Historical authenticity. Again

After 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' (here), 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 video game which was making big claims about being historically authentic 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 here. In short, it suggests that suggestion that the game could 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 The Daily Dot. A recent post at the Tumblr site, here, shows that this includes continuing death threats.
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 Year's Work in Medievalism, and have a couple of other articles about it forthcoming too.
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.

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.

Medieval and modern racisms

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.

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 (Heng, 2003). 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.

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 Lord of the Rings. 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 Orcs trilogy and Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals challenge many of the conventions significantly, they don’t explore orc culture in any depth at all. Games are more likely to do so, eg World of Warcraft and the like, but they still, as Tanner Higgin and Jessica Langer have shown, deploy biological constructs of race (Higgin, 2009; Langer, 2008). Even a recent game, Of Orcs and Men, which castes orcs as the good guys, a forest-dwelling indigenous-type people resisting the evil human empire  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.

Heng, G. (2003). Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia University Press.

Higgin, T. (2009). Blackless Fantasy. Games and Culture, 4(1), 3–26.

Langer, J. (2008). The Familiar and the Foreign: Playing (Post) Colonialism in World of Warcraft. In H. G. Corneliussen & J. W. Rettberg (Eds.), Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader (pp. 87–108). London: MIT Press.