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Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction ed. by Meghan Gilbert-Hickey and Miranda A. Green-Barteet

2022; Volume: 49; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sfs.2022.0037

2327-6207

Brittany Tomin,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Reviewed by: Race in Young Adult Speculative Fictioned. by Meghan Gilbert-Hickey and Miranda A. Green-Barteet Brittany Tomin Interrogating and Decentering Whiteness in Young Adult SF. Meghan Gilbert-Hickey and Miranda A. Green-Barteet, eds. Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction. UP of Mississippi, 2021. xii+ 266 pp. $30.00 pbk. Meghan Gilbert-Hickey and Miranda A. Green-Barteet introduce their edited volume Race in Young Adult Speculative Fictionby positioning young adult speculative fiction (YASF) as a narrative space through which racialized youth envision future continuance against the backdrop of historical and present survival and resistance. Summarizing the text's purpose as a consideration of "how characters of color are represented in YASF" and "how they contribute to and participate in speculative worlds" (4), throughout the introduction the editors navigate the nuanced ways in which race is, or is not, addressed: are authors using speculative world-building to imagine beyond racial hierarchies of power, or are they adopting color blindness but nevertheless drawing upon dynamics of racism? If speculative worlds represent worldviews, how does one critically consider the (de)centering of race, racism, and racialized otherness within speculative world construction? How does YASF perpetuate default whiteness when imagined worlds are framed as postracial? The chapters that follow offer analyses of specific texts through critical race theory, gender theory, whiteness studies, and posthumanist theory to examine how YASF engages with race. Four sections organize the volume's contributions: Section One, "Defining Diversity," considers texts that explore racism and diversity without openly engaging with issues of race, often to great problematic effect; in Section Two, "Erasing Race," color blindness is problematized and examined in relation to perpetual neoliberal ideologies and racist discourse; Section Three, "Lineages of Whiteness," explores how whiteness is privileged in texts that discuss race and concurrent forms of marginalization; and in Section Four, "Racialized Identities," contributors envision how representations of intersectional characters can help articulate new speculative possibilities for authors and readers alike. The chapters in each section work in tandem to articulate and exemplify new modes of [End Page 392]analyses and inquiry through which YASF texts and their impact can be examined along lines of race, racism, and racialized otherness. This is an important hermeneutic move towards equity given the influential power of YA fiction and the frequent privileging of white protagonists within YASF. The contributions in the first section identify opportunities in YASF to complicate diversity. In the first two chapters, "Blood Rules: Racial Passing and the Commodification of Difference in Victoria Aveyard's The Red Queen" by Sarah Olutola and "The Fairy Race: Artemis Fowl, Gender, and Racial Hierarchies" by Kathryn Strong Hansen, both authors interrogate lost opportunities within texts that fail effectively to engage with diversity, or otherwise undercut the representational possibilities promised within the texts. Olutola specifically problematizes Aveyard's commodification of racial power hierarchies without discussing race as such, and poses an important question which thematically sets up the rest of the volume: As teen readers devour these stories of systemic oppression, as they identify with the plight of the protagonists, what narratives are they really consuming, and whose ideological aims do the books truly serve? (16) Through providing the largely ignored historical context of Aveyard's storyworld, Olutola highlights how The Red Queen(2015) appropriates racial struggle without dismantling oppressive systems in the fictional world. In the following chapter, through positioning Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl(2001) as a text that superficially celebrates racial diversity and queerness without questioning or dismantling oppressive systems, Strong Hansen expands on Olutola's concerns and argues that "while science fiction has the potential to critique racial hierarchies, it often instead reinscribes them" and that "even well-intentioned attempts at inclusivity fail when they reify social hierarchies" (Strong Hansen 44-45). In the final contribution to this section, "Enchanting the Masses: Allegorical Diversity in Fairy-Tale Dystopias," Jill Coste explores the affordances of allegorical dystopia, with particular attention to texts that draw upon fairy tales to critique racist systems and structures in what appear to be "postracial" worlds. The first of many contributors who examine Marissa Meyer's L unarC hroniclesseries (2012-2015), Coste argues that while both dystopia and fairy...