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    The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
    The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
    The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games

    Written by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

    Narrated by Janina Edwards

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children's publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter.

    The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early twenty-first century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW's The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC's Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 15, 2019
    ISBN9781541430709
    The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
    Author

    Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

    Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Education. A former Detroit Public Schools teacher and National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, she is an expert on children’s literature, youth media, and fan culture. Her most recent book is The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from “Harry Potter” to the “Hunger Games.”

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    Reviews for The Dark Fantastic

    4.5/5

    48 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A triumph of critical analysis on children's literature, its transmediation, and what dangerous representational patterns they indulge. Read this book! It will help you see what has been rendered invisible and rethink what has been normalized. Thomas is spot on, from her reading of Rue as the first mockingjay to her thorough treatment of Bonnie's blackening (and ensuing consequences) on The Vampire Diaries. It's changed how I think about reading-- and writing.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Very informative and engaging book, the author managed to both focus on four examples and address the bigger picture.
    • 5/5
      Mandatory reading for fantasy fans and BLM supporters alike. Great examples, great narration, great analysis.
    • 5/5
      Insightful, poignant, timely, and much needed, is how I would describe this fascinating analysis of race and how it is perceived throughout the Sci-fi genre.

      The Narrator does excellent job bringing the content alive, making it engaging, and a pleasure to listen to.

      I can honestly say, this book made me think, take a step back, and deeply begin to re-examine how I read, as well as approach Sci-fi literature, in regards to how people of color have been portrayed throughout the centuries.

      I have learned many new things which i had previously never really considered and truly enjoyed listening to every minute of the book.

      I highly recommend it and hope more analytical research will be done within this area of Sci-fi / Horror literature and race.
    • 5/5
      I loved everything about this read, and it’s just the right blend of academics and pop culture; her use of scholarly works alongside fandom comments is inspired. I was only truly familiar with one out of the four works discussed (HP) with just some passing knowledge of the rest, but Thomas does such an amazing job of breaking them down that I didn’t feel as though I missed anything. My library only had the audiobook, so I hope I can request it in ebook or paper in order to dig more into it and all its references as well.
    • 4/5
      This is a personal and anecdotal view of black girls in four popular modern YA fantasy worlds written in academic language. It explores the gaping lack of positive engagement with and outcomes for those black characters and how young black girls and women are failed by the lacks and how they compensate.
    • 5/5
      In The Dark Fantastic, Thomas writes a study of darker-skinned people in fantastic popular culture. She covers Rue, from Hunger Games, who is described as “dark-skinned” in the book, but got a torrent of horribly racist comments when Rue was cast as black in the movie. To the white mind, and sometimes even to the brown or black mind, innocent characters should not be cast as black. Another rage emerged when Guinevere was cast as black in the TV show Merlin.Thomas mentions that there is a paucity of dark-skinned people in fantastic literature, and that could be part of the reason why dark-skinned people tend to not be considered the audience of fantastic literature – because they can’t relate to the characters. It is quite possible for dark-skinned people to find heroes in white people, but why not have some dark-skinned people that they can view as heroes?In most shows / books, dark-skinned people are shoved off to the side as supporting characters to white characters like Luka Martin in Vampire Diaries. They are meant to serve, not to be powerful characters themselves.I had heard previously that fantastic literature lacked in diverse characters, but had never spent much time thinking about it. Now I feel like reading books more carefully to see how they are portrayed. This was a fantastic piece of nonfiction for anyone interested in diverse voices in literature.
    • 4/5
      The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is an important addition to the scholarship on fantasy and the dynamic between it and its readership and viewership.Thomas makes many important distinctions in this work between inclusion as simply being in the story and inclusion as being essential to the story. Additionally, the difference between being included as a character with agency and being included as only representative of some element of fantasy. These insights, while not new, are brought together here as a whole with a couple of key intended takeaways.First, the part I didn't think worked. I felt that Thomas was too concerned with making every instance fit with her relatively new paradigm for the dark fantastic. Being too wed to making things fit a standard form is part of the problem she is confronting, putting argument second to making something fit within a box, or set of sequential boxes. The only times her argument goes astray is when she is focused more on making things fit her "new" paradigm than she is on simply making her argument. I would have preferred her boxes have been posited as a "some or all" thing rather than a "they will fit this" thing.In many cases a complaint like I just made would negate what the overall argument does, but that isn't the case here. The points she is making about these stories and the representation of the dark fantastic are spot on, once you jettison the dogmatic imposed structure. Thomas illustrates her analyses with examples and argues persuasively for what she sees within each text she looks at. If she had simply done that, this would still have been an important addition.She also, and I think more importantly, addresses two additional areas: fan interaction and the imagination gap. These are largely linked but not entirely. The dynamic between the two help to point to future positive change.The way that readers and viewers appropriate texts for their own uses has been an important part of the SF&F community for some time. Early examples centered largely around sexuality, rewriting oneself into the existing story by creating extensions of that universe. Rewriting oneself into the story around the concept of race is likely even more important simply because of the unconscious biases people bring to texts. It is this imaginative work on the part of fans that points back to the publishing and writing community, and education as well, to imagine better and more diverse worlds and stories. I would highly recommend this to scholars and fans of science fiction and fantasy. This helps us to look back at what we have already read and seen with a new perspective while also asking us to look ahead with a new imaginative frame.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.