Despite much progress, racism remains a pressing social issue, highlighted by recent events, including immigration and refugee debates, “free speech” protests and counter-protests, “corona racism,” the George Floyd protests, and so on.
“Like Sauron and his One Ring before the events of Tolkien’s stories, racism lives on. Indeed, it remains as dangerous as ever. Those who neglect to confront that danger do so at the peril of all”, MA Nicholas Wanberg says.
Meanwhile, speculative fiction, including science fiction, fantasy, and related genres has risen from obscurity to become one of today’s largest and most profitable popular entertainment genres. According to Wanberg’s study, the two interlink.
Wanberg’s dissertation shows that popular speculative fiction has and continues to construct fantasy and alien “races” in dialog with racial beliefs in the real world. As ideas change about what constitutes race among real-world humans, speculative races change to match.
"For example, early twentieth-century racists built complex classification systems with races, sub-races, and sub-sub-races to explain human variation. Over the century, popular understanding of race simplified to using only high-level categories without subdivisions. Likewise, early twentieth-century works like Tolkien’s have races with numerous complex sub-divisions”, Wanberg describes
As popular beliefs about races simplified, so did fantasy and science fiction divisions, moving toward only one high-level group of each type with few or no sub-divisions. On the rare occasions where sub-divisions still occur, they are usually of groups like elves, mirroring or adapting Tolkien’s system.
This construction of race in speculative fiction encompasses everything from abilities and constitutions to smells, the effects of intermixing, who is considered “normal,” gender relations, and reproductive and sexual anxieties.
Anti-Racism and Ideological Openness
While the works use these racialized creatures to construct racially ordered, hierarchal societies, they also deploy them toward anti-racist ends. The works employ, critique, and negotiate different anti-racist strategies alongside racial depictions of non-humans without contradiction.
This employment allows them to create an ideological openness whereby audiences from across the political spectrum can engage with the works without feeling their beliefs are challenged. Indeed, by choosing which details to focus on, they can feel the stories validate their worldview.
Rather than tacking toward the center of the mainstream, these popular works ensure mass appeal by encompassing the full range of mainstream positions. Nonetheless, each maintains a specific, highly nuanced stance, even while allowing this openness toward alternative readings.
Public defence on Tuesday 20 June
The doctoral dissertation of MA Nicholas Wanberg in the field of languages titled The Human Race Vs. the Minorities: Racism, anti-racism, and intelligent non-humans in the world architecture of speculative fiction will be publicly examined at the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University at noon 20/06/2023 on the main campus, Pinni B 1096 (Kalevantie 4, 33100 Tampere). The opponent will be Dr. Meghan Gilbert, Ph.D., City University of New York. The Custos will be Dr. Johannes Riquet, Ph.D., Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences.
The doctoral dissertation is available online.
The public defence can be followed via remote connection.
Photograph: Nicholas Wanberg