing these kinds of media things is important because they challenge people. Race and racism are topics that lots of people find really difficult and confronting to talk about, and if the comments on the piece I linked to above are anything to go by, some people don't always want me to talk about them either. But as academics we have a responsibility to engage with the world outside the pages of scholarly journals. Researching pipular culture means I have a responsibility to be part of it too. Which is one reason I am planning to post here more requently than I have been!Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-2753121255223182242012-12-11T14:36:00.000-08:002012-12-11T14:36:04.562-08:00Publication plansLast week I was at the Cultural Studies Association of Australia annual conference, which is conveniently on my home campus in Sydney. As far as I can remember, it was the first time I've been to a conference on my own campus in ten years of tertiary studies and work. I gave a paper about RaceFail 09, using Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's schemas from <i>Racism without Racists</i> to explore the dynamics of the blog posts and comments on them.<br />
This week I've gone back to a conference paper I gave a few months ago to try to turn it into an article for publication. I went to a couple of research planning days given by my school earlier this year, and one of the things they talked about was how important it is to get the most out of each piece of work/writing you do. I realised that only one of my publications (articles and chapters) began life as a conference paper. I'm not sure how many conferences I've been to over the years but it's more than 20, and possibly more than 30. Even if I'd only converted 1 in 5 of those into a publication I'd had a much stronger track record. I like to think what I have is OK, but more wouldn't hurt.<br />
There have been three main topics I've given paper on this year: representation of orcs/monsters (this includes my Shakespearean digression); the idea of an authentic Middle Ages in online discussions of fantasy racism; and the Racefail dynamics I mentioned before. The last one is still too nascent to be ready to write up properly, and may turn out to be a chapter in the book I'm planning, but I aim to have the other two sent off as articles by February (which is when my next conference is). I'm in a position at the moment where I don't have a lot of deadlines imposed on me from outside, so this is, in part at least, a challenge to myself. I've called life as a full-time researcher 'living the dream' before, and for me it really is.But I still have to make sure it heads in the right direction.Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-50159492376587779092012-12-02T02:50:00.000-08:002012-12-02T02:50:23.956-08:00Radio guest spotLast week I was part a radio show called "Common Knowledge" on the ABC's Radio National. It's about popular culture, and we talked about Tolkien and <i>The Hobbit</i> movie, and Tolkien's influence on fantasy. The podcast can be downloaded here: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/commonknowledge/<br />
It's the show titled 'Soft Power and Tolkien's World,' and I'm on in the second part.Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-65370644390908447712012-11-26T03:58:00.001-08:002012-11-26T03:58:18.192-08:00A post/human digression
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This week is another departure for me – and one that’s
related to what I posted about at the end of September. Tomorrow I am going to
the ANZ Shakespeare Association conference in Perth, WA – it’s themed
Shakespeare and Emotions. The paper I’m giving argues that Caliban offers an
emotional template for the kind of monster used to work out/on post/human
anxieties in fantasy. I compare Caliban with Spike from <i>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</i> (the truth may be that I really wanted to
write a paper about the musical episode from <i>Buffy</i>). It’s not about the singing episode – although that would
make for a very interesting paper at an emotions conference, one which I still
hope to write. I talk about Spike’s emotions – and Caliban’s of course – as indicative
of humanity. A monster that feels the right things stops being a monster and
becomes more and more human the more it feels. Caliban mostly feels anger, and
fear, but he also has that beautiful speech about the “thousand twangling
instruments.” Can he be a monster (he’s called one more than 40 times in <i>The Tempest</i>, although never by Prospero)
when he cries to dream again? Spike’s equivalent speech might be the one about
people “walking around like billions of happy meals with legs” but the
sentiment is, literally, the same: it’s love. Love for another person isn’t the
point, although Spike of course feels that, it’s the feeling that matters not
who inspires it, or what. The core of humanity in these texts is the ability to
feel love.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Many fantasy texts work through post/human anxieties with this type of approach. I've also been thinking about the ways the dragons in Robin Hobb's <i>Rain Wilds Chronicles</i> slowly develop character and a particular kind of emotion. Science Fiction gets a most of the attention with its robots and cyborgs and hyper-ration Dr Spock and the rest, but fantasy offers a different perspective, one without that obvious overlay of technology. It engages with anxieties that existed long before modern technology made us worry about genetic manipulation and biotechnology and cybernetics and... and... and... I think what really interests me, and what is perhaps important to my bigger project as well as this paper, is that all the monsters which have become more humanised in fantasy over the past decade or more - vampires, orcs, werewolves etc - get closer to humanity, less threatening, when they are given not just agency or a backstory or a voice, but the right kind of feelings, love in particular.</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-46132252060983489432012-11-21T20:07:00.000-08:002012-11-21T20:07:01.295-08:00More Thoughts on Genre
