The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas Tharini Viswanath (bio) The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. By Ebony Elizabeth Thomas. New York University Press, 2019. Every now and again I come across a book of literary criticism that is so powerful in its import that it significantly changes how I perceive and approach young adult literature. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's The Dark Fantastic: Race and Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games is one such book. The Dark Fantastic skillfully weaves together autoethnography, literary criticism, critical race theory, and digital media culture to examine how race shapes the imagination and provide readers with counter narratives of mainstream (read: predominantly white) films and TV shows. Herein, Thomas posits that the lack of diversity in imaginative genres like fantasy and science fiction causes a discord in the Western collective imagination. The Dark Fantastic is the author's analysis of that discord "as it plays out in speculative fiction for young adults and in audience interaction with these stories" in four mainstream visual narratives: the Hunger Games trilogy, BBC's Merlin, CW's The Vampire Diaries, and the Harry Potter series (4). Chapter 1 establishes the traditional purpose of darkness—"to disturb, to unsettle, to cause unrest"—and exemplifies how this deeply rooted primal fear of the dark gets transposed onto people with dark skins (19). Building on the works of theorists such as Jeremy Jerome Cohen who position monstrous beings as analogous to people who are deemed different in the real world, Thomas asks an important question that the subsequent chapters in this book grapple with: "If monsters and people of color inhabit the same place in our stories, what would it be like to read monster theory from the monster's perspective?" (20). [End Page 435] Thomas positions the "dark other" as the "spectacle, monstrous Thing that is the root cause of hesitation, ambivalence and the uncanny" that needs to be vanquished in the Anglo-American fantastic tradition (22). This chapter also lays a strong foundation for the rest of the monograph by highlighting the relationship between the dark other in fantasy stories and people of color in the real world, and by charting a pattern—of spectacle, hesitation, violence, haunting, and emancipation—that the dark fantastic follows in speculative fiction. Titled "Lamentations of a Mockingjay," the second chapter discusses how race and ethnicity are constructed in the Hunger Games books and films by focusing on the intersections between televised state violence and the neoliberal imperative of using visual technologies to market the body. Importantly, Thomas explains how mainstream media subtly recenters whiteness and examines how the life and death of the character Rue illustrate the intersections of race, class, and innocence in the text and on screen. As the sacrificial mockingjay in the series, Rue demonstrates the prevailing cultural script in the Western world: that "some children are more innocent than others, and Black children are not innocent at all" (56, emphasis original). Thomas goes on to exemplify how this sentiment is echoed by some readers and viewers in their negative online reactions to Rue in the books and films, which in turn traps her in the dark fantastic cycle. Chapter 3, "A Queen out of Place," analyzes how "time, space, and emotion shape our experiences in the waking dream of the fantastic," and how locations—both real and imagined—affect the perception and desirability of black (female) bodies (70). Since the primary world in which we live shapes our identities, Thomas argues, our world's unconscious "laws"—especially those pertaining to race and ethnicity—are present in secondary fantastic worlds as well. Thomas goes on to demonstrate how Angel Coulby as Queen Guinevere "Gwen" in Merlin evokes and amplifies the reader/viewer's sense of hesitation because "[a]ccepting a desirable dark-skinned queen requires not only the suspension of disbelief but also the conscious rethinking of who and what is marked as beautiful and desirable" (93). This chapter also highlights the challenges of placing characters of color inside magical worlds with a medieval setting. Thomas concludes...