I'm curious

[gretagarbled]

do other black people feel happy about the portrayal of black characters in fantasy literature? I'm 16yr old girl of Nigerian descent and have just re-read the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini and was thinking about this quite seriously. In many of the fantasy novels I've read, the author either goes with the 'Calormenes' school of thinking

Comments

[aqeldroma]

Oh, how timely.

I suggest you google "Racefail 2009" and read up on it. VERY on point to what you're discussing.

[weaselistic]

Or best start here with an overview:
http://rydra-wong.livejournal.com/155427.html

(It's too big a discussion and on too many different websites and blogs to hope that Google would help you understand the context, I believe.)

[aqeldroma]

Only 425 hits ;)

[weaselistic]

Light reading for an afternoon!

No, honestly, I have to keep reminding myself how this started out in the first place...

[the_faery_queen]

i think i've read only one book with a nonwhite character, and that was one of david gemmels. they are seriously underwritten, but i think that most fantasy writers are white, so they right about what they know. i think that's why there are, or were, a lot of male leads in books, most writers for a while were male. it's changing now tho. but, as a female who writes about male leads, i don't know why people don't try to write characters of other races. but perhaps they're afraid of it coming off badly and being accused of racism, or being politically correcgt.

[christa_wolf90]

I think it's because a character that's white, blond, and rich is more interesting to most readers (stupidly) than a normal, black character. It's like the media; whenever a rich, pretty-looking white girl goes missing, they're all over that. But when a poor, normal-looking black girl disappears, they ignore it. And they call us the most advanced and smartest species!

[comrade_cat]

i think i've read only one book with a nonwhite character, and that was one of david gemmels

There aren't that many out there that I know of. Some books that I liked that do have nonwhite characters were the Earthsea books by Ursula K Le Guin; The Watcher's Mask by Laurie J Marks (the main character is only physically described once that I remember, but when she is, it says she's dark-skinned); Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson; & The Stone Mage and the Sea by Sean Williams.

Publishers are also to blame. When Eric Flint submitted his first novel, his publisher told him to put in a viewpoint character who wasn't black or alien.

[vaegue]

As a non-white female writer, I'm indifferent. Race isn't just about skin colour. Race formulates your core beliefs and your very identity. I'm fine with white people writing non-whites as secondary characters, provided they research about it well, but very often, white writers who write their main characters as Asians... get it very wrong.

And I'm not trying to be racist from a completely different angle. There's plenty of media in Asian countries with Asian protagonists. Really. And in those countries, it is just as easy to find book about a white character as it is to find a book about a non-white character in a Western country. It isn't racism, its just cultural.

I'm speaking from a strictly non-American perspective though. Americans have a long history of racial tension, and that's probably why the whole black v. white is so central to the whole racefail argument.

[the_pangolin]

Yeah, but there's an equally long history of racial tension in most other countries as well. For instance the whole white/Turk/black issue in Switzerland, or the UK where you still get people calling others "wogs" (some of my worst childhood memories involve that word). In Panama City, Panama blacks are welcome but native peoples are seen as intruders; in the interior of the country, it is the reverse. Such is human nature.

[the_pangolin]

This is partially why LeGuin was so furious about the televised adaptation of her books -- they made her copper and brown-skinned protagonists into crackers.

In any event, living in Harlem I have often worried about the racial issue in relation to books for young people. I'd actually like to try and write a series of books for young adults in which the protagonist(s) are black, if only so that there is an alternative out there.

[tigerweave]

I thought about this issue long and hard when creating my fantasy world and the peoples within it. I had a human race that I think of in my head as being white, but then they come from a climate where not a lot of melanin in their skin is the likely evolutionary response