The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas
Oct 2019 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Janina Edwards
4.5star
2 reviewsreport
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7 hr 13 min
Unabridged
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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.
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4.5
2 reviews
Flavia Brites
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February 17, 2023
The other side of Otherness. It's well known in the area of Science-Fiction Studies that the fantastic "others" created in fiction are metaphores for the unrestrained release of fear, fury and cruelty towards a cultural "other". It gives shape to hegemonic white cultural anxieties facing other cultures in general, but most of all, it casts in the literary/filmic mold of fantasy the fears of people who are much too close not to threaten change in white society: the repressed dark, invisibilized,
About the author
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is Associate Professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Educational Division at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. A former Detroit Public Schools teacher, she is an expert on diversity in children's literature, youth media, and fan studies.
Janina Edwards, a graduate of New York University's Tisch Schools of the Arts, recorded her first audiobook in 1987. She is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner, as well as a finalist for the Audie Award. In addition to narrating audiobooks, she is a certified yoga teacher, sings kirtan, and plays the violin.
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