Tales After Tolkien: Medievalism and Genre in the Twenty-First Century

It'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.

Contributions are sought for an edited collection titled Tales After Tolkien: Medievalism and Genre in the Twenty-First Century. 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?

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?

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.  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.

Chapters will be 6,000 to 7,000 words, including all footnotes, references etc, with first drafts due 1^st June 2014, and final versions on 1^st October 2014. The volume will be offered to Cambria Press, which has expressed interest in seeing the manuscript proposal.

In the first instance, an abstract of approximately 300 words along with a brief CV should be sent to Helen.young@sydney.edu.au by 8^th January, 2014. Any queries may be directed to the same address.

Tales After Tolkien Society

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.

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.

See our website www.talesaftertolkien.org  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 Helen.young@sydney.edu.au

Racist Discourses in Fantasy Fandom

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 Textual Poachers (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 westeros.org. When threads which raise problematic issues around race in either George Martin’s novels or HBO’s Game of Thrones 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 Racism Without Racists (2006). The eurocentricity of the fictional world is justified in a few main ways (in varying order):

1)    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.

2)    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.

3)    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 too much.

4)    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.

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 westeros.org, minimization suggests that the experience of the OP, or any who takes that perspective, is either not important, or not real.

Westeros.org 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 World of Warcraft and Dragon Age. 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.

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2006. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. 2nd ed. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Bury, R. 2005. Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online. New York: Peter Lang.

Going to the (Kalama)zoo

In 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 Of Arthour and of Merlin and Guy of Warwick - 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 Mars trilogy and Frank Herbert's Dune - which is different to Middle English romance, but a lot closer to the research I'm doing now.

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.

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.

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.

Worth the Trip

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.
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.
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.
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.

Medievalism and Colonialism Revisited

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 Melbourne University 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 Nation; Robin Hobb’s Soldier Son trilogy; Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series (having grown up loving C. S. Forester and Anne McCaffrey I love this amalgam of the two); N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy, and the Dragon Age game franchise (I read the narrative of elven slavery to humanity as distinctly linked to colonialism).

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. Dragon Age 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.

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.

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 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. 

Game of Thrones, Authenticity, and Mass-Production

Today I’ve been trying to write an abstract for a roundtable on Game of Thrones 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 not 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 A Song of Ice and Fire, 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.

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.

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 insert foodstuff here’; 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 Game of Thrones adds another dimension to those kinds of tendencies because the Middle Ages were by definition pre-modern, and therefore pre-mass-production.