Episode 120: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas
In Episode 120, Flourish and Elizabeth welcome back one of their earliest guests, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, to talk about her book about race, fantasy, fandom (and more!), The Dark Fantastic. Topics covered include what Ebony’s work as a reading professor entails, the themes of the book, Barnes & Noble’s “diverse book cover” controversy, and what to do with the problematic canon of children’s literature. They also discuss a listener’s response to the last episode, about whether Oscar Isaac really can be said to “ship” Finnpoe.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:47] Ebony first appeared on the podcast in Episode 7, “The Dark Fantastic.”
[00:09:18] Elizabeth is referring to “Star Wars, queer representation and the mainstreaming of slash,” an article she wrote for the New Statesman in early 2016.
[00:13:10] Find all our articles about our Shipping Survey in the “Projects” section of the Fansplaining site.
[00:16:11] Our interstitial music throughout is “Quirky Small Town Characters” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
Bonnie Bennett, from The Vampire Diaries
Gwen, from Merlin
[00:29:14] Ebony recommends Helen Young’s Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness.
[00:37:45] Unless you have access to the children’s lit academic journal The Lion and the Unicorn (eg through a university library), it’ll be hard to get behind the paywall—but if you do, you can read “Notes toward a Black Fantastic: Black Atlantic Flights beyond Afrofuturism in Young Adult Literature.”
[00:39:55] Many people have racebent Frozen; here’s just one beautiful example from juliajm15 on Tumblr:
[00:41:05] You can watch Vivian Vasquez’s entire 2014 Ethnography Forum talk on YouTube!
[00:44:44] Alanna Bennett’s article is “What A ‘Racebent’ Hermione Granger Really Represents.”
[00:49:38] For more on the Barnes & Noble book controversy, L. L. McKinney (who Ebony plugs below!) went on All Things Considered and spoke about the situation.
Also, make sure to read Elizabeth’s thread about the whole machine learning situation. Y I K E S!
Some of the covers of the Barnes & Noble books are below. The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde cover is towards the bottom.
[00:54:38] Chimamanda Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story” talk.
[00:52:05] L. L. McKinney wrote A Blade So Black and A Dream So Dark, and the forthcoming A Crown So Cursed.
Tor published a list of favorite retellings of classic stories that you might want to read instead of the “diversity cover” versions.
[01:01:52] Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer looks amazing!
[01:07:24]
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #120, “Ebony Elizabeth Thomas.”
FK: Yes! And as you can probably guess from that title, we are having the return of one of our very first guests, Ebony, to talk about her book The Dark Fantastic.
ELM: It’s like such a journey, you know? She was working on it when we had her on. It’s not really a journey. She had the journey, like, off-screen. [FK laughs] I don’t know why I feel like we’re now part of this narrative, but you know, it’s really, it’s exciting to have a guest come back on, but it’s especially exciting to have them on to talk about the conclusion of something that was in progress the first time.
FK: Yeah, it really really is. So we’ll, in the show notes, if you wanna catch up on what she said last time—which was like four years ago now!—we’ll have a link to her last episode with us. And before we call her, though, there’s a couple of pieces of things that we wanted to talk about.
ELM: Well first let’s talk about the thing that relates to her!
FK: All right!
ELM: So, The Dark Fantastic: really really interesting book, it is about, oh God. It’s about so many things! But it’s about race and literature, especially children’s literature. It’s about black girl characters.
FK: And it’s about fandom and the way those things intersect!
ELM: It focuses on, there’s some broad theoretical stuff…I would describe it as a very accessible academic book. It’s undeniably academic, but having read a lot of academic books I would say that this is one of the most accessible ones I’ve read. I don’t know if you felt the same way.
FK: Yeah, definitely.
ELM: And so she, she has some broader theoretical stuff, but then she also has four case studies and they are Rue from The Hunger Games, the Harry Potter—Hermione but also Angelina Johnson, and then Bonnie Bennett from The Vampire Diaries television show, and Gwen from BBC Merlin. Exciting if you wanna read some scholarly literature on BBC Merlin!
FK: And the reason we’re saying all this is that we have two hardback copies of it to give away.
ELM: Yes, we accidentally got our hands on two extra copies. We’re not giving away our copies. And so we thought, why don’t we have a drawing of some kind? So we’ve never done this before, this may go terribly.
FK: We’re gonna find out. So send us an email at fanplaining at gmail dot com with the subject line “The Dark Fantastic” if you’d like to be entered into this drawing. And you need to do it by February 28, so that’s the last day of February, and include your—like, some way for us to contact you. Presumably your email will work.
ELM: Wait, yes. They’re going to email us so we can email them back.
FK: There ya go. We’ll email you back.
ELM: Don’t email us from some sort of weird burner account! [laughs]
FK: Oh my God. Well, seriously though! Yeah.
ELM: You don’t have to use your real name at all, even, even if you are the winner. But we will need a physical mailing address. So…
FK: Yeah, cause a book has to go somewhere.
ELM: If that’s not something that you wanna share privately, then don’t enter. But otherwise totally feel free to use a pseud or something like that, we will not share this with anyone at all obviously. So yeah, good luck!
FK: All right. What’s the next thing, Elizabeth?
ELM: All right, well, speaking of giving us your mailing address…that’s a terrible transition, but that’s one thing you could do if you were a patron of this podcast!
FK: Yeah! So we, ah, as you probably know we are not funded in any way by anybody except for listeners and readers like you. And we don’t break even yet still, but we are very grateful for all the support we get from fandom. So if you would like to make sure that we can keep making this podcast, patreon.com/fansplaining. There’s lots of great rewards, you can give as little as a dollar a month, and we really appreciate everyone who supports us!
ELM: OK so the reason we are bringing this up now in the front-of-show business, though, is because we have something new for patrons. And if you are a patron, you will have already seen this because it already came out. But if you didn’t see it, we did a special episode on Birds of Prey.
FK: Yeah!!
ELM: Or as we’re supposed to call it now, Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey?
FK: Eh. Indeed. [both laugh]
ELM: So, yeah.
FK: My bad.
ELM: We saw this together in our favorite way to see movies together: at the 4DX sound and motion theater.
FK: We got rained on!
ELM: Yeah, we—every time the mist came out, I lost it. I will say, having only ever seen X-Men: Dark Phoenix in 4DX…you’ve seen other films.
FK: Yes.
ELM: What I took away was there was far less blunt-force trauma in that X-Men film than there was in Birds of Prey.
FK: Oh yeah, there was a lot of bashing.
ELM: It was a little painful. Cause every time, well, you can tune into the podcast to hear our feelings about getting…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: …punched repeatedly by your chair. But, uh… [FK laughs] Really, a movie that we really enjoyed and the conversation, the movie actually opened up a conversation to talk a little bit about the box office conversation around it and the marketing conversation, which I would highly recommend because I’ve seen a lot of well-meaning but factually dubious commentary about this on Twitter, and Flourish is an actual expert…
FK: I don’t know about expert.
ELM: I think you know more than, well, you know more than almost anyone I know., probably more than most people that our listeners know, about how Hollywood works.
FK: I will accept that.
ELM: I would recommend it for that reason. So that’s for $3-a-month patrons or, or more. So you also get access to our most recent Star Wars special episode, very different things like The Favourite or The Good Place, so there’s all sorts of stuff in there if you pledge $3 a month.
FK: All right. I think the last piece of business we have after that to do is we have a question, don’t we?
ELM: We do have a question and I’m going to read it. We got a bunch of questions from our AMA episode…
FK: Hooray!
