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Young, Helen. Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness. London: Routledge, 2016. 224 pp. Hardcover. ISBN: 978-1-138-85023-1. $140.
Published in the Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature Series, Helen Young's Race and Popular Fantasy Literature raises questions about fantasy as a mode that is both complicit in the creation of racialized representations of otherness and seeks to subvert them at the same time. To examine not just specific works but also their role within larger material-semiotic systems, Young adopts the lens of "the Fantasy genre-culture" (1), in which interrelatedness of both components is stressed without denying their different capacities. Fantasy genre conventions, Young explains, are textual features-like settings, characters, or plot types-drawn mostly from medieval European culture and history. The culture aspect of fantasy, by contrast, is made up of habits that shape discursive practices among authors and the audience. The eponymous "habits of Whiteness," Young asserts, are ubiquitous in fantasy because they have had strong presence in the genre-culture complex. Young's book is thus structured around two key claims: "Fantasy habitually constructs the Self through Whiteness and Otherness through an array of racist stereotypes, particularly but not exclusively those associated with Blackness" (11) and "Fantasy formed habits of Whiteness early in the life of the genre-culture, and is [presently] struggling to break them" (10).
Young establishes the foundation of her argument in the first two chapters; chapters three through seven explore how the habits of Whiteness have informed selected works and have been challenged in others. In her first chapter, "Founding Fantasy: J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard," Young identifies the roots of Western fantasy in the works of these two authors. The Sword and Sorcery and High Fantasy subgenres they forged, she claims, established the race-based habits of Whiteness as foundational both for these subgenres and for the fantasy genre-culture as well. Young demonstrates that the racialized worlds of Tolkien's Middle-earth and Howard's Hyboria are Eurocentric mythologized expressions of Anglo-Saxonism-an ideology that, throughout the nineteenth century, shaped ethno-national identity and supposed racial superiority of the English-speaking peoples. In "Forming Habits: Derivation, Imitation, and Adaptation," Young traces how the habits of Whiteness based on racial logics and Eurocentrism became ingrained during the genrefication of fantasy starting in the 1970s; while these models...