Literary Studies

THE DARK FANTASTIC

Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games EBONY ELIZABETH THOMAS

Reveals the diversity crisis in children's and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imagination

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, fanfiction 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. In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”

"One of the most radiant and thoughtprovoking descriptions of the potentials of fantastic literature." —LA Review of Books

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is Associate Professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Educational Division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. A former Detroit Public Schools teacher and National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, she is an expert on diversity in children’s literature, youth media, and fan studies.

NEW IN PAPERBACK

September 2020 240 pages • 6 x 9 1 black & white illustration Paper • 9781479806072 • $16.95A(£12.99) Cloth • 9781479800650 In Postmillennial Pop

Literary Studies

December 2020 272 pages • 6 x 9 13 black & white illustrations Paper • $30.00S(£23.99) 9781479810093 Cloth • $89.00X(£74.00) 9781479807215

Literary Studies THE SMELL OF RISK

Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics HSUAN L. HSU

A timely exploration of how odor seeps into structural inequality

Our sense of smell is a uniquely visceral—and personal—form of experience. This book outlines the many ways that our differentiated atmospheres unevenly distribute environmental risk. Reading everything from nineteenth-century detective fiction and naturalist novels to contemporary performance art and memoir, Hsuan L. Hsu takes up modernity’s differentiated atmospheres as a subject worth sniffing out. From the industrial revolution to current-day environmental crises, Hsu uses ecocriticism, geography, and critical race studies to, for example, explore Latinx communities exposed to freeway exhaust and pesticides, Asian diasporic artists’ response to racialized discourse about Asiatic odors, and the devastation settler colonialism has reaped on Indigenous smellscapes. Hsu takes smell at face value to offer an evocative retelling of urbanization, public health, and environmental violence.

Hsuan L. Hsu is Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.

NEW IN PAPERBACK

September 2020 400 pages • 6 x 9 Paper • $19.95T(£15.99) 9781479806058 Cloth • 9781479892945

New York City GOWANUS

Brooklyn’s Curious Canal JOSEPH ALEXIOU

The surprising history of the Gowanus Canal and its role in the building of Brooklyn

For more than 150 years, Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal has been called a cesspool, a blemish, but also is one of the most important waterways in the history of New York harbor. Joseph Alexiou explores how the Gowanus creek—a naturally-occurring tidal estuary that served as a conduit for transport and industry during the colonial era— came to play an outsized role in the story of America’s greatest city. Highlighting the biographies of nineteenth-century real estate moguls like Daniel Richards and Edwin C. Litchfield, Alexiou recalls the forgotten movers and shakers that laid the foundation of modern-day Brooklyn. As he details, the pollution, crime, and industry associated with the Gowanus stretch back far earlier than the twentieth century, and helped define the culture and unique character of this celebrated borough. The story of the Gowanus, like Brooklyn itself, is a tale of ambition and neglect, bursts of creative energy, and an inimitable character that has captured the imaginations of city-lovers around the world.

Joseph Alexiou is the author of the sixth edition of Paris for Dummies and a licensed New York City tour guide.