ELM: …which makes sense, because you know, there was a lot of different topics. And so we’ll do the other ones hopefully the next episode if not within the next few episodes. But we wanted to do this one first. OK, so this was an anonymous submission on our website. There’s a form there. Subject line: “Oscar Isaac…shipper?” OK. Here we go.
“Hi there! Listening to your most recent episode I was struck by what felt like a disconnect between the fannish perspective and the performer’s perspective regarding ‘shipping.’ Specifically in the case of the Finn/Poe relationship. I didn’t watch every interview with Oscar Isaac from the press tour, but I did see the reporting on what he had said about wishing that Disney and the Powers That Be had pushed in a bit more of a romantic direction.
“The listener’s question was about your thoughts on actors shipping non-canon character pairings. The framing of this question and the use by a fan of the term ‘shipping’ is I think the beginning of the disconnect. While media outlets have generalized the use of the terms ‘ship’ and ‘shipping’ in instances like the reporting of Oscar Isaac’s statements, in my opinion those terms do not encompass all the meanings they have within fandom.
“I think that to call Isaac a ‘Finnpoe shipper’ or to say he was ‘shipping’ in these statements is to conflate his motives with fannish ones. I suspect it’s more likely that he simply advocates a wider representation of queer characters in films, and is using whatever power his celebrity confers on him to raise that issue publicly—or perhaps that he feels that as an actor it would have been an interesting thing to play that relationship. As you pointed out, actors are often not writers, but actors often do have to a greater or lesser degree influence on the creation of their characters—although that influence is less likely in something like the Star Wars franchise. He may have other reasons for this advocacy that I can only guess at, but the thrill of having his ship confirmed by canon—which is understandably a fannish motivation—seems to me to be unlikely, simply because the relationship of an actor to a film he appears in is so different than that of a fan to the canon that she loves.
“With that in mind, while I honestly have no wish to have actors vocally participate in fandoms or fannish practices, I do actually want anyone with any power in the film and television industry to continue to push for the issue of queer representation. If they do it by citing specific instances, as Oscar did (“look at those two guys, there’s an opportunity to tell a different story here”), so be it. Especially in a mainstream blockbuster franchise, especially between characters of color.
“Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to have some thinky thoughts.”
FK: All right, so I would be on board with everything this person said except that really I think that what we were talking about with him within shipping was not about this most recent round of conversation, it’s about the way that he interacted about Finn and Poe like, back when The Force Awakens came out, which was totally a shippy—the way he was talking about it it was so…I don’t know how to express it.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: He was, he was just expressing—now whether, I mean, I don’t have access to his personal thoughts. But he was certainly performing shipping, do you know what I mean?
ELM: So I was thinking about this and this letter actually reminded me. In December 2015, I was so struck by the kind of conflation that was going on around this—and it’s some of what the letter-writer is talking about—that I wrote an entire article about it. And I reread it when all this was going down, when all the stuff was going down around The Rise of Skywalker, just to see if it held up, and I was very pleased to find—there wasn’t a single thing in it that I felt like “Oh, I wouldn’t say that now.” Which I don’t feel about most of the things that I reread [FK laughs] from five, six, seven years ago.
But what was happening at the time was Oscar Isaac was, I agree, and my example in the last episode also of my pleasure and my lack of discomfort with James McAvoy shipping Cherik—it was a very similar sort of thing of a “Aah, I love you! My character loves your character! I love him,” you know? And it’s often very flirty with the co-star, and it can feel a little teasing but in both of those cases it didn’t feel teasing to me in a bad way.
But what happened after that was the media and actually a lot of fans started doing the conflations that I think the letter-writer is getting at, where they started to say, “Well, this is a confirmation.”
FK: Right.
ELM: “This is real. Because he’s doing it, it’s real.” And that was really hard to see in the sense of, just in the same way of the other example we had of Michael Sheen saying “I’m reading your fic and I love it and I love this too like you love it,” and then that makes it more real. Because none of these actors are actually, they can play it as shippy as they want—well, not as much as they want. But they can play it more shippy or less shippy, but they are not actually going to affect the script. They do not have as much power as I think people ascribe to them.
FK: So I would take a slightly different tack. Which is to say, I don’t think that Oscar Isaac was like—I mean I think that Oscar Isaac’s feelings about like, quote, “Will Finnpoe happen?” I totally agree that they must be different than your average fan who’s like “I want my ship to be…”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: “…canon.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Of course they’re different! Absolutely. I don’t think that they could be the same because Oscar Isaac like, reads the scripts, and like, sees more of the conversation. Not—I could tell you for a fact as an actor he does not see all of the conversation. But he sees more of the conversation about, like, sort of the process and how those scripts develop than anybody who’s a fan.
ELM: Can we just say, I don’t know how Lucasfilm works, but in the MCU he would see only the pages of the script that he was on, also. So even, I would be—at this point, on a franchise of that size, I don’t know if you know more about this particular franchise…
FK: That’s very common.
ELM: But it’s possible that he is not even seeing the whole script. He’s just seeing his portions.
FK: There are in fact cases where, I mean, I think that Oscar Isaac is a different case, but there are definitely like—just to be clear!—there are cases where actors are not told who they are playing [ELM laughs] until they actually arrive on set.
ELM: Stop it!
FK: No, not even joking! Because people really don’t want leaks, and people are idiots and leak things all the time, so.
ELM: And you wonder why people—not Oscar Isaac, though I don’t blame him for what happened with his performance in the last movie—but you wonder why in some of these big blockbusters everyone is so…not wooden but just kinda neutral, you know?
FK: Yes, yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: It’s like, you didn’t even tell them what they were doing in advance! How are they supposed to just do this on the fly?
FK: Yeah, or more accurately like, I think that typically you would give them notes about what kind of person broadly they are, but like, not enough. Anyway, regardless, the point is: he knows more than a fan knows at every point, so his theories about having your ship quote “confirmed” or whatever, I don’t think that that’s like a one-to-one comparison. But I do think that there was something happening of like—like you were saying, of delight in the idea. Which I think is broadly similar to fandom and not the same thing as a very, like, “Hey, here is an opportunity, I will choose to be an advocate,” you know what I mean?
ELM: Also, when you think about our shipping survey and all of the different perspectives on shipping we encountered, that kind of shipping is totally how a lot of people define shipping, right? “I’m rootin’ for it! Sexy, sounds sexy. I love it, I’m gonna talk about it a lot.” We’ll definitely put the article that I wrote in the show notes so you can get some perspective on what was going on. The media, like, I was really frustrated with the media this past time around, and in 2015, in the sense of, of the way they were totally collapsing a lot of these things.
And I do think that he, he was flipping the script a bit—or just moving it to a different position in 2019 than he had been all throughout. And I think one of the things that we go into a bit more in the special episode, and less so in the last one, is some of our ambivalence about that and rather than seeing it as this pure noble drive for representation, saying it’s a little bit more complicated when you take in the full context of the way that…and I don’t wanna pin this on him and I hate that this example that we had to come up with was, was an actor of color talking about a queer ship with two men of color also, because I understand that that, that heightens the stakes.
FK: I mean it also happens, this is not—the fact that we’re talking about this case, this happens with other actors all the time. This just happens to be the one that is right now, you know?
ELM: There was a few weeks ago, and luckily it fizzled very quickly, Sebastian Stan tweeted—
FK: Yes.
