“Dispelling Fantasies significantly advances scholarship on works that break from the Western, Eurocentric fantasy tradition, highlighting how Christian virtues and their historical ties to colonialism and white supremacy have shaped fantasy’s bias toward whiteness.” —Taylor Driggers, author of Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature: Fantastic Incarnations and the Deconstruction of Theology
“Sanchez-Taylor introduces a large number of BIPOC authors into the critical arena, engaging with subtleties and variations across different ethnic, religious, and colonialized experiences and revealing how these writers challenge and subvert the fantasy canon. Dispelling Fantasies is creative and insightful.” —Farah Mendlesohn, author of Rhetorics of Fantasy
In Dispelling Fantasies, Joy Sanchez-Taylor examines how authors of color, such as R. F. Kuang, N. K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Tomi Adeyemi, Tasha Suri, Aiden Thomas, Nghi Vo, and Marlon James, among others, offer critical counterpoints to the history of white-dominated, Eurocentric fantasy. The traditional fantasy that these authors are writing against reinforces Christian virtues and colonial, white supremacist structures; Sanchez-Taylor argues that its racial tropes are tied to a history of colonization and Christian missionary practices, with popular fantasy narratives often depicting Indigenous groups as primitive, deviant peoples in need of salvation. Such representations are based on a Western binary of rational versus magical and are influenced by tenets of Christianity, ultimately contributing to depictions of “the dark fantastic” or fantasy worlds where dark and othered characters are implicitly portrayed as evil and irredeemable. Organized around four Christian ideals that appear frequently in Western fantasy texts—virtue, envy, patriarchy, and salvation—Dispelling Fantasies demonstrates how non-Eurocentric fantasy worlds offer alternative versions of morality, race, gender, and sexuality and make space for authors to move away from hierarchical, binary systems of good and evil.
Photo credit: Lia Jay Photography LLC
Joy Sanchez-Taylor is Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY), where her research addresses intersections between science fiction, fantasy, and critical race studies. She is the author of Diverse Futures: Science Fiction by Authors of Color (2021).
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction Dispelling Fantasies
Chapter 1 Virtue: Revising the Moral Order of Epic Fantasy
Chapter 2 Envy: Blood Magic Is Not Always Black Magic
Chapter 3 Patriarchy: Reimagining Gender Roles in Fantasy
Chapter 4 Salvation: Rescuing the Dark Other from the White Savior
Conclusion Decolonizing the Imagination
Works Cited
Index
