Race in fantasy is a topic quite close to my heart: I wrote about Tolkien’s complex engagement with race and racial anthropology in my 2008 monograph Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History, summarizing some of my main findings in a later paper, now available here, and a recent article in The Conversation (which was reprinted multiple times). In 2015, Helen Young’s Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness offered a winder discussion on race in fantasy, including in Tolkien’s precursors and followers.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s book The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games is an important new intervention on Young Adult fantasy and race, examining some of the most popular YA fantasy text of the last two decades, including The Hunger Games (the novels, as well as the films). You can read my review of this book for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) via this link: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/dark-others/. I will post a longer review on this blog soon, so watch this space!