ELM: —er, put on Instagram something that people interpreted as a similar sort of clapback at Disney for the perceived treatment of the Steve/Bucky storyline, to bring it back into the realm of two white men. And I definitely saw some similar commentary about how it was advocating for, and that just felt like a pure conflation of fans’ shipping desires and what they were reading into an actor’s statements, and a conflation of shipping and queer representation.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It was pretty frustrating, and luckily it kind of, it was a bit of a flash-in-the-pan compared to the way that some of these cycles have—I think cause the media didn’t pick up on it and didn’t fuel that into a broader conversation basically, so.
FK: Totally.
ELM: But I did see someone saying, maybe semi-ironically, maybe wholly ironically, but it still made me weary, that he was “braver than the Marines” for writing that on Instagram, so. Saluting Sebastian Stan.
FK: With prayers that that was ironic, uh… [laughs] I think that’s the best answer we’re gonna have for that question.
ELM: Fine.
FK: So I think that we should probably move on to call Ebony!
ELM: OK, but thank you very much for this letter, writer.
FK: Yes!
ELM: I think that these are really complicated things and I think we just need to…
FK: It’s a really good letter.
ELM: It’s a great letter. I did need to clarify a little bit about the full context of the Oscar Isaac thing. Because I think if you were only looking at what had happened in 2019—
FK: Agree.
ELM: —I think that, that yeah, if I was looking at two other people saying “Wow, he wants that ship, he’s a shipper,” like, that—
FK: You’d be like “ugh.”
ELM: I would also critique that rigorously but I think when you take in the full scope of the way that this conversation has happened over the last five years, then it’s a little more complicated for sure. So.
FK: Yeah. All right.
ELM: Yeah?
FK: Let’s call Ebony.
ELM: You think it’s Ebony time? Let’s take a quick break and then let’s give her a call.
[Interstitial music]
FK: OK! It is time to welcome Ebony back to the podcast for the first time in like four years. Welcome, Ebony!
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas: Yay! I’m so happy to be back. Thanks for having me!
ELM: Thank you for coming back!
FK: We are so happy to have you.
ELM: You were our first guest who was not on the panel where we met. You were our first guest that we, I don’t wanna say “first real guest” but…
FK: First non-obligatory guest?
ELM: Nothing against our first set of guests who were all great too…
FK: …but you all were a little obligatory, all of you. [all laugh]
EET: I feel special!
ELM: You are. But what I will say though, because you came on the podcast 100,000 years ago, for anyone who listened to that episode back then, I wonder if we should do a little refresher about your origin story and who you are and all of that before we start talking about the book. Just because it’s been awhile since people have heard from you, just to talk about who you are and how you came to be here.
EET: Wow. So, I feel as if I’ve known Flourish for a million years. [all laugh] Should I say how many years it’s been this year? Because this summer, a bunch of us will have a huge anniversary. So we met in 2000.
FK: It’s been 20 years and that’s horrifying.
EET: Whoo!
ELM: Wow.
EET: Yes. 20 years ago, I met Flourish on a Yahoo!Group.
ELM: R.I.P.
EET: Titled “Harry Potter For Grownups.” HP4GU.
FK: I was not a grownup.
EET: [laughs] I was barely a grownup. I was barely there! I was, well, two years into legal adulthood. So I was, what, I would turn 23 that summer. So I was 22 when I joined.
ELM: You couldn’t rent a car.
EET: I sure couldn’t rent a car.
ELM: Not full adulthood, then.
EET: My frontal lobe wasn’t fully formed. [all laugh] No offense to anyone under 25 listening saying “Hey, what are you talking about?!”
FK: There’s a lot that is explained by the fact that a lot of people’s frontal lobes were not fully formed around that summer. There’s just lots that is explained by that. Just sayin’.
ELM: Wow, wow.
EET: Absolutely. Absolutely. And then I had the pleasure of meeting Elizabeth five years ago through Flourish, and so it’s just been a lifetime, a 21st century time of, you know, being in fandom, thinking about fandom, and now weirdly becoming a scholar of fandom and learning how much I need to learn about fan studies. So, I started in Harry Potter fandom in July 2000. I soon became very active with the FictionAlley archive and message boards. I wrote a fanfiction duology that was controversial titled “Trouble In Paradise” and “Paradise Lost,” it was, I was a salty Harry/Hermione shipper who didn’t get my way. Oh, it seems, I mean, it seemed to matter so much back then! [all laugh] Still kind of matters. We were right!
Then I attempted to write my own Black fantasy young adult novel, but that was back in the early-to-mid 2000s, and that really wasn’t a thing unless you were a genius. So you had to be a Macarthur genius, like Octavia Butler, or you had to be maybe more connected than I was, so I wasn’t connected to the Iowa Writers Workshop or the Clarion workshop, I was just some young high school teacher in Detroit. So that didn’t work out for me.
I ended up going to graduate school and becoming a reading professor and my specialization was children’s literature, so I somehow managed to come full circle and make a book about race and fangirling Harry Potter and other properties count for tenure at the University of Pennsylvania, which, I mean, if I achieve nothing else in life…
ELM: Amazing. This is the dream.
EET: The fangirl dream!
ELM: It’s so good. I’m so excited to talk to you about it. I am, I wanna get a reminder or clarification about what “reading professor” is. So who do you teach? And what are you teaching them?
EET: So a reading professor is someone who teaches those who want to become reading specialists or English Language Arts teachers. So generally they’re the ones who teach reading at the elementary and middle school level. I became one because when I finished my PhD in the joint program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, there were two different kinds of jobs available: there were people training high school English teachers, that were largely located in English departments, and I applied for those, and then there were literacy K-12 jobs in schools and colleges of education. So I landed in the Reading, Writing, Literacy program at Penn a couple of years after graduation. Before that I was in the Reading, Language & Literature program at Wayne State University in my hometown of Detroit. So yeah, reading professor, it’s a thing! I love to read and so now I get to profess reading, which is super duper cool.
ELM: That’s really interesting. Wait, so, I only have questions about reading professors which is not what we brought you hear to talk about, but like…
FK: No but it’s interesting cause it’s in that category of like, you know how sometimes when you’re like, growing up as a kid, you’re like “I have an idea of five jobs!” And then you get to be an adult and you’re like “Whoa! Those five jobs were only like, five jobs! And there’s a bajillion jobs everybody has and what are these jobs? How do they work?!” You know? This is totally like that. [all laugh]
EET: Yeah!
FK: Just a microcosm.
ELM: Well I mostly, I’m just, I am interested in the sense of like, so, a lot of English professors I think it might be fair to say don’t have their fingers on the pulse [FK laughs] of the current publishing industry? And I have to imagine, I know you have a lot of sense of the publishing industry just based on having read and seen your work. But I’m wondering if that’s a part of it too cause you’re thinking about what’s currently available for kids as they learn to read. So you like have more of a sense of what is contemporarily out there. Which I think connects directly to what we’re gonna talk about, too, in terms of diversity and stuff like that.
EET: Absolutely! Because one of the differences is that in the English department in general, your focus is on texts and culture. So you’re thinking about you know, the book itself, you’re not as much focused on readers except for theoretically. So they would tell me “Oh no, Ebony, we think about the reader too,” but they think about The Reader, capital T, capital R—
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah!
EET: —and in my department, what I do, what my colleagues do, and what we train our students to do, is to think about readers, small R, plural, by going out and actually conducting empirical research around reading.
And so what I’ve been doing over the past decade or so is really thinking about how kids and teens—well, also young adults—read the word and the world around them. Which is a phrase from Paulo Freire, a famous Brazilian critical educator: “reading the word and the world.”
