Home > Author > Ebony Elizabeth Thomas
1 " 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. "
― Ebony Elizabeth Thomas , The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
2 " 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. "
3 " The affordances of the first person perspective for audience engagement also create a significant challenge in that the Dark Other is always focalized through a White protagonist's eyes. "
4 " Words matter, and the fantastic has multiple resonant connotations. The fantastic captures the wonder of stepping into a world-that-never-was, and immersing yourself in it in a way that speculative fiction does not. "
5 " 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. "
6 " Maybe it’s not that kids and teens of color and other marginalized and minoritized young people don’t like to read. Maybe the real issue is that many adults haven’t thought very much about the radicalized mirrors, windows, and doors that are in the books we offer them to read, in the television and movies we invite them to view, and in the fan communities we entice them to play in. "
7 " 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. "
8 " When readers who are White, middle class, cisgender, heterosexual, and able-bodied enter the fantastic dream, they are empowered and afforded a sense of transcendence that can be elusive within the real world. If this is the case, then readers and hearers of fantastic tales who have been endarkened and Othered by the dominant culture can never be plausible conquering heroes nor prizes to be won in the fantastic. Unless the tale is meant to be comedic, tongue-in-cheek, a wink and a nod that breaks the fourth wall and assures audiences that this is a parody of the fantastic, not the real story . . . . . . the implicit message that readers, hearers, and viewers of color receive as they read these texts is that we are the villains. We are the horde. We are the enemies.(Page 23). "
9 " 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. "
