Blood Rules

Abstract

In this chapter, Sarah Olutola examines Victoria Aveyard's The Red Queen. The juxtaposition of racial ambiguity, racial oppression, and upward mobility in Victoria Aveyard’s YA dystopian fantasy positions this text as a window into the complex, unstable, and often contradictory meaning of race in America, particularly in this present era of late capitalism. The Red Queen perpetuates colonial discourses of biological determinism that have long since fueled racial anxieties and justified state-sanctioned racial terror. Simultaneously, the text works with the concept of race and particularly racial rebellion through the depoliticizing language of capitalist modernity that offers racial minorities the promise of inclusion through their ideological and emotional investment in consumption. The goal of raising these critical concerns is to complicate discussions of diversity in Young Adult fiction and to underscore the violent, historical, and contemporary power relations that belie the mass market and consumer demand for stories, in any genre, of race and racial oppression.