ELM: That’s really interesting and it’s interesting that, so you would agree that that doesn’t necessarily extend back to the English department, which is kind of a shame, because literature and readers—lowercase-R readers—exist in the world together.
EET: Absolutely.
ELM: [laughs] I don’t wanna make you trash your colleagues!
EET: Well…
FK: No but it seems like that this is also like, really connected into the, the whole like, concept—the whole existence of fanfiction, right? Is that fanfiction is very much about how like, lowercase-R readers, individual people, choose to see things in a text based on their existence and their context and stuff like that. Then they, you know, those ideas come out in fanfiction, maybe in a more visible way than people usually see it. And sometimes that’s very different than what an English professor would say seems to be [laughs] you know, like, a sensible reading of the text or something like that. Is that, I mean maybe that’s totally the wrong way to think about it, but it was striking me as you were talking about this.
EET: Yes. That’s exactly what I think and I think that it helped me gain more perspective on my own experiences as a reader, as a fangirl, and as a would-be creative writer. So thinking about how my experiences might be or might not be generalizable to others who were having similar experiences, who shared identities with me, whether or not that identity was race or gender or region or generation or genre of interest, I became curious about how we read and I also wanted to expand the definition of “reading books for young people” beyond just the book, because I knew that many of us were reading children’s and young adult literature, and so was everybody else younger than us.
We were reading the books, but then in a new media environment we were also watching the television show or the film that the book was adapted into. We were also participating in online forums, communities, fanfiction, gaming in some cases. I’ve only recently become more interested in gaming because of my burgeoning, my newest latest fandom is the oldest fandom. I’ve become a huge Trekkie since my last podcast recording with you all. So Star Trek Online is where part of the story is, or where part of the paracanon is. So you have to read the novels, read the comics, watch all the shows, participate in the fan communities, and then you need to also play the game in order to get all of the narrative and right now, there just aren’t a ton of people in reading research who are thinking along those lines.
Now, I find that colleagues in fan studies, such as yourself, Flourish, are thinking about that—or Henry Jenkins and others out there are thinking about that. But as a reading professor, I’m really interested in expanding reading and how we think of how folks read beyond just the printed page.
FK: That’s really fascinating because it seems like it must have impact, not to be too essentialist, but having met a few teenage boys in my life, how often like, gaming is one of the places where there’s actually quite a lot of text in a lot of games, you know? And there’s quite a lot that can sometimes be interesting for people and open a door, and sometimes people are just skimming by because they don’t think it’s important, but it actually could be important, could improve their play of the game if they read it. [laughs] You know? I don’t know, I’m really curious to see, are you currently working on research about this or getting into it?
EET: I really want to, but then I have a couple other budding projects post-The Dark Fantastic and—do you know there are now professors of gaming studies?! Or game studies?
FK: [laughs] Yes I do!
EET: Who knew! I mean, this, this is a brave new world! I mean, I would’ve, my dissertation would’ve been completely different had I been coming out of school 10 or 12 years later! I’m sort of jealous of some of the people who are coming out now. Yeah, I’m thinking—
ELM: Maybe you should have married Flourish’s husband instead of Flourish.
EET: Oh no.
ELM: Then you would have learned about it 10 years ago! [laughing riotously]
FK: You should not have done that but also I will introduce you to, there’s someone who I know who you’re going to really like, Clara Fernández-Vara, she does a lot of work on mystery games and how they connect to mystery novels.
EET: Oo!
FK: I think that you guys will get along like wildfire.
EET: Absolutely, that sounds so exciting. You know, I also wanna namecheck Helen Young, whose book Race and Fantasy Literature, she’s a colleague down in Australia. I learned a lot from, but after I turned in The Dark Fantastic. So there were a bunch of colleagues who were just coming out with books around the time I had to finalize mine, so she is one of the few people I’ve read so far who’s done work on Dungeons & Dragons and thinking about race there, and I’d really love to—you know, now that Dungeons & Dragons is something that the cool kids do, I mean, what kind of odd world is this?
ELM: I don’t know how this happened.
FK: Aw man. And I’m gonna introduce you to another person too, Fox Harrell who works with Nick at MIT—he does a lot of stuff on race and games and—anyway, yeah.
EET: OK!
FK: And imagination! And—anyway. Aah!
ELM: But, but, you just mentioned turning in The Dark Fantastic so let’s start talking about it! I’m sorry I started us down this road with my 19 background questions. But, congratulations! It is fantastic, I’m sorry, that was a very cheesy way for me to say that, but yeah, let’s talk about it!
EET: Thank you, Elizabeth! Um, yeah. It was really, it was really exciting to be able to write a book that had been on my mind for about a decade before I first set pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. I really wanted to think about some of the experiences I was having between Harry Potter fandom, initial conversations with publishers about trying to publish a Black fantasy novel, and my experiences reading growing up. And one of the things that I want to do here that I wish I had been able to do in the acknowledgments, and it just didn’t occur to me, was to give credit to my mentors at the University of Michigan.
So this was the kind of work they didn’t train me to do. So they trained me to be a discourse analyst and an interactional ethnographer. So I learned during my five years in my doctoral program how to analyze conversations using a few different methods, and also to look at human interaction with a fine-tooth comb. To comb through both talk and action.
At the time, I was looking at classroom conversations and moments of disjuncture and conflict. For the dissertation. What I didn’t realize until I actually held The Dark Fantastic in my hands is how much the work of Lesley Rex, who was my academic advisor and mentor, who retired in 2010, and her mentor Judith Green at UC Santa Barbara, absolutely influenced how I was able to pull together a lot of disparate threads into a sometimes coherent, sometimes messy whole. And it was really because that interactional ethnographic perspective helped me look at the phenomenon of race in fantasy across these different domains. So it made me comfortable to write it as autoethnography in part, but then not to stop there, because I could’ve written a book that was just about me and my experiences as a reader—but then to really think about what was happening from text to screen and then in those fan communities.
I chose a very limited set of texts because I wanted to use properties that had moved me, narratives that I had participated in, as both a reader in my own mind and then online, and I also needed closed canons. So a few people have said “Well, why did you pick those four books?” Well, those were the four that came out during a very specific time. So the first 20 years of the 20th century, maybe end of the ’90s for Potter. And they were texts that I felt comfortable talking in-depth about, across all these different domains.
And so yeah, it was an interactional ethnography. And I really didn’t think about that until [laughs] I turned in the book, because I did not set out to do it as an IE project! I set out to do something that was completely the opposite of sitting in a classroom and recording discourse or dialogue for a semester or two and then transcribing it and then you code for any interesting moments.
ELM: There are good—it’s funny you talking about, they’re a good four properties, cause they’re very like…something very fannish? I think it’s just the inclusion of BBC Merlin where I’m like, “Only someone in fandom would ever choose…”
FK: It’s sort of true.
ELM: The Hunger Games and Harry Potter, I can see someone like a cultural scholar or whatever, but like…it’s The Vampire Diaries plus BBC Merlin where you’re like “Oh, fandom.” That really, so.
EET: I wanted to be really honest about my text selection too, because I didn’t want to say “Well, there are all these academic reasons why these are the most logical texts.” [all laugh] And that’s just not me! I began in Potter fandom, and then from there you know, that was one of the big three, 2000s, children’s YA books. It was Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games. And of those three I was into Potter and I was into The Hunger Games. And then shortly after I was done with The Hunger Games, I fell straight into CW fandom and I followed Bonnie Bennett’s journey, because I was surprised to see her on screen after the dearth of Black girl characters on the CW during the 2000s. So loved Bonnie, watched her for eight years. And of course, Merlin is someone who I discovered from being in CW fandom under a series of pseudonyms. So.
