Fantastic racism is when speculative
fiction includes racism as a theme in its work but extends it not to non-human
entities. These species will usually be alien in science fiction works, such as
the Prawn of District 9 or na’vi of Avatar, or magical in fantasy works, such
as the talking animals in Wicked or the house elves of the Harry Potter series.
These fictional races allow the author to bring racism their work without
having to worry about upsetting anyone with unflattering portrayals of the
either racists or racism targets.
In any
work where fantastic racism, however, the humans will almost never have any
racism within the species.
No one will care
whether the bugger was killed by a guy from Egypt or Russia.
If the other aliens or magical beings go
away, will the humans just turn on themselves?
Is the fringe lesson supposed to be that racism will always exist unless
we have Orcs to discriminate against?
This is very interesting to me. I never heard of this term before or even thought that something like this existed. It makes the author think they can be racist and it being okay because they are fictional characters which in reality is not okay at all and very irritating to me.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, it does seem that the lesson is that racism will exist. However, I think the authors throw these themes in to prove a point about racism, other than just to have random discrimination. In District 9 for example, the tables turn when the main character sees himself needing help from the Prawn, who he previously discriminated against. He begins to see that the Prawn is a lot more human than he treated it. The Prawns are forced to live in really horrible places, which I guess was inspired by an event in Africa, in which a town was declared whites only, and 60,000 of its residents were forcibly removed (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1916306,00.html). But,this could even relate to the events we read about in which African Americans were forced to live in run down areas. Also, in Wicked along with the talking animals, the main character Elphaba is also discriminated against for being green skinned. She proves to us though that being green makes her no different, and she is frequently standing up for the rights of the talking animals (much like our Civil Right movement). Even in Harry Potter, the elves are the slaves, but it shows that elves can be heroic, or "human" (look at Dobby) and they deserve to be freed. The fantasy worlds in movies and books, I guess are a lot like our world. The authors want to address problems such as racism, in a metaphorical way. I personally, think it can be very beneficial. People get to see how the inferior characters end up being not so different than every other character, and it can really teach a valuable real world lesson.
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