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With some interruptions, I’ve been working more on the
conference paper I was putting together last week. Really what it’s about is
the dynamics of Racefail 09 and many of the other debates around race that I’ve
been working on this year. I see them as contests over the genre – and as
reflecting similar situations in culture and society more broadly. Fantasy has
a bad reputation for being racist. Like any generalisation that ignores the
diversity of the texts and people who are part of the genre, but it also hasn’t
come from nowhere. The World Fantasy Awards were announced recently. For the
second year in a row the award for best novel went to an author who wasn’t a
white man from the USA or UK: Lavie Tidhar, who is Israeli-born won for his
novel <i>Osama</i>. Last year it went to
Nnedi Okorafor, an American woman with Nigerian heritage, for <i>Who Fears Death. </i>The awards started in
1975 and have gone to white Anglophones 32 times by my count (I’m basing this
on online photos and biographies of the winners so my sincere apologies if I’ve
miscounted or misrepresented anyone – please let me know so I can correct this if I
have). 26 times they were white Anglophone men. Patrick Suskind, born in
Germany, won for <i>Perfume</i> in 1987, and
Japanese author Haruki Murakami won in 2006 for <i>Kafka on the Shore</i>. I wonder if it’s significant that neither of
those works was marketed as fantasy or would ever have graced the shelves of
the fantasy/sci-fi section of a bookshop? <o:p></o:p></div>
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Fantasy texts, authors, publishers, marketers, critics,
awards and audiences have a habit of whiteness (and I can’t exclude myself from
that as my photo attests). It’s a habit that’s being broken more often in
recent years than it was for a long time. Racefail 09 seems to me something
like an intervention; habits can be addictions as well as traditions. The
argument, the contest, is as much about defending long-held positions of
privilege as much as anything else – sometimes by flat-out denying that they
exist. That privilege is multi-dimensional, it’s not just about race or
ethnicity or diversity (or lack of it). I’m suspicious of generalised claims
that the internet has changed everything by making culture participatory, but
it’s certainly added new dimensions to occurences like Racefail. Authors, editors,
and publishes have historical been somewhat insulated from audience reactions,
but blogs and fan forums and the rest change all that. The voices of
intervention aren’t so easily marginalised or ignored. It’s time for fantasy
studies to catch up with contemporary thinking on genre and recognise that ‘fantasy’
isn’t just a set of texts to be read and interpreted, but is also cultural
systems, groups, individuals and their interactions.<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-17679954790688145612012-11-14T20:13:00.001-08:002012-11-14T20:14:27.960-08:00Thinking About Genre<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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I’m currently working on a paper for the Cultural Studies
Association of Australasia conference at the University of Sydney in early
December. It’s partly an attempt to solidify, and articulate, some of the ways
I’ve been thinking about fantasy as a genre in this project. Being from a
literary studies background means I come to it from a perspective which depends
very heavily on texts, and on critical theory about them. This is problematic –
it’s widely acknowledged that fantasy is more tricky than most genres to define
this way. Or at least that critics have struggled to do so, which isn’t necessarily
the same thing. Right from the beginning of this project I knew that just doing
textual analysis wasn’t going to be sufficient to really understand all the
different ways in which race and fantasy intersect – I’ve always planned to
talk to authors and fans and have spent a lot of time this year reading blog
posts, fan forums etc. </div>
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Reading and thinking around fan studies has been useful for
me lately. Even if fantasy fans haven’t been the subject of a major work (yet, it’s
in my head for when the current project ends), science fiction fans have always
been a significant topic. I’m thinking of Celia Bacon-Smith and John Tulloch
here, although there are plenty of others. What I’m finding most helpful at the
moment though, is work on popular music genres. Jason Toynbee’s term ‘genre-culture,’
from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Making Popular Music</i> (2000)
offers a framework for thinking about genre as a process that is socially
constructed, not a fixed category. Studies of popular music also tend to take
into account or at least acknowledge the role played by marketing and
publishers, as well as fans and artists. Literary critics of fantasy – even those
who defend it – tend to make derisive comments about boy wizards and vampires
and have little else to say about the mass-market side of things. And as Steven
Erikson pointed out in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York
Review of Science Fiction</i> earlier this year, scholars have a tendency to
fixate on Tolkien, but there’s far more to the genre, even to genre fiction,
than that. It seems likely to me that a disjunction between critical engagement
and what’s actually being written and read, is one reason it’s so difficult to taxonomies
fantasy. Form and content necessarily depend on what is written, published and
read, particularly in a genre that is as popular as fantasy at the moment.</div>
Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-24541635316780925702012-10-21T10:06:00.002-07:002012-11-14T20:13:50.453-08:00Worth the Trip<br />