I really needed to know something about what those fan communities were like. I would say out of the four fandoms, the one that I probably took the most academic lens to looking at would have been The Hunger Games. Simply because I read some of the fanfic—I really enjoyed what Suzanne Collins did in the series, although I know she’s been critiqued recently for, you know, what’s going to happen in the new prequel. I really appreciated Suzanne Collins, but at the same time was troubled by Rue. So I don’t know, I have this ambivalence around The Hunger Games that made me choose it. But those other three properties, or those other three fandoms, were just things I loved and still do.
ELM: OK. So. I know that you talked about it when you were last here, but because it was 100 years ago—I’m picking a different amount of time every time. Because it was a millennia ago… [FK laughs] And also because you know, you were working on it then and now it’s out. So if I had to ask if you could, it’s kind of big, but the central argument or arguments of the book.
FK: Oh my God that face.
ELM: I know that’s big.
FK: I regret that we’re not a video podcast cause no one can see the face Ebony just made. It was a great face.
ELM: Yeah. No no, I, I knew I was gonna get that response too. But, but, as best you could, just so people can have an understanding of what this book is about really beyond the specific examples, but the broader arguments basically.
EET: All right. So I’m actually going to pull up something that I wrote in a recent article to cheat, since this is not a visual podcast. [laughs]
ELM: You just, you just gave yourself away…
FK: You did just give yourself away!
ELM: …I’m just gonna leave it in, so everyone will know! [EET laughing]
FK: But we understand. We get it!
EET: OK. So my first post-Dark Fantastic article, where I’m trying to move away from racism in science fiction/fantasy/fairy tales et cetera and think about what Black creators are doing now that they’re beginning to appear on the page and on screen en masse, beyond just Octavia, Sam Delany and others. I have this article titled “Notes Toward A Black Fantastic: Black Atlantic Flights Beyond Afrofuturism in Young Adult Literature,” that is in The Lion and the Unicorn, and it was part of the special issue on The Brownies’ Book if anyone wants to look that up. But what I said, because I had to summarize my book in a paragraph for the very first time after it was on the shelf.
So, just summing up: “In The Dark Fantastic I explored the way that race operates in the popular fantastic traditions of the West, primarily within mainstream speculative transmedia that is produced in the United States and England and marketed to youth and young adults all over the world, proposing that Black characters in those stories are trapped in a cycle that I call the ‘Dark Fantastic.’ My analysis of popular young adult media reveals pernicious movement through four stages: spectacle, hesitation, violence and haunting. Specifically, I argue in The Dark Fantastic that Black girl characters are especially trapped in imagined storyworlds as monstrous, invisible, and always dying. Their frightening fates mirror the realities of the imperilled Black girlhood in the real world. Only through emancipation, either through Black feminist storytelling or agentive youth restorying online, can such characters escape the cycle of death.”
ELM: Pretty good paragraph! I’m very impressed. [laughs]
FK: I think it is too and I particularly wanna call out the term “restorying,” which I love.
EET: Thank you!
FK: I think it is so, like…
ELM: Yeah!
FK: …evocative. I guess. You know?
EET: Thank you, thank you so much! It’s a term that I coined with my research partner and friend Amy Stornaiuolo, who is also an associate professor of reading at Penn with me, and we literally were sitting around after the polar vortex winter, trying to figure out a phenomenon that I saw on Tumblr. So I told her, I said, “Oh my gosh, look at what all these young people are doing on Tumblr with Frozen!” Because do you remember the racebent Frozen meme, where everyone was sort of racebending Elsa and Anna in all these different ways? And because they canceled classes a lot, because we were, you know, there was a foot of snow that fell every single week that year. So that was I wanna say in the winter of 2014? So gee, six years ago!
Frozen was out, very appropriate cause it was super cold that year, but people were just tired of not seeing diverse princesses. And so we had all kinds of racebent drawings that were on Tumblr, which was before Tumblr was ruined. And when that was sort of the locus of fandom or the fandom multiverse, that and DeviantArt. But I saw those drawings on Tumblr. And I was just really curious about what it meant for reader response. That was sparked by a colleague of mine, Vivian Vasquez, who gave a talk that winter.
So a lot happened in the winter of 2014: polar vortex, racebent Frozen, and then my colleague’s talk at our annual ethnography forum where she talked about young people reading all-white children’s books and drawing themselves into existence. So these were first-grade students who she was observing who were drawing—and they were, I think, I wanna say they were Mexican-American kids. And they were sort of drawing and imagining their own lived experiences into the text. And so I, we give her credit in the article.
So we were trying to figure out what we had seen, between my experiences in fandom and researching classrooms, and her experiences as a researcher of digital literacy. She came out of Berkeley, where she did her PhD with Glynda Hull. So we literally sat—no, we just sat at her dining room table. Her husband was making eggplant parmesan, so they’re San Franciscan Italian-Americans, they owned a restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. Everybody thinks that our diagram on restorying is so brilliant. We took an empty can of tomato sauce and they had a piece—you see where this is going!—and Amy got a piece of you know copier paper. We put it down and we [laughs] we drew around the can of pasta sauce or tomato sauce. And we said “OK, how many different things are we observing these young people doing online in response to persistent textual and narrative erasure?” Once that article came out, we said “You know, Penn is probably going to give us tenure, because no one’s written about this yet!”
But anyway, so her husband was a retired chef, we used his pasta can or, yeah, pasta sauce can, and that was the best eggplant parmesan I have had! [all laugh] Before or since. But that’s how “restorying” came about. I don’t think I’ve ever told that story.
ELM: It’s really good. Amazing!
FK: It’s a good story.
ELM: And now just like 18 months from now Flourish is gonna be in some meeting with some studio executive just blithely going “restorying.”
FK: I totally am!
ELM: “In this town we do a lot of restorying.” [laughs]
FK: No, absolutely, absolutely! No, I think it’s particularly evocative too because it’s like—I mean with the Frozen stuff that you were talking about right, a lot of those drawings are being made by adults and sort of, the idea of like, almost going back to your childhood and you’re not the kid who longed for it anymore, but you can at least make it…you can make it now that you’re old enough to draw something that feels like it’s really complete? I don’t know, it just, it’s very…it makes me misty? Which is sort of weird?
ELM: Misty? That’s a weird adjective to use.
FK: Misty? Like misty-eyed.
ELM: Misty-eyed. Yeah.
FK: Yeah! No?
ELM: Yeah. No, that’s fine.
EET: No, I think it’s great. One of the things that we mention in the article is that they’re young adults. There’s two things there. There’s arguments, as you both well know, that we could extend some definitions of “adolescence” all the way up to 30. You know, so like, the 18-30 age is like, you know, sort of that “new adult”—
ELM: Sure.
EET: —age group that publishers like to talk about, so what’s the next stage beyond young adulthood. And then thinking about the ways in which, like you said, people who are now adults, who are—but still who are child-adjacent, or teen-adjacent, are able to look back and say, “This is what I needed at the time.” You know, so maybe there’s something inside, there’s an inner child that that satisfies. You know, even I’m thinking about Alanna Bennett’s viral article about Black Hermione—you know, what a Black Hermione really means to me—that I cite in the book. You know, Alanna was a young adult. I think she was in her 20s when she wrote that. And so she’s a grown-up, but, you know, she talked about some of her childhood experiences dreaming of, you know, dreaming herself into the text or imagining herself into the text and I think that that’s really important.
