I. Defining Diversity. Blood rules : racial passing and the commodification of difference in Victoria Aveyard's The Red Queen / Sarah Olutola ; The fairy race : Artemis Fowl, gender, and racial hierarchies / Kathryn Strong Hansen ; Enchanting the masses : allegorical diversity in fairy-tale dystopias / Jill Coste -- II. Erasing Race. Neoliberalism's erasure of race in young adult fiction : Sherri L. Smith's Orleans as counterexample / Sean P. Connors and Roberta Seelinger Trites ; (De)stabilizing the boundaries between "us" and "them" : racial oppression and racism in two YA dystopias available in Swedish / Malin Alkestrand ; Postracial futures and colorblind ideology : the cyborg as racialized metaphor in Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles Series / Sierra Hale -- III. Lineages of Whiteness. "I've connected with them" : racial stereotyping and white appropriation in the Chaos Walking Trilogy / Meghan Gilbert-Hickey ; Asian masculinity, Eurasian identity, and whiteness in Cassandra Clare's Infernal Devices Trilogy / Elizabeth Ho ; Eugenics and the "purity" of memory erasure : the racial coding of dis/ability in the Divergent Series / Alex Polish -- IV. Racialized Identities. "Vine Head," "Snake Lady," "Swamp Witch" : racialized othering in Nnedi Okorafor's Zahrah the Windseeker / Joshua Yu Burnett ; Between "Castoff" and "Half-Man" : pressuring mixed-race identity in The Drowned Cities / Susan Tan ; Black girl magic : bioethics and the reinvention of the trope of the mad scientist in black YA speculative fiction / Esther L. Jones ; Fore-fronting race and law : Ambelin Kwaymullina's The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf and challenging the expectations for idealized young adult heroines / Zara Rix.
Summary:
"Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction offers a sustained analysis of race and representation in young adult speculative fiction (YASF). The collection considers how characters of color are represented in YASF, how they contribute to and participate in speculative worlds, how race affects or influences the structures of speculative worlds, and how race and racial ideologies are implicated in YASF. This collection also examines how race and racism are discussed in YASF or if, indeed, race and racism are discussed at all. Essays explore such notable and popular works as the Divergent series, The Red Queen, The Lunar Chronicles, and the Infernal Devices trilogy. They consider the effects of colorblind ideology and postracialism on YASF, a genre that is often seen as progressive in its representation of adolescent protagonists. Simply put, colorblindness silences those who believe-and whose experiences demonstrate-that race and racism do continue to matter. In examining how some YASF texts normalize many of our social structures and hierarchies, this collection examines how race and racism are represented in the genre and considers how hierarchies of race are reinscribed in some texts and transgressed in others. Contributors point toward the potential of YASF to address and interrogate racial inequities in the contemporary West and beyond. They critique texts that fall short of this possibility, and they articulate ways in which readers and critics alike might nonetheless locate diversity within narratives. This is a collection troubled by the lingering emphasis on colorblindness in YASF, but it is also the work of scholars who love the genre and celebrate its progress toward inclusivity, and who further see in it an enduring future for intersectional identity" -- Provided by publisher
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.