For the past two days I've been at the International Society for Studies in Medievalism conference in Canton, Ohio. By the time I get home I will have spent more time in transit between here and Sydney than I was actually at the conference, but I feel like it was worthy the trip. I've had a habit of jut missing major conferences that are themed perfectly for my work - and were important to it. I began my Phd on postcolonialism in Middle English romance a year or two late to go to a conference here in the USA on postcolonialism in the Middle Ages. The 2010 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts was themed Race and Fantasy, and was just at the start of my thinking about my current project, before I'd put in my first funding application, let alone had the second succeed. The conference I've just been at was themed Medievalism(s) and Diversity. It would have been hard to come up with a theme that worked better with what I've been doing this year.<br />
I gave a paper titled " 'Yo! It's the Middle Ages': Talking about Race in the Fantasy Genre." I looked at the ways fantasy fans claim that the 'real' Middle Ages (European of course) were exclusively white: no diversity (racial or any other kind) allowed. It's not a completely new theme for my work obviously, although in this paper I looked mainly at various thread on the Bioware Social Network. Dragon Age is an interesting example because the game has been both criticised for not having enough diversity, and praised for its inclusiveness and attempts to address themes around prejudice. If Bioware aimed to please everyone they failed (surprise), but they did get people talking (and flaming each other) about diversity - in terms of gender and sexuality as well as race - as well as privilege and the assumptions both players and the wider community make about fantasy RPGs and the their fans.<br />
There were some really interesting parallels between what I was talking about and another paper in my session: Elizabeth Emery from Montclair State University speaking on 'Goblets, Tankards and the Green Fairy: Inclusion and Exclusion in the "Medieval" Cabarets of Belle Époque Paris.' Both then and now, the 'real' Middle Ages were constructed to suit the needs and desires of particular contemporary groups, in ways that often had little if anything to do with historical fact. The 'medieval' has been more about feeling than fact for centuries apparently.<br />
I've come away from the conference with at least four different ideas for research and publication that I didn't have when I got here, which is the other reason it's been worth the trip. I'm just about to leave for the first flight in my journey home, oping I can remember any, or even all of them, by the time I get there.Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-78629125596745115222012-10-03T22:47:00.000-07:002012-10-03T22:47:03.947-07:00Medievalism and Colonialism Revisited
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In the past few days I’ve been revisiting a topic I’ve
written on before: the connections – or lack of them – between medievalism and
colonialism in fantasy. I’d originally thought it was a negative correlation,
that works which explore and critique processes and practices of colonialism
don’t, for various reasons, do it in conventionally medievalist settings. I’m
giving a paper next week at <a href="http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/study/english/research-seminars">Melbourne University<b> </b></a>and it’s made me rethinking this. In the paper I’m talking (briefly) about
5 works/ groups of work which have colonialism and its legacies as a theme:
Terry Pratchett’s <i>Nation</i>; Robin
Hobb’s <i>Soldier Son</i> trilogy; Naomi
Novik’s <i>Temeraire </i>series (having
grown up loving C. S. Forester and Anne McCaffrey I love this amalgam of the
two); N. K. Jemisin’s <i>Inheritance</i>
trilogy, and the <i>Dragon Age</i> game
franchise (I read the narrative of elven slavery to humanity as distinctly
linked to colonialism).<o:p></o:p></div>
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The first three are all set in analogues of the nineteenth
century; Pratchett and Novik use Alternate Worlds and Hobb a secondary world
that is very clearly and deliberately inspired by the heyday of European
imperialism. Sailing ships and guns are the forefront of technology in these
worlds, not swords and castles. All three engage with colonialism (I’m using
this a an umbrella term, the details in each vary) as it’s happening, in the
narrative present. The other two use pre-industrial worlds. <i>Dragon Age</i> has a reasonably conventional
fantasy setting: ‘Europe in the Middle Ages’, while Jemisin’s is distinctly
non-European and is more a fall of empire and the aftermath thereof than the
conventional fantasy ‘epic struggle against evil.’ Both of these works are
interested in the long-term social and cultural impacts of colonisation, and in
both the actual process happened long ago. Even with pre-industrial settings,
and a medievalist one at that, colonialism still can’t happen in the Middle
Ages.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I think there’s more than one reason for this. For a start
authors (and I include game-makers here) who are interested in social justice
and critiquing European colonialism in any form are also, I’d suggest, more
likely than others to shy away from cookie-cutter ‘sort of the Middle Ages’
settings – or not be drawn to them in the first place. Critiquing colonialism,
or history at all, isn’t that common in a genre known for its nostalgic
tendencies, and perhaps breaking one convention is connected to breaking
others. But there’s more to it than that, and it goes back to something else
I’ve written about before: the influence of Alternate History.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So far as I can tell there is, quite simply, no Alternate
History story where the nexus event which changes the path of history happens