Incidentally, I wanna call BS on the executives who are trying to use young Black girls’ imaginings of Hermione as themselves as an excuse for the Barnes & Noble covers! Did you see that?
ELM: Oh yeah. I was hoping we would get to that!
EET: Eeeh, that’s just terrible.
ELM: Incredible! It was also like, his quote…
FK: Wait wait wait wait wait, in case people were listening and they didn’t hear about this—
ELM: Let’s briefly explain what this was.
FK: OK. Yeah. Go on!
ELM: Yes. Who—do you want me to do it, do you want you to do it? I’ll summarize it because I blew up their spot. I don’t know, do you, did you see this Ebony? Cause I don’t know if you were on, I muted that thread immediately. Cause you’re off Twitter a bit right now, right?
EET: Yeah, I’m off Twitter this year until the election’s over at least.
ELM: I got this press release, I like how I’m now centering myself in this narrative. But I did blow up their spot! I got this press release a couple weeks ago and it said that Barnes & Noble—it was a specific Barnes & Noble in New York City, just one store—were partnering with Penguin Random House and their Classics, which is the Western literary canon, quote-unquote, and an outside consulting firm who had come up with this idea to use AI to scour 100 [laughs] that’s the thing that I can’t get over: that they used AI to look through 100 works of classic literature. I don’t think you need a computer program to go through 100 books. That’s usually for like…that’s for like 50,000 book corpus.
FK: This is the classic thing where “we said AI because it sounds cool.”
ELM: Yeah. Well, OK. So they used machine learning to go through these 100 books and look to see which ones, which ones there were no explicit references to the protagonist’s race. And if they weren’t explicitly described as white, then they were good to go and they [laughs] created these quote-unquote “diverse covers” which was…they had variant covers too, I didn’t realize that initially. So they had like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz as a Black girl, and as a girl of Asian descent, and you know, et cetera et cetera.
So. This seemed like the stupidest thing I had heard in a while in the AI bit in the press release, and I sent it to Flourish and I was like “This is gonna go really poorly.” And then when it came…and then they announced it in Publishers Weekly and everyone got really mad, but I didn’t see anyone mentioning the AI part, because they didn’t put that in the article. So then I was like “Also, I got this press release!” And then from then, I don’t think I was the only one that led to their downfall, but I do think this did not help. Because I don’t know who else got that press release. So. That happened.
FK: Yeah, your tweet went very viral.
EET: Yeah.
ELM: So I muted that very fast. [laughs]
EET: Yeah, so an author friend was the one who wrote me about the Black Hermione component. So, an author friend on Saturday texted me and said “Did,” you know, “Eb, did you see this?” And so I don’t know which author said that they blamed everyone who applauded Hermione being Black for this. I don’t know that…
ELM: Oh.
EET: Yeah. Something, I don’t wanna get too messy on your podcast. But. [all laugh] I just, no! Black girls, you know, wanting to be the protagonist of the biggest story of their childhood is not equal to a multi-million-dollar corporation, or a billion-dollar corporation, cynically wanting to jump the diversity wave by repackaging books that, you know, everyone already knows that are readily available! And so…
FK: But also like, also like, you know, not that there’s not—there’s plenty of race stuff to talk about in Harry Potter, but it’s not like it’s The Secret Garden, my personal favorite that they made Mary…like, what?!
EET: Yeah, that’s it!
FK: You know what I mean? Like, there’s…
ELM: This is the thing, yeah. So that’s what I, I got really angry about this because I studied postcolonial lens on British, Victorian literature, right? So it’s like you’re always reading for the racialized language, of course, right? That’s like at the heart of it. And rarely, rarely, rarely, it’s actually quite hard to find explicit references to race in a lot of these books, even when they are obviously racialized and obviously pretty racist.
EET: Right.
ELM: And so there was some, like, the one that sent me over the edge was the cover they did for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, did you see this one? Where it was like, oh it was shocking. It was supposed to be a South Asian man, but they did like a split-screen of his face, and the Mr. Hyde side I saw rightly described as literally what a contemporary super-racist illustration, like, British illustration of a South Asian person would have looked like. It was frankly shocking.
And so it’s like, this stuff that’s actually quite subtextual in Jekyll and Hyde—and there’s racialized ways to read that book and there’s very heavy, there’s very obvious queer undertones in that book as well about the duality—but when you slap that cover on it it makes it look explicitly racist, you know? It’s like, how did you not think this through? I don’t understand!
EET: Yeah, exactly. Well, I wanna—I can give a Black author a shout-out here.
ELM: Yes!
EET: Here is a place where you can do a Black version of something well. So L. L. McKinney’s A Blade so Black and A Dream so Dark are a re-imagining of Alice in Wonderland, but as I wrote about in The Dark Fantastic, when you change the race of a previously white character, the narrative changes. So like for Bonnie Bennett, when she was Bonnie McCullough she had a completely different story in the Vampire Diaries book series than Bonnie Bennett who was Black had on the television show. So the same thing happened in L. L.’s wonderful hands in A Blade so Black. So you know, her Alice is urban, has an edge, it’s almost like Alice in Wonderland meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And so I love her Nightmareverse.
And so you know, one of the arguments I would make, that’s why I told my buddy, when, you know, who texted me about sort of this: “I blame those of you who wanted Black Hermione,” I said “Well, that person is not really considering not only the positionality of those young girls, but also the argument in my book and across my body of work.” So yeah, it’s not just Black Hermione or we just want to, you know, dip white characters in Blackness. It’s the idea that the condition of being Black changes the story, changes what the life of that character is going to be like. Otherwise, your audience won’t be able to suspend disbelief. So I just really wanted to give McKinney a shout-out for that series. Because that’s the way that you do it well.
ELM: Yeah for sure. We should definitely include links to that in the show notes. I saw it featured, there was a list that was going around where it was a bunch of authors of color—I think specifically Black authors, and that was one of the main ones, but there were other ones like that in science fiction and fantasy, so we should probably find that list if people wanna check some of that out.
Because like, the whole thing about it too is like, it is hard to do. You think about kids and reading, I studied some literature that was ostensibly for children through this post-colonial lens, but I don’t know if I would have been—when I was eight what I would have done with it. Like, this is like, an adult project. Right? You know, like…and it’s really, so it’s really hard because I think that these…I wonder how you feel about teaching quote-unquote “the canon,” but I think it’s important to study the canon for what it is, but that’s a hard thing to do for kids.
EET: Absolutely. Yeah.
FK: Yeah. I’m sitting her looking over at the Laura Ingalls Wilder books that I can’t bear to give away but that also, like…
ELM: Slays me. I didn’t know. I had no idea. Flourish, you know I dressed as her for Your Hero Day in third grade?
FK: I didn’t know that. Aw.
ELM: My hero. She was a lady author! Like, she wrote all those books, she churned all the…she didn’t churn any butter. But she did all that hard work.
FK: She probably did churn some butter at some point.
ELM: I don’t think they ever had a cow! Do you think they got their hands on a cow? They had to move.
FK: I’m pretty sure that I read about them churning butter at some point.
ELM: Like every year.
FK: Regardless, they are in that category where they are literally…
ELM: There’s locusts…
FK: …I have a shelf of kids’ books for like, when kids come over, and I almost don’t wanna put them on that shelf, so that no kid can read them. [ELM laughs] But then like I don’t know where else I’m gonna put ’em, it’s a real struggle.
