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“The odds are ever in Katniss's favor: she is the primary character with whom audiences identify. This is not inherently problematic, as part of the work of literature is to provide mirrors, windows, and doors into other people's experiences. The problem occurs when contemporary literature and media for young people include characters of color who are supposed to provide someone for every reader or viewer to identify with--and yet at the same time construct protagonists who are the only characters worth rooting for. Although the initial authorial intent may have been noble, stories constructed in such a fashion have the pernicious effect of normalizing our existing social hierarchies--including hierarchies of race.”

Speculative FictionThe Hunger GamesRacialized MirrorsSocial Hierarchies
Book:The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
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“I have found much value in considering monster theory, color theory, and the history of racial analogies in speculative fiction. However, when we read literary and cultural texts from the perspective of the monster, not the protagonist, we find ourselves in a completely different ballgame. This is why taking a supposedly 'neutral' or 'objective' approach to theorizing the dark fantastic is problematic; the default position is to allow those who are used to seeing themselves as heroic and desired the power and privileged of naming, defining, and delimiting the entire world and everything that is in it. We never notice that monsters, fantastic beasts, and various Dark Others are silenced because we have never been taught the language they speak. Critical race counterstorytelling provides both translation and amplification for these subsumed narratives.”

MonstersSpeculative FictionCritical Race TheoryColor TheoryMonster TheoryCounterstorytellingRacial Analogies
Book:The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
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“The trouble with colorblind ideologies in text and culture is that by not noticing race, writers and other creatives do the work of encoding it as taboo. While silence and evasion around race in dystopian science fiction is 'understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture', implying the inevitability of a postracial future, this silence also has the effect of confusing readers.”

WritingSpeculative FictionColorblindPostracial
Book:The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
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“The traditional purpose of darkness in the fantastic is to disturb, to unsettle, to cause unrest. This primal fear of darkness and Dark Others is so deeply rooted in Western myth that it is nearly impossible to find its origin... No matter what the reasons were for the way our culture came to view all things dark in the past, the consequences have been a nameless and lingering fear of dark people in the present.”

DarknessFantasyRacismLightnessThe Fantastical
Book:The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
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“From ancient Greece and the classical tradition, to the Christianization of the late Roman Empire and Dark Ages Europe, the emergence of catholic Europe, and the Crusades against the Islamic world, a nameless and lingering fear of dark-skinned people has been normalized in the popular imagination. Darkness--an antagonist born of this primal fear--is the archetypal monster in much of our literature, media, and culture. Thus, the Dark Other becomes monstrous in our collective imaginations, a shadow creature locked into place and time, imbued with a fixity that is difficult to overcome. In my studies of and experiences with the fantastic, I have found that this fixity has led to fan and audience complaints whenever a dark-skinned character moves out of his or her expected place of abjection.”

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