before Columbus’ arrival in America in 1492. This implies <span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">that the Middle Ages are too far back, too different to today, for
any change in the past to alter our present. The texts I’m talking about here
are trying to imagine, or at the least imply, a more just future for their
worlds, but the Middle Ages – fantastical or not – are too far removed for that
implication to carry weight, so setting inspired by the more recent past are
needed. This works for the pre-industrial settings as well. Both reference
empires fallen from former glories, and the temptation is to read these are
referring to the Roman Empire because of the pre-industrial present of the narratives.
Both can just as easily invoke the British Empire, and the ways that both
engage with contemporary issues stemming from that aspect of history suggests
that they do. </span><b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-38758210356921197482012-09-23T18:32:00.001-07:002012-10-03T22:47:26.300-07:00A slight departureI haven't blogged here much lately, but I'm not completely absent from the internet. Today I have a guest post <a href="http://performinghumanity.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/caliban-on-the-edge-of-humanity/">"Caliban: On the Edge of Humanity"</a> appearing at 'Performing Humanity,' an Early Modern blog. The post is about the humanity - or otherwise - of Caliban in <i>The Tempest</i> and the ways Shakespeare is influenced by medieval material. It's a departure from my usual time-periods, but is part of what I've been thinking about for a conference paper I'm giving at a conference on Shakespeare and Emotions in a couple of months. That paper will look at Caliban as an emotional model for hybrid figures in modern fantasy, not just in works that reference him explicitly like Tad William's <i>Caliban</i>, but more broadly. Hybrids are a staple of all kinds of fantasy - from Elrond Half-Elven in <i>Lord of the Rings</i> on - and Caliban with his combination of rage, fear, and love for his island with its "noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not" (<i>The Tempest</i>, III, 2, 148-9) is an literary antecedent for many of them.Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-91335156092945034602012-08-23T22:02:00.000-07:002012-08-23T22:02:11.319-07:00Game of Thrones, Authenticity, and Mass-Production
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Today I’ve been trying to write an abstract for a roundtable
on <i>Game of Thrones </i>at a conference
next year. It’s about the idea of authenticity, something I’ve written about
before, but a topic which gets bigger and bigger every time I do. Fantasy is
obviously not authentic in some ways – the whole point is that it’s <i>not</i> this world, or its history – and
scholars of medievalism often aren’t interested in it for that reason. But
consumers are, and producers are. It’s struck me that there are multiple layers
of authenticity surrounding the novels in <i>A
Song of Ice and Fire</i>, and the TV spin-off and all the other franchise
material as well. Most of them are interconnected, and most of them have
something to do with ‘the medieval’ if not the Middle Ages. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The writing process is constructed as authentic in contrast
– or challenge – to the mass-market habits of a lot of genre fiction. George
Martin writes at his own pace, sometimes to the incredible frustration of fans
and no doubt his publishers, so the story seems to be told organically, rather
than simply being churned out for the sake of best-seller after best-seller,
all timed for release just before the Christmas sales rush or the
summer-reading lists. Even the massive sales are constructed, at least in their
origin story, as non-commercial. I’ve read a few different versions about how
Martin struggled to find a publisher, how it the first novel was sold by
independent bookshops and gained popularity by word-of-mouth. All of this
creates an aura of authenticity in a world where big business drives consumer
decisions about what is good, what is read, what is in.<o:p></o:p></div>
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None of this is immediately obviously connected to the
Middle Ages, however, I think the fact that the books – and their spin-offs –
are so closely linked to the pre-modern era is important. Whatever its origins
were, the whole franchise is now a substantial part of popular, mass-produced
modern contemporary culture. And in that culture, there is value in appearing
to be outside it. Just think of all the ‘artisan bakeries’ and ‘traditional <i>insert foodstuff here</i>’; as a culture we
are soaked in the constructed, the mass-produced, so we value things we think - or are told - are real, authentic. We’re prepared to pay more for them, but they also have
symbolic meaning to us, and we often use them to create out own identities,
whether it’s being the person who buys the artisan sourdough not the packet
white bread form the supermarket, or whether it’s being a ‘real’ fan of a ‘real’
TV show. The medieval aura of <i>Game of
Thrones</i> adds another dimension to those kinds of tendencies because the
Middle Ages were by definition pre-modern, and therefore pre-mass-production.<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-65506871575196354712012-08-12T20:56:00.002-07:002012-08-12T20:58:54.732-07:00Tales After Tolkien updateA quick update on the session I'm organising for next year's International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. Professor Carol L. Robinson from Kent State University will be moderating. I've also extended the deadline for abstracts etc to 10th September to give people a little extra time.<br />
My email was given incorrectly on the original listing on the conference website - the '.au' was missing from the end. It's now been fixed there, but just in case, the correct address is: helen.young@sydney.edu.au<br />
<br />