EET: Yeah, what to do with canon is just such a challenge. I mean I plan to go to Prince Edward Island this summer, I have my hotel booked, I need to do flights and I need to email my colleagues up there to let them know I want to come to the biennial conference. I probably should get that done soon. [all laugh]
But anyway my favorite, I’ve made no secret that my favorite children’s book while growing up was Anne of Green Gables and the sequels. And in those books, the N-word is very explicitly used in Book Seven. I still remember the passage and the context. And I think I excused that away when I was 12 by saying “Well, they’re not talking about me!” You know, “This was a long time ago and far away.”
And so I can’t help but, I can’t help but think of Chimamanda Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story” talk, where she mentions how vulnerable and impressionable we are in the face of a story as children. Because growing up in Nigeria she had the same kinds of tales that you and I grew up with here in the States. So she talked about everyone being white and blue-eyed, and they ate apples and they talked about the weather, and I just thought that was so hilarious. Because although I had apples in Michigan, of course my experience would have been different than some of the children I read about in those books.
ELM: It’s interesting because it’s like, I don’t think it’s realistic to ask children to have that kind of self-awareness, right? And I remember when you came, even when you came on last time you were talking about how Anne of Green Gables was an escape for you.
EET: It was.
ELM: And it was a fantasy in a very foreign way, in a way that like, it might not have been…I never, I haven’t read those books, but you know, I’m a white person from physically closer to there, would I have found them as foreign? Probably not. I don’t know. I mean, I’m from the northeast, you know, so it’s still quite a distance. You know.
It’s interesting and you talking about the ideas of the myths that we make and the things that we, it’s about whether you want kids to have to, to exclude themselves from those stories, cause those stories aren’t gonna change, right? Those stories are still embedded in the culture, and maybe that will change over decades, but you know what I mean? It’s really hard to say “Oh, don’t read…” We talked when J. K. Rowling, Terfgate, I don’t know what we’re calling it, but we were saying how frustrated we were at all the people who were tweeting “I never liked those books,” or “Why don’t you read this book by these authors, these trans authors, these queer authors?” And it’s like, “OK but also it’s Harry Potter!” You know? That doesn’t erase the fact that it’s Harry Potter and that it’s this, maybe it’s the most important thing in their childhood, and that’s not gonna go away!
EET: Right.
ELM: You have to reconcile that. You can’t just say “Swap this out for it,” cause it’s someone who’s less problematic.
FK: Right, that’s one of the things that I think is most interesting to struggle with in this, right. Because sometimes it feels like, especially like, in—I mean it must be, you must have a lot of insight into this Ebony from an educator’s perspective. Because sometimes it feels like “Here, we’re gonna swap these books. This one’s the one that’s got,” it’s like “this is a carob cookie,” you know what I mean? “Here’s your diversity carob cookie, and like, you can have, but you can’t have the exciting thing that everybody,” you know, “that everybody around you seems to be reading…”
ELM: That’s a harsh comparison! Carob cookie, just thinking about it I’m disappointed.
FK: Right, but when you’re a little kid you want, you know, you just wanna read the things that everybody seems to be reading and the things that seem like they’re fun, whether or not they’re actually quote—I mean, and obviously things can be good for you and delicious! But sometimes it’s hard to feel that when you’re a kid and it’s also hard sometimes to find it in those moments when like, J. K. Rowling has just shown her entire butt, you know?
EET: Right, oh, absolutely. And you know, this idea that Black kids and teens and adults or, you know, others who are from non-dominant identities, that we are supposed to only want to read and participate in and consume media that mirrors us is something that I think is gonna be relitigated throughout the 2020s. Because see, we’ve needed to advocate and fight hard for mirror media, so media that you know, has people like us in it.
In between interviewing applicants, during this long texting session with my friend, we talked about what will happen if we tell Black readers or others from the margins what it is they can and can’t read. So you know, as we get more diverse media, I’m hoping that we can take a “both and” approach to things, so that you know, yes, I am immersing and consuming media that has Black girls, women, if I’m Black and a girl, or Latinx girls, boys, poor white girls, boys, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know. Queer folk, you know. But also we’re all reading each other’s media too.
And I think one of the things we haven’t really come to is how we get people to think about the windows and doors of the conversation as well as the mirrors. I find that because we’ve had to work so hard on mirrors, we haven’t thought about doors and windows and I’m afraid that there will be some policing of what kids from marginalized and non-dominant identities will be expected to read. So that, you know, “This is not queer enough, this is not Black enough, this is not feminist enough,” et cetera et cetera.
FK: Right.
EET: Maybe it’s a weird fear, maybe I’m showing my generation and my own conservatism by expressing that, but I do think—I did bristle when I heard that, you know, the Black Hermione reading was seen as problematic because “Why do you want Black Hermione, look, you have all these, now you have a burgeoning number of Black protagonists in books and a few on screen, so hush and be content with those.”
FK: I kinda feel like it also goes—it doesn’t just go that direction either, it goes the other way too, right? So one of the things in my job, right, in Hollywood, like: there’s a lot of movies that get made… [all laugh] [funny voice] in Hollywood!
ELM: Yes.
FK: There’s a lot of movies that get made, right, like, for a Black audience. And they are not marketed to white people, I have never seen a Barbershop movie in my entire life, those movies make bank, you know what I mean? Like, I know lots of people who love those movies, I would feel weird like, walking into a theater to see one. That’s how much it’s not, it’s like, not just not marketed to white people, it’s like in order to market it to Black people there’s an idea that it’s sort of actively not marketed to white people, you know what I mean.
EET: Right.
FK: And I feel like it’s, that’s something that also sometimes worries me, right, what happens when you have your little white kid who wants nothing more than to be Black Panther, right. Maybe that’s cute right now, but at some point that becomes like…
EET: Yeah!
FK: “Are you posing as something?”
EET: Right.
FK: And yet, you know, isn’t part of what we want that people can see each other in each other’s stories, right.
EET: Right, right, absolutely. I think it’s all messier than some of us are willing to admit. You know, on all sides. I think that these conversations are long, I think they’re messy, there’s not a perfectly woke answer for every issue in literature and media that arises! [all laugh]
FK: Shocking. Do you mean that we can’t just stamp “woke” on things and be done with it?!
EET: So, you know, I mean, I love and revel in diverse books; I’ve read every single one of these books that have come out, I am anticipating Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer, which is gonna be out from Abrams this spring and it is another Black Panther-inspired West African fantasy that I treasure. But once I finish all those, I’m a very fast reader, and to be quite honest, you know, at the pace that the big publishing houses are putting out Black fantasy books, I mean, that’s one month out of twelve. I’m done with those, I watch Black Panther how many times? Like, how many times am I gonna screen it over the weekends? [all laugh] Eventually I’m not a horrible person if I decide I’m gonna put on The Witcher! I’m not terrible because The Silmarillion, I’m Black and I’m reading The Silmarillion.
So I think I do understand the frustration of Black creatives when they see us loving Game of Thrones, and then there’s almost this sort of glee on the part of—I wouldn’t say Black creatives, but some, you know, some of the elements of Black Twitter or Black social media when we get disappointed by Game of Thrones or media like that, you know, and if you experience racism or sexism in media that’s supposedly not for us, that, “Oh, well, you shouldn’t have been reading or watching or enjoying in the first place.” And I do think that that’s something that I’m going to cover in whatever follow-up I do to The Dark Fantastic, because…
FK: YES!
EET: I mean, people want a celebratory book, like, people were expecting— “I was disappointed in The Dark Fantastic, I was expecting a celebration of Black science fiction and fantasy!” I said “I would have called it The Black Fantastic! I would not have called it the Dark, number one!” [all laugh] Then number two, I feel as if that’s a separate study.
