Skip to content
FREE SHIPPING ON ALL DOMESTIC ORDERS $35+
FREE SHIPPING ON ALL US ORDERS $35+
The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games - Paperback | Diverse Reads

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

Availability:
in stock, ready to be shipped
$20.00 - $20.00
$20.00
$24.99
$24.99 - $24.99
$24.99
Winner, 2022 Children's Literature Association Book Award, given by the Children's Literature Association

Winner, 2020 World Fantasy Awards

Winner, 2020 British Fantasy Awards, Nonfiction

Finalist, Creative Nonfiction IGNYTE Award, given by FIYACON for BIPOC+ in Speculative Fiction

Reveals the diversity crisis in children's and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imagination

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 21st 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.

In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”

ISBN-13: 9781479806072

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: New York University Press

Publication Date: 09-22-2020

Pages: 240

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

Series: Postmillennial Pop #13

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 and National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, she is an expert on diversity in children’s literature, youth media, and fan studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination Gap 1

1 Toward a Theory of the Dark Fantastic 15

2 Lamentations of a Mockingjay: The Hunger Games' Rue and Racial Innocence in the Dark Fantastic 35

3 A Queen out of Place: Dark Fantastic Dreaming and the Spacetime Politics of Gwen in BBC's Merlin 65

4 The Curious Case of Bonnie Bennett: The Vampire Diaries and the Monstrous Contradiction of the Dark Fantastic 107

5 Hermione Is Black: A Postscript to Harry Potter and the Crisis of Infinite Dark Fantastic Worlds 143

Acknowledgments 171

Notes 177

Bibliography 199

Index 213

About the Author 225