Here are the full details:<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>[UPDATE] Tales After Tolkien: Medievalism and Twenty-First Century Fantasy
Literature, Extension of deadline.</b><br />
<h1>
<o:p></o:p></h1>
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<b>Panel at the International
Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo. May 9-12, 2013 </b><a href="http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/"><b>http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/</b></a><b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Organizer: Helen
Young<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Moderator: Carol L.
Robinson<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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For a work of contemporary fantasy literature to be compared
with those of J. R. R. Tolkien can be either compliment or condemnation; the
juxtaposition might suggest a major, original contribution to the genre or
imply a work is merely derivative. Yet if Tolkien had one of the first words on
fantasy and medievalism he did not have the last. Author Steven Erikson
recently described himself and other writers of epic fantasy as “post-Tolkien”
in <i>The New York Review of Science Fiction
</i>and lamented the tendency of some scholars to not realise that “we’ve moved
on.” This panel seeks papers which explore the ways in which twenty-first
century fantasy literature deploys ‘the medieval’ with all its relics, forms
and incarnations. Papers may or may not directly contrast and compare with
Tolkien’s practice. The panel asks, for example, how contemporary trends in
technology, society, politics, and culture intersect with and influence
contemporary writers, readers, and critics in their re-imaginings of medieval
material. Are there shifts in the genre as a whole? Tolkien drew largely on the
European Middle Ages as do his imitators; is this changing as Eurocentric views
become increasingly problematic and the world is ever more globalised? How do
technological developments and the explosion of multi-media fantasy products
including film, television and video-gaming engage with literature? How do
representations of race, gender, and class intersect with medievalism in
contemporary fantasy? Is the idea of an ‘authentic’ Middle Ages important? How
do writers research the past and approach their sources? Papers which address
these or any other topic related to the theme of the panel are invited. They
might address short stories, novels, comics and graphic novels, series, authors
and/or their oeuvres, or the genre as a whole, as well as adaptations for or
from film, tv, gaming, and fandoms including fan-fiction. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Please send a 250-300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper, a
brief biography, and a conference Participant Information Form (<a href="http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html">http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html</a>)
to the organizer, Dr Helen Young by Monday 10th September 2012. Abstracts etc are
best emailed to <a href="mailto:Helen.young@sydney.edu.au">Helen.young@sydney.edu.au</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-5862902397858689122012-08-02T22:31:00.005-07:002012-08-12T20:58:31.205-07:00Alternate History, Historical Fantasy, and Alternate Worlds<br />
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In some of my earlier posts I used the term ‘alternate
history’ rather loosely. As a technical term, AH revolves “around the basic
premise that some event in the past did not occur as we know it did, and thus
the present has changed” (Hellekson, 2000, 247). It’s usually considered a
science fiction genre, and, as Hellekson also points out “concerns itself with
plausible relationships” (247). It also has, as Amy Ransom points out a
“scientifical approach to mimesis”(Ransom, 2010, 260). Draconic intervention in the Napoleonic Wars –
as in Naomi Novik’s books – doesn’t fit. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Magic, mythology and anything else outside the mundane world
– except sometimes time travel – are outside the bounds of the genre. <o:p></o:p></div>
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AH extrapolates forward from a changed event, or series of
events – a Nazi victory in World War II or victory by the South in the American
Civil War are the most common divergences. Books like Novik’s extrapolate
backwards from the present, asking what would have had to be historically
different for the present to be altered. That they employ ‘the fantastic’ to do
it doesn’t necessarily make the process less logical. As I said in my earlier
post about Novik’s books, dragons make European militaries comparable with
those of the rest of the world, resulting in much altered attempts at
imperialism particularly in Africa, South America, and Australia. If AH asks
‘what if,’ Novik’s question is a ‘what would’ have altered the history of
western expansionism around the globe.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Books that intertwine history with fantasy elements in
various ratios and combinations are often, not very imaginatively, labelled
Historical Fantasy – although this is more a term used by publishers and
audiences than scholars. Novik’s <i>Temeraire</i>
is currently at the top of the Goodreads Popular Historical Fantasy list, ahead
of Susanna Clarke’s <i>Jonathon Strange and
Mr Norrell</i>, and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s <i>The
Mists of Avalon</i>. Guy Gavriel Kay features in the top 20, as does Diana
Gabaldon, Cassandra Clare and George R.R. Martin. Historical Fantasy is really
only useful as a very broad term – there are major differences between these
works. Jo Walton’s article <a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2009/07/what-is-historical-fantasy-anyway">"What is historical fantasy?"</a> on Tor.com is
indicative of its very broad application as well (Walton, 2009).