At first I thought about doing the book as two halves, the first half would be taking down racism and examining racism and this cycle in Western speculative fiction, and then on the other side “This is how Black authors and creatives are doing it right.” And not only did I have no time to get the second half done, because that tenure clock is a-tickin’ and it ticks fast… [all laugh] But the other problem was that I truly didn’t believe that we’re 100% right.
Just because I’m trying to finalize my fantasy novel manuscript after all these years, and my agent has lots of questions, my friends have been asking questions, and just to be quite honest, to be perfectly candid, it is difficult as hell to try to write, you know, a Black fantasy novel, you know, based on US myth, based on the pieces that have been handed down to us. It is not some easy paint-by-numbers task! And, sometimes, some of the media we have out, some of the books that we’ve had, the few that have slipped through, there are some things that are problematic in those books and those are things we create. And I talk about that in my article for The Lion and the Unicorn, but that’s in an academic journal so few will be able to access beyond that paywall, but I do—I think we need to talk about it.
Even I didn’t get everything right in The Dark Fantastic. I was slammed by one reviewer for mentioning Hamilton in a positive way. And a lot of critical and radical thinkers have critiqued Hamilton and by extension Lin-Manuel Miranda’s politics. Now, it’s not a reading I agree with, you know, 100%, because I do think that there is still work that can be done on representation, diversity, and inclusion, but also in decolonization, if you get certain things out in the mainstream. So I do think it’s still pretty radical to have Black and brown folks playing, you know, the founders of a very white supremacist colonial nation. I think that that, especially for the time in which he did it, he did it or was writing it during the first half of the 2010s.
And so I just think that considering all factors, even beyond celebration, because there’s a, you know, I think that even amid the celebration of this new era, where we have, you know, sort of the age of Afrofuturism, I think it’s really important for us to be quite honest about who’s being included, who’s being excluded, and how our previous experiences as readers, as viewers, as audiences, and as fans, even those of us from marginalized identities, will carry that into the creation and consumption of these new forms moving forward. So we can’t unsee or undo that previous stuff as we’re consuming the new. And so I really wanna be very thoughtful with whatever I do to follow up The Dark Fantastic.
ELM: OK, so you’re gonna write it like, maybe I can get it in the next six months you think?
EET: [panicked laughter] What, no! [all laugh] This will be…
ELM: I know!
EET: No, what will happen is I will need to take another few years in order to, I know, like, to not only glean responses from The Dark Fantastic, because you know, it’s an academic book. Therefore it is written in Entish and it moves amid the Entmoot. And so therefore…
ELM: Oh wow, yes. [all laughing]
EET: I still don’t have most of my academic reviews! So I need to read what my colleagues have said about it. I need to wait till all these other books are out. I wanna see the Black Panther follow-up, and I wanna get my own novel out!
ELM: All right, that’s fair.
FK: Those are reasonable.
ELM: It’s just so, it’s so exciting to think about too, because like, I’m just thinking about when you first came on and how much this space has, you know, this conversation has evolved so much. And just when you think about the sheer amount of media, just because of the pace of development that will be out within five years, you know what I mean? That’s gonna make it really really interesting, I think, to see. So I’m, I’m very excited for whatever you do next. Excited for all your work!
FK: Me too!
ELM: So you’ll come back on. You don’t have to wait that long to come back on though. If you wanna come back on for anything else before then.
EET: Any time!
ELM: If we’re still doing the podcast five years from now…why not?
FK: Oh my God. Why not?
ELM: Why not, sure.
EET: I will come anytime.
FK: You’re the one who yelled at me for saying we would still be doing it, you know, five years from now.
ELM: You said that was ten years from now. I just didn’t wanna think about ten years from now. Then you said “Bring on the asteroid” ten years from now, so.
FK: Yeah that’s true, OK. Well, anyway. All right. I don’t want the asteroid to hit us now cause that was a really good conversation. If the asteroid hit us, we wouldn’t have any more of those.
ELM: Wow, wow. That’s right. You saved us from Flourish’s metaphorical asteroid.
FK: You saved us from the asteroid, Ebony. [all laughing] Thank you so much for coming.
EET: Always!
ELM: Yeah!
EET: Always a pleasure talking to you two, thanks so much.
[Interstitial music]
FK: Aw, it was such a delight to have Ebony back on!
ELM: Total delight.
FK: I am, I mean, can we make it not like so long? Till the next time?
ELM: [laughs] Oh, I thought you meant our conversation.
FK: No! We could just have only conversations with Ebony, you know, like, just have it be a continuous thing that happens through our entire lives.
ELM: Yeah, the, I mean, yeah, you just wanna make this a three-person podcast with Ebony?
FK: Forever. Also not ending. [laughs]
ELM: So many things forever! So many things that she touched on that I would really love to dig into deeply, many of which are things that I, I see every day people talking about on Twitter, and it just—listening to one single person out loud speaking about that, in a, with a little bit more distance? Reminds me of what a bad medium Twitter is in general. You know? Like…
FK: Yeah, the ability to actually talk in depth, and like… [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, and also like, people sometimes I think try to do this on Twitter and go “These are some thoughts that have been, like, knocking around: Thread.” You know, but it’s like these conversations are so asynchronous and people are at different levels at different times that it just feels like, you know, it’s really nice to hear someone—the way someone is kind of trying to put all these pieces together in their mind, sort of work through it out loud in real time. I really really valued that.
FK: Absolutely. And the whole book is like that, so just to remind everyone, we’re giving away two copies of it. Send us email, fansplaining at gmail dot com, with the title of the email “The Dark Fantastic” in order to be entered into a drawing for those books.
ELM: You don’t have to give us your address unless you are selected as one of our two winners.
FK: In fact please don’t, because I don’t want to—just, hold on to your address until you win. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. And if you are listening to the next episode and you did not hear from us, I’m sorry you didn’t win. Hopefully we’ll have something else to give away in future.
FK: I’m sure we will. Well, I think that’s about it, but we should mention that if you have questions, comments, thoughts, you can reach us at fansplaining at gmail dot com. Title your email something other than The Dark Fantastic if you don’t want to be entered in that giveaway.
ELM: If you have thoughts about The Dark Fantastic or about our conversation with Ebony, put something else in the subject.
FK: Put something else in the subject!
ELM: You can say, “Different thoughts about The Dark Fantastic.”
FK: Yeah, right. You can also call in and leave us a voicemail at 1-401-526-FANS. You can message us on Tumblr. We have an open askbox, anon is on. We’re on Twitter or if you must on Instagram or Facebook. We are fansplaining at all of those places. And then there’s a little form on our website if you want to leave an anonymous comment and don’t want to hear back from us unless we choose to read you on the air, you can leave something in that box.
ELM: You said that so threateningly! [laughs]
FK: Well OK look, but it is annoying when someone leaves a comment and we’re like “Well, we don’t want to read this on the air,” but we have no way to respond to them otherwise.
ELM: Yeah, it’s frustrating. And we’ve said that a bunch, so hopefully that is sinking in for people. And then you can also leave us a comment if you are a patron on Patreon! We’ve read some of those before. Of course that’s a great place to leave comments because it also means that you’re pledging money to us.
FK: All right.
ELM: It’s actually my favorite place to receive comments, so as a reminder, patreon.com/fansplaining. That’s not true, I like all our comments, whether you donate to us or not. But patreon.com/fansplaining and as a final reminder, out now, our Birds of Prey special episode. If you enjoyed the film and wanna hear people enjoying the film, you should pledge.
FK: All right. With that, I’ll talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: OK, bye Flourish!
[Outro music]
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