The Dark Fantastic
Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
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Narrated by:
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Janina Edwards
About this listen
Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children's publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter.
The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fan-fiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW's The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC's Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world.
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No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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Cloying voice
- By Suzanne on 11-02-19
By: Benjamin Moser
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Witches, Sluts, Feminists
- Conjuring the Sex Positive
- By: Kristen J. Sollee
- Narrated by: Kristen J. Sollee
- Length: 3 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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“Like being deemed a witch hundreds of years ago, being presumed a slut today is cause for ostracism, abuse, and death”.... Archetypes of “witch” and “slut” have been used to police female sexuality and punish women; now, feminists are reclaiming them as positive affirmations. This book unearths the sex positive feminist legacy of the witch in art, music, politics, and popular culture, connecting the fictional witch we love to emulate and fear with real women, past and present.
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Uh Ok
- By Chris J Saretto on 05-05-20
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Superman
- The Unauthorized Biography
- By: Glen Weldon
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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How has the Big Blue Boy Scout stayed so popular for so long? How has he changed with the times, and what essential aspects of him have remained constant? This fascinating biography examines Superman as a cultural phenomenon through 75 years of action-packed adventures, from his early years as a social activist in circus tights to his growth into the internationally renowned demigod he is today.
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Unauthorized and fairly biased
- By AdarkanddrearyKnight on 05-15-22
By: Glen Weldon
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Looking for Lorraine
- The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.
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Radiant
- By Rose Brookins on 03-20-19
By: Imani Perry
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The Western Canon
- The Books and School of the Ages
- By: Harold Bloom
- Narrated by: James Armstrong
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon.....
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A personal and opinionated book on the Canon
- By Steffen on 07-23-12
By: Harold Bloom
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Shakespeare in a Divided America
- What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned.
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An Entertaining History Lesson
- By David on 08-17-20
By: James Shapiro
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The Art of the Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the postpsychological novel.
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Informative and Inspiring
- By Mo on 11-27-21
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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Wasteland
- The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror
- By: W. Scott Poole
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 20th century, World War I was the most devastating event humanity had yet experienced. New machines of war left tens of millions killed or wounded in the most grotesque of ways. The Great War remade the world's map, created new global powers, and brought forth some of the biggest problems still facing us today. But it also birthed a new art form: the horror film, made from the fears of a generation ruined by war. From Nosferatu to Frankenstein's monster and the Wolf Man, the touchstones of horror can all trace their roots to the bloodshed of the First World War.
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An interesting take
- By CN on 07-30-19
By: W. Scott Poole
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The Man Who Invented Fiction
- How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
- By: William Egginton
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.
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Very Interesting and Informative, but Poorly Read
- By LCorSMT on 06-21-23
By: William Egginton
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Antigone Rising
- The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths
- By: Helen Morales
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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A witty, inspiring reckoning with the ancient Greek and Roman myths and their legacy, from what they can illuminate about #MeToo to the radical imagery of Beyoncé.
By: Helen Morales
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Feminism and Pop Culture
- Seal Studies
- By: Andi Zeisler
- Narrated by: Angela Reed
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Whether or not we like to admit it, pop culture is a lens through which we alternately view and shape the world around us. When it comes to feminism, pop culture aids us in translating feminist philosophies, issues, and concepts into everyday language, making them relevant and relatable. In Feminism and Pop Culture, author and cofounder of Bitch magazine Andi Zeisler traces the impact of feminism on pop culture (and vice versa) from the 1940s to the present and beyond.
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Really needs an update
- By Lori Grossman on 04-05-18
By: Andi Zeisler
What listeners say about The Dark Fantastic
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Bruce
- 06-05-23
Adds lots to think about
I found this book especially helpful in filling voids in my own experience. Living outside of UK/USA and teaching Juv/YA fantasy literature courses, I am quite unexposed to serialized TV programs from those societies, aside from some dvd boxsets of Buffy and the like. I was hoping this book would deal with some of the thousands of printed titles I survey with my students, but am satisfied to at least expand my awareness of television, fanfic and the blogosphere.
Also, I wonder if the "dark" matter addressed by Edwards would have developed differently if instead of light/dark (=good/evil) polarity, our ancient ancestors had defined day as verdant green & night as cobalt blue. Or if they had been nocturnal for whom the bright sun was deathly and night was warm, safe and cozy. That might have flipped our good/evil paradigm resulting in an ingrained fear of the light side of the Fantastic/Force/magic/psyche/race. As it is, I am not sold on the suggestion that "dark" fantastic comes from an intentional racist construct. But I do not deny that it can be felt as a racist construct. Thomas could have discussed more the difference in culpability between the writers of books, the publishing industry, and a studio's economic-driven media adaptation.
From my perspective, the paucity of Asian leads in the fantastic would lead to the consideration of yellow fantastic. Since my experience is quite different from Edwards', when she sees dark themes and equates it with black bodies, I am inclined to wonder about yellow/brown bodies. And as things have developed, my students query about Pride bodies. The asian angle does complicate things, as we saw when Japan's Studio Ghibli lightened the characters in Le Guin's Earthsea and we are seeing now as the Little Mermaid remake is floundering in China and S. Korea.
With so many ways to insult by non-inclusion today, and with probably many more potential faux pas in the coming centuries, writing is a risky business. Ultimately, what does Thomas suggest that authors supposed to do to remedy the situation?
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-28-21
Ready to reimagine our world.
As an avid reader as a child I didn't question the world's I was diving into just as I didn't question the one I was living in. I am thankful to have listened to this book because now I am better equipped to see the world as it is, AND how we will rebuild it for the future.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Suprised
- 09-26-21
A great personal perspective
I think this was very well written and supported essay. Lots of points were well supported and I thought were interesting to think about.
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