Moreover, scholars of fantasy don’t tend to define it, although they use it.
There’s no definition in John Clute and John Grant’s <i>The Encyclopedia of Fantasy</i> for example (Clute & Grant, 1999).<o:p></o:p></div>
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Ransom offers Historical Fantasy as a term for works like
Kay’s <i>The Lions of Al-Rassan </i>(which
she invokes as an example) or Novik’s which differ from AH in that “more than
one event and the plausible extrapolation of its consequences must be altered;
rather <i>everything </i>must change” (275).
I’d suggest that Historical Fantasy is a very problematic term to adopt from a
critical standpoint because it is already used so widely, and in such varied
ways, by publishers and audiences. John Clute lamented the tendency of
publishers to mis-use ‘Epic Fantasy,’ saying that the term “has lost its
usefulness” (Clute & Grant, 1999, 319), and this sort of problem is
endemic in fantasy criticism – even in the difficulties of defining ‘fantasy’
itself. For Historical Fantasy to be critically useful, it would need to be
disentangled from commercial and popular usage.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I would suggest that Alternate World has more potential to
be useful in delineating fantasy which engages with (by altering) a specific
aspect of the real world’s past, often although not always with the intent of
critiquing both that past and the present. In the kinds of works I’m thinking
of, something about the world is different – whether its sentient dragons or
real magic or myriad other options – and this <i>changes the course of history as we know it</i>. This draws on the
critical history of the term. Clute, drawing on Brian Stableford in <i>The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction</i>
offers this in his definition: “an alternate world is an account of our world
as it might otherwise have been” (21). Clute excludes works like Kim Newman’s <i>Anno Dracula</i> because they intervene in
and “violate” history, although as I haven’t read the book I’m not sure if I’d
agree on that distinction (more on this at a later date). Alternate World
resonates with AH in productive ways: it invokes the thought experiment
questions that underpin AH, suggesting that an Alternate World is more than mere revisionism or
nostalgia, and it can be used to separate out some of what it lumped together
under the banner of Historical Fantasy.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 24.1pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; text-indent: -24.1pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Clute, J., &
Grant, J. (1999). The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 24.1pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; text-indent: -24.1pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Hellekson, K. (2000).
Toward a Taxonomy of the Alternate History Genre, <i>Extrapolation: A Journal
of Science Fiction and Fantasy</i>, <i>41</i>(3), 247–256.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 24.1pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; text-indent: -24.1pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Ransom, A. J. (2010).
Warping Time: Alternate Histories, Historical Fantasy, and the Postmodern
uchronie quebecoise. <i>Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy</i>,
<i>51</i>(2), 258–280.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 24.1pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; text-indent: -24.1pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Walton, J. (2009).
