Radio guest spot

Last 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 The Hobbit movie, and Tolkien's influence on fantasy. The podcast can be downloaded here: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/commonknowledge/
It's the show titled 'Soft Power and Tolkien's World,' and I'm on in the second part.

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.

Thinking About Genre

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.

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 Making Popular Music (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 New York Review of Science Fiction 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.

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. 

Medievalism and Colonialism

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 Nation or Snuff (which is in part about indigenous peoples), Nora K. Jemisin in her Inheritance trilogy, or (from memory) any of the authors in Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan’s So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy. 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.

Hobb, Pratchett, and Novik all use nineteenth-century-type worlds; the latter two creating alternate histories (in Nation for Pratchett, Snuff 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 discussions 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 here.

The decision not to use medievalist settings is uncommon enough to rate comment. Readers who reviewed Hobb’s Soldier Son books on Goodreads, 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 unconventional. Even if none of them made conscious decisions to be non-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.

Tales After Tolkien: Medievalism and Twenty-First Century Fantasy Literature

I am organizing a panel for the 2013 International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

CFP: Tales After Tolkien: Medievalism and Twenty-First Century Fantasy Literature

Panel at the International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo. May 9-12, 2013 http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/

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 The New York Review of Science Fiction 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.

Please send a 250-300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper, and a brief biography, to the organizer, Dr Helen Young by 1^st September 2012. Abstracts are best emailed to Helen.young@sydney.edu.au but may also be posted to Helen Young, John Woolley Building A20, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.

Decolonising the past

From the Middle Ages making modern fantasy be racist to modern fantasy re-writing history – I’ve been reading Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series in the past few weeks.[i] They aren’t medieval at all – I’m not just interested in medievalist fantasy whatever the past couple of post might suggest. Novik’s books are set during the Napoleonic Wars in a world inhabited by dragons which, with their human riders, form air forces and take part in the conflicts. But they also do more. The protagonists – the dragon Temeraire and his rider Captain William Laurence – repel a French invasion early on in the series, but later books are much more concerned with European encounters with the rest of the world. The Franco-British war provides a backdrop, but to date the heroes have been to China, Africa, Australia, South America, and at the end of the most recent seem headed back to China. The underlying premise of the series is “what might have happened if all the places colonized by Europe had had similar, or superior, armed forces?”

 In the Temeraire series Novik treds a tricky path, and does it well. Rewriting history into “worlds that weren’t” can be problematic if all that happens is the bits that are uncomfortable or politically inconvenient simply get taken out. There are examples of this in Novik’s world – Spanish conquests in the Americas, for example, fails because the Incas have dragons. But the coming of Europeans is not without consequence as disease ravages the Incan empire, vastly reducing its population. Australia, specifically New South Wales, is colonized, but Chinese trade interests seem likely to prevent further predations on the rest of the continent, at least by the British. Cape Town is colonized by the Dutch, who brutalize the indigenous inhabitants of the area – who do not have dragons. Soon after the British have conquered the Dutch colony, however, they are forced to leave by the Tswana, a central African civilisation (who do have dragons), who also destroy the slaving ports on the west coast of Africa, and at the current time in the series have invaded the Portugese colony of Brazil in order to rescue those who had already been taken and their descendants. Although she doesn’t dwell on them gory detail, Novik doesn’t shy away from the brutality and devastation wrought by colonization and slavery – although there is yet to be a book set in North America.

Not everything that fits into the fantasy genre is what I would call speculative fiction, by which I mean that it doesn’t always ask a question,[ii] let alone a significant one. Novik is one of what I think is a growing number of authors writing for the mainstream Western fantasy market that are exploring issues around colonisation. Terry Pratchett’s Nation, and Robin Hobb’s Rain Wild Chronicles are other examples. And there are others which use feature the not unrelated theme of world exploration: Michael Stackpole’s A Secret Atlas series, and Kevin J Anderson also has one which I haven’t had a chance to read yet.[iii] Explorations of colonization are usually associated with science fiction –Star Trek for example –than with fantasy partly because, I think, the former often gets taken more seriously, and is thought of as being more serious, than the latter. And it’s relatively easy to write a book about colonisation when all you have to do is put your colonisers aboard space ships instead of the ocean-going kind. It seems like a positive thing for fantasy to taking up these types of issues also,[iv] particularly if it’s done well.

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[i] Thanks to Derek Newman-Stille for recommending these to me at the ICFA conference.

[ii] There are lots of different ideas about what ‘speculative fiction’ really means, and plenty of people who would say that it’s mutually exclusive with ‘fantasy’. Margaret Atwood springs to mind. Obviously I don’t agree.

[iii] If anyone can add to this list I’d love to hear about it. There are also a lot of non-Western writers, and those whose works are neither aimed at nor read in mainstream markets. Once again I’m thinking about fantasy in its incarnation as simultaneously mass and popular culture. All but Stackpole are authors I’ve found in airport bookshops, and I encountered his series in a general bookstore not a dedicated fantasy/sci-fi shop.

[iv] I’ve recently head of an independent fantasy game Dog Eat Dog designed to explore colonisation, its impacts, and dynamics. It is due for release later this year.

The Middle Ages MADE Me Do It

I’ve been spending a lot of time trawling online discussions of fantasy – as a genre and specific works – finding out what people have to say about racism, ethnicity, diversity and lack thereof, and similar topics. There a quite a few common threads, and the discussions – mainly in fan forums and blog comments sections – tend to take similar shapes. I’m still working on how to describe them all, and what they might mean, but there’s a feature I wasn’t expecting, although perhaps I should have: medievalism. This is particularly true in places where some participants have made accusations of outright racism. A common feature is comments along the lines of: “but it’s based on Europe in the Middle Ages, and everyone there was white so it’s OK for this book/film/game to only have white characters too.” The line between fantasy and the Middle Ages is so blurred as to be non-existent in many cases – the orcs in my last post apparently have no problem going both ways! Chuck Wendig blogged about ways people try to excuse/justify racism in fantasy and pointed out the lack of logic in the “medieval” excuse As have plenty of others. Putting aside, for a moment, the question of whether the Middle Ages were as white as lots of fantasy fans claim, I wonder why it is that the idea of a ‘real’ Middle Ages is so potent? Like Wendig says, no-one says there were actually wizards, elves, dragons etc in medieval times, so why should any notion of an authentic past matter so much? But it must, because people keep bringing it up. Even when they are advocating greater inclusion of minorities, like Wendig does.

It doesn’t matter on these forums if the Middle Ages were actually monochrome – little if any evidence is ever given and no-one making assertions gives any kind of academic or other credential to claim authority. To go back to the Orcs movie blurb in my last post, modern culture tends to see the European Middle Ages (and rarely a Middle Ages located anywhere else) and call them mythical, warmongering, monstrous, and sadistic. Why not add racist to the mix? After all, it’s them not us. The Middle Ages can be ‘ours’ but ‘we’ aren’t medieval – these comments always have an assumed audience of youngish white males – so no-one is responsible for any exclusion, offense, or down right racism.

That “the Middle Ages made us do it” is an excuse for modern racism of many different kinds – it features on everything from white supremacist sites on – probably isn’t much of a surprise to anyone. But in the process an interesting thing happens. The Middle Ages are always spoken for and about in these kinds of discussions, but are also constructed with a certain level of agency: they made us do it. “The medieval” is often conceptualised as the opposite, even the Other, of “the modern”, but this aspect of contemporary popular culture depends on being similar, even the same. I think this is a feature of fantasy and its relationship with the idea of the Middle Ages that doesn’t happen in other kinds of popular medievalism.