Introduction: Race and the Fantastic
2010; Volume: 21; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-0521
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
ResumoThe 2010 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts was devoted to the theme of Race and the Fantastic. The response at the conference was so strong that we have devoted an entire issue of the Journal to the same theme. While it might seem (to those who don't know the field) that fantasy is merely an escape from real-world conflicts such as racial strife, it became clear in conference sessions, special events, and conversations poolside that the fantastic is a powerful tool for examining all things human, including our tendency to gang up on one another based on any perceived physical or cultural dissimilarity. Though race is a bogus category biologically, we tend to act and speak and write as if it were real, which makes races at least as real as, say, genres. Within science fiction and fantasy, the title of Benedict Anderson's influential study Imagined Communities (1991) takes on a new and literal meaning. Anderson was talking primarily about nationhood; his thesis has to do with the way we maintain the illusion of shared communal life by identifying with those unmet others who are bathed in the same media signals (print or electronic) as ourselves. Yet his approach is also useful in talking about race, and especially the kinds of racial identities found within science fiction. In many sf texts, of course, communities are not just imagined but wholly imaginary, and, not surprisingly, there is another book, by Philip E. Wegner, called Imaginary Communities (2002). The subject of that study is not the fantastic per se, but a related and overlapping mode, utopia. Sfs depictions of race can be utopian, as in Star Trek, where alien races serve together in relative harmony on the starship Enterprise. They can also be dystopian, although it is hard to imagine racial interactions more horrific than those found in the real world. Most often, they are simply different: viewed at a distance with the aid of such distorting lenses as alien worlds and artificial life forms. Robots are often the racial other in Isaac Asimov's stories; so are Martians in some of Ray Bradbury's chronicles. The alien-as-racial-other metaphor is employed with satire and a measure of hope in Alien Nation (1988 movie and 1989 TV series) and with devastating specificity in 2009's District 9. The latter film plays on the ultimate racist fear, that the other will turn out to be oneself. Fantasy has an odder relationship with race than does sf because its races are not so much biological as theological. They are usually presented as originary, ordained by whatever Powers-That-Be may preside in the fantasy world. There were always Elves, Dwarves, and Men, or, in E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Witches, Pixies, and Demons. These races differ physically and psychically. They have their own languages, spaces, traditions, and habits of thought, going back to time immemorial. This view of race reflects some of the roots of fantasy in Romantic mythography and philology. Eddison and J. R. R. Tolkien were not the first to combine interests in the origins of languages and myths, and to turn those interests into fantastic narrative. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were searching not just for household tales and Germanic sound shifts, but for the mythic soul of the German people. Race played a big part in nineteenth-century thinking about culture and the past, from folklore studies to cranial measurements, and the races imagined were legion. The Celts were a race; so were the Slavs, the Balts, and the Mediterraneans and, against all historical evidence, the English. The more innocent by-products of this kind of racial thinking include the reconstruction of proto-Germanic and Indo-European languages and the rediscovery (in the West) of the great Sanskrit scriptures. Combined with European voyages of discovery and colonialism, racial theory produced the somewhat sinister lost world romances of H. Rider Haggard, Talbot Mundy, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, which had a big impact on twentieth-century fantasy. …
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