What is historical fantasy? <i>Tor.com</i>. Retrieved August 2, 2012, from
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2009/07/what-is-historical-fantasy-anyway<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-87392695456164341452012-07-24T18:50:00.000-07:002012-07-24T18:56:35.417-07:00Barking on Goodreads<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1RWKskg7N87dVu2iAD_lD_nAZ7EwmkWQYwdZKsGQOYqUZ1yNTI1MvvkSDGzwfhYxVCrawov93NKkE7LRYXPUXSX4VeNapzIqN5IDdDssS7NTFbghC86RIJU8g9QPls5eY9IoX5T4SaSo/s1600/Internet_dog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1RWKskg7N87dVu2iAD_lD_nAZ7EwmkWQYwdZKsGQOYqUZ1yNTI1MvvkSDGzwfhYxVCrawov93NKkE7LRYXPUXSX4VeNapzIqN5IDdDssS7NTFbghC86RIJU8g9QPls5eY9IoX5T4SaSo/s320/Internet_dog.jpg" width="286" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt;">It might have been true once that on the
internet no-one knows you’re a dog, but sometimes people make it their business
to find out. Particularly if they don’t like what you’ve been barking. I’ve
been following the controversy around supposed bullying on Goodreads on Twitter
and various blogs in the past few days. Basically, a group of authors who
didn’t like critical reviews of their work anonymously started a website, Stop
the GR Bullies, which aggregated information about reviewers and warning
readers that their reviews shouldn’t be trusted (a very sanitised description).
I haven’t seen all the screen-shots, and it seems that quite a few posts have
been taken down, so I don’t know the details of who said what and when. Foz
Meadows has a good post about it <a href="http://fozmeadows.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/bullying-goodreads/">here. </a></span><br />
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</style><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt;">Most of the blogs I’ve read about it are along
the lines of what John Scalzi had to say last week: “<a href="http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/07/17/bad-reviews-i-can-handle-them-and-so-should-you/">Bad Reviews: I Can HandleThem, and So Should You</a>.” </span>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt;">The situation isn’t directly related to my
research, but it reminded me a lot of RaceFail 09 with the ‘outing’ of
anonymous users. It’s all about power: who is allowed to have a voice, and what
they are allowed to say. And who decides. All those questions are connected to
issues around race and gender and class. The social and cultural systems that
privilege certain voices offline aren’t suddenly erased in the virtual world. Even
on the internet, some dogs bark louder than others, and some get muzzled.</span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt;"> </span>
<br />
<br />Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-81074580081803641802012-07-18T18:39:00.002-07:002012-07-24T18:51:19.482-07:00Research Ethics<br />
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It’s been a week of ethics, which is not always that same as
an ethical week, but I would like to think it was both. I put in the first
human ethics approval application I’ve ever had to do for my own research
yesterday. Working on medieval literature where the authors have been dead for
700 years or so – and are mostly anonymous anyway meant that there were some
things I just didn’t have to think about. But now I’m working on contemporary
fiction, written by people who are (mostly) still alive there are new
dimensions to consider. Interviewing authors, people who are public figures and
have engaged with the issues I’m interested in either through their work or by
commenting in public, officially comes under the category of “low risk.” If I
weren’t planning to go overseas to do some of the interviews I wouldn’t have
had to apply to my university Human Research Ethics Committee at all. It was a
long and fiddly process (have I ticked ‘no’ in all the right boxes – are you
secretly taking photographs of or recording subjects? No). 25 pages of form,
plus attachments. It was also an interesting one in some ways because it
started me thinking about research ethics more broadly. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For most of my academic life, ethics has been about issues
like plagiarism, not about what and who get included in my research, and how. I’ve
mentioned in earlier psts that part of my research is looking at fan-forums,
blogs etc (Twitter is becoming a big part of it now as well) to find out what
makes people talk about race in relation to fantasy texts, what they say, and
how. In a project like this it’s very important to include the voices of people
of colour, but one of the challenges is how to do it. And, on sites where
almost everyone uses pseudonyms and doesn’t have information about their
background or identity, it’s often impossible to know who is speaking. One of
my research questions asks what information people will give about themselves
in online conversations about a topic like, say, “Is [insert name of MMPORG]
racist?”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1457271362502173174#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">[1]</span></span></span></a> So
it is sometimes possible to know who has said what – people will quite often
say something like “I’m Chinese and…” or “I’m African-American and…” or on the
other hand “I’m a straight white male and…” Then there are blogs, which often
give personal details. The important (<i>an</i>
important) thing then is not assuming that one person of colour speaks for
every person of colour. And not assuming that because someone is from a Chinese
or Caribbean or Malaysian or Indigenous or any other minority background that
they are only interested in ‘minority’ issues, or that their voice only has
value when those topics are raised. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The second part of my week of ethics was a flyer in my inbox
about an inter-university “Ethics and Human Research” seminar in Melbourne at
the start of August. I’m hoping to get travel approval to go down for it.
