Can Fantasy Free the Fantastic?: Whiteness, Marginalization, and the Productive Potential of the Fantastic in Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch

Can Fantasy Free the Fantastic?: Whiteness, Marginalization, and the Productive Potential of the Fantastic in Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch Bevin Roue (bio) When Nnedi Okorafor won the 2011 World Fantasy Award for her novel Who Fears Death, she was the first Black writer to do so. At the award ceremony, she was presented with the World Fantasy Award trophy—at the time, a bust of H. P. Lovecraft, an influential fantasy and horror writer. He was also a notorious racist. Though Okorafor is a Black writer who identifies as Nigerian-American and Igbo, her greatest professional achievement was honored with the image of a racist1 (“Lovecraft’s racism”). The choice of Lovecraft as the World Fantasy Award model, a choice that stood for over thirty-five years, and the lack of embarrassment in presenting Love-craft’s head to a Black woman2 illustrate two broad tendencies in fantasy literature and its wider culture. First, fantasy has a long-standing problem with whiteness. By whiteness, I refer not to a biological marker like skin color, but to a system of power and privilege developed and maintained by “deliberately contrived ruling-class” (Allen 3) maneuverings. This system socially constructs a center of white dominant norms, and marginalizes, or pushes out and keeps out, those who do not fit within those norms. These actions operate in society at a structural level and are “a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed” (Frankenberg 1). No one declared the World Fantasy Award a white award, but it was very much a white award. Second, inclusion of diverse writers for award consideration does not, by itself, solve this problem of whiteness. Increasing racial representation in fantasy award nominations, important as it is, without naming and addressing the system of whiteness leaves the structural problems in place. [End Page 81] The problem of whiteness in fantasy (imaginative narratives about worlds that bend, defy, or contradict our rules of reality, along with the broader cultures associated with those narratives such as fandom and marketing) is not limited to the genre’s awards. Many of the genre’s more popular works nestle themselves in white, European, medievalesque worlds—from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth to C. S. Lewis’s Narnia to Terry Brooks’s Shannara to Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain to J. K. Rowling’s Hogwarts. These worlds, predominantly populated by white people saved by white heroes, cast whiteness as pervasive yet leave it unnamed and uninterrogated. The result recreates the dominant culture of whiteness within the confines of the fantastic. Nnedi Okorafor is an out-spoken critic of white hegemony and colonialism in fantasy culture. She has spoken publicly, for example, against the World Fantasy Award trophy (“Lovecraft’s racism”). While her fiction, both children’s and adult, also subverts many of the implicit biases surrounding the assumed normativity of whiteness often found in fantasy genres,3 scholarship focusing specifically on her consideration of whiteness is uncommon. Scholars more often have focused on Okorafor’s postcolonial critique of Western modes of being and knowing. Both Alice Curry and Judith Rahn, for example, have explored ways Okorafor expands Western concepts of the human. Curry argues that Okorafor’s “hybrid identities” (38), notably Sunny’s agency in the “visible and invisible” (38) worlds of the physical and the magic world, call into question Western ideas around ecocriticism. Okorafor’s writing, according to Curry, reveals an “animistic mode of being-in-the-world that successfully deconstructs the human-environment or culture-nature dichotomy” (38) at the root of ecocriticism. Likewise, Judith Rahn considers the “narrative shifts” (83) in Okorafor’s Lagoon, where human, animal, and alien beings all take on a narrator role. Rahn argues the novel “questions the singularity of human experience and underlines the interconnectedness of all life on earth” (83). Other scholars have focused on Okorafor’s postcolonial vision in expanding concepts of genre. Joshua Yu Burnett, for example, highlights a compelling aspect of Okorafor’s texts—a multilayered criticality. She plays concepts against each other, sometimes to dizzying effect. Of Okorafor’s novels The Shadow Shaper and Who Fears Death, Burnett writes that they “conduct a postcolonial revision of...