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.

Publication plans

Last 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 Racism without Racists to explore the dynamics of the blog posts and comments on them.
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.
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.

More Thoughts on Genre

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 Osama. Last year it went to Nnedi Okorafor, an American woman with Nigerian heritage, for Who Fears Death. 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 Perfume in 1987, and Japanese author Haruki Murakami won in 2006 for Kafka on the Shore. 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?

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.

Barking on Goodreads

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 here.
Most of the blogs I’ve read about it are along the lines of what John Scalzi had to say last week: “Bad Reviews: I Can HandleThem, and So Should You.”  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.
 

Prolonged absence

Obviously I haven't posted in a while. Quite a while. I haven't been completely absent from the blogosphere though as I've been reading my way through the parts of the interwebs known as Racefail 09. Or sometimes Mammothfail. It's hard going partly because of outright offensiveness of some of it, partly because of the rage, partly because of the hurt, partly because of the posts taken down or locked away behind passwords. Putting it mildly - and as the name suggests - Racefail was a mass (network) of posts where some science fiction and fantasy writers, publishers and readers committed (and I use that word on purpose) epic fail when talking about race, and then by refusing to talk about it. Summaries - and there are no unbiased ones because such a thing is frankly impossible - here and here, although there are lots more out there. 

This episode of racefail was a fairly short discussion in the long history of SFF not engaging well, again putting it mildly, with non-white perspectives and experiences, although more than one person has suggested that it's led to some positive changes. Nora Jemisin's post here is one of the more detailed.

From my perspective as a researcher Racefail 09 is a very strong reminder that what I'm working on has some very real manifestations and implications. As far as I can tell no-one has written about Racefail 09 in an academic forum, perhaps because its so emotionally charged that even a veneer of scholarly objectivity is hard to maintain. Also, there is a lot of truly excellent meta-discussion, eg in the second summary I linked to above. And, of course, given that a lot of posts aren’t available anymore, it would be hard to be comprehensive. But I don’t think any of these are a reason not to try. I don’t have a plan for how to do this in detail – a book chapter or article or even a whole book. But it’s a major part of the world(s) I’m working on, and is relevant in so many ways to what my project is about. Including the article I’m currently trying to write on some quite recent fantasy engagements with colonialism and imperialism. Naomi Novik’s work that I wrote about way back when will come into that article (and Novik made a well received if brief contribution to Racefail), but at the moment I'm working on Robin Hobb's Soldier Son trilogy which is an interesting and sustained critique of colonisation and imperialism.