Social media research is such a new field – and it changes so quickly – that
the sorts of ingrained assumptions about how to do ethical research that we now
have aren’t necessarily sufficient. And the ideas many of us have about the web
can be problematic too if we don’t think about them carefully. I read <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/21555876">this</a><b> </b>article in <i>The Economist </i>a little while ago on how one of the problems with
psychology research in universities is that it often relies on undergraduates
participating in experiments for results – they tend to get course credits. As
the article points out, this means that what gets defined as ‘normal’ tends to
be young, white, people from middle-class, reasonably well educated
backgrounds. Some researchers are now ‘crowd-sourcing’ their psychology surveys
online in attempts to get a much more diverse sample. This makes a lot fo sense
as far as it goes, but as with any internet research, its important to remember
that not everyone has equal access to the internet, or to any given site. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve taught the concept of ‘digital divide’ to
undergraduates for years at more than one university, and it’s very difficult
for people from educated western backgrounds to understand the concept. My
students could grasp the idea, and accept that there were some parts of the
world where internet access was not a given – “in the African desert” was a
favourite – but struggled with the idea that it might be an issue in western
countries, or that something like ethnicity might be a factor. They loved to
say “anyone can write anything” on the internet, but had a lot of trouble with
the idea that not everyone has access. And the concept that not everyone has
equal power online was an even bigger struggle - I mentioned earlier that a lot
of fan-forum discussions of racism get locked or taken down by site moderators.
How do we, as researchers, taken into account these kinds of issues? I’m hoping
that the seminar in Melbourne will help me figure out some answers.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div>
<br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1457271362502173174#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">[1]</span></span></span></a>
These kinds of topics tend to get locked if they are on the official websites
of game publishers, but the dynamics of what’s locked and what’s not is another
post.<span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
</div>Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1457271362502173174.post-19424699659068623252012-07-11T22:51:00.001-07:002012-07-24T18:52:52.895-07:00Medievalism and Colonialism<style>
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I have been thinking about colonisation, medievalism, and
fantasy all at once in the past couple of weeks. One of the things I’ve noticed
is that fantasy stories that critique colonisation and imperialism very rarely
do it in medievalist settings. Robin Hobb and Naomi Novik whose work I’ve
mentioned in other posts don’t use them. Neither do Terry Pratchett in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nation</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Snuff</i> (which is in part about indigenous peoples), Nora K. Jemisin
in her <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inheritance</i> trilogy, or (from
memory) any of the authors in Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science
Fiction and Fantasy</i>. This is a quick, and definitely not exhaustive list.
And there are a lot of people whose writing isn’t part of the western
publishing genre that I’m working with. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hobb, Pratchett, and Novik all use nineteenth-century-type
worlds; the latter two creating alternate histories (in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nation</i> for Pratchett, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Snuff </i>is
a Discworld book). There’s some logic to this: the nineteenth century was the
heyday of European imperialism around the globe, what better time to draw on
for a critique of the practice? None of the works I’m thinking about – or have
mentioned here, are Steampunk as such, but the <a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/10/stupid-things-we-say">discussions</a> that have been going
on around that sub-genre and its ability to critique and be transgressive are
reasonably applicable. Like medievalism, Steampunk has been accused of having
inherent racist nostalgic leanings – of yearning for a time of ‘white power’.
And not without some justification. Although I won’t link to them, there are
white supremacist web-forums which praise both for their supposedly monochrome
visions. But Steampunk also has its defenders. Probably the most active is
Jaymee ‘Jha’ Goh, a self-described steampunk postcolonialist who blogs <a href="http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com.au/">here</a>. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The decision not to use medievalist settings is uncommon
enough to rate comment. Readers who reviewed Hobb’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Soldier Son</i> books on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Goodreads</i>,
for example, often commented on the unconventional setting. I wonder how much
the use of non-medievalist setting to critique imperialism is a deliberate
tactic on the part of the authors. Whether they turn to a ‘Victorianist’
setting or not, they certainly tend to turn away from medievalist conventions.
Looking at my list of examples in the first paragraph, this probably isn’t
surprising – none of those authors are genre hacks; most if not all are known
for being <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">un</i>conventional. Even if
none of them made conscious decisions to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">non</i>-medievalist,
the settings are telling. They work against genre expectations on multiple
levels. I’d really like to know if there are books out that use a medievalist
setting but are significantly engaged in critiquing colonisalism.</div>Helen younghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03089106804807201826noreply@blogger.com0