Incredible geographies? Orientalism and Genre Fantasy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3977845 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Myles Balfe (0000-0001-6081-6317, University of Sheffield, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2004 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 75-90 |
| Publication date | 2004-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social & Cultural Geography (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1464-9365 • E-ISSN: 1470-1197 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1464936042000181326 |
| OpenAlex | W2091023535 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 15 |
| References cited | 21 |
Despite its immense popularity, the Fantasy genre has been largely ignored by academic geography. In this paper I give an overview of the genre, its politics and its geographies. I examine the ways in which several popular Fantasy texts negotiate and draw upon 'Orientalist' tropes. Fantasylands are often described as landscapes enabling characters and readers to flee the drudgery of the 'real' world and escape into inconceivable places populated by magic and wonder, realms liberated from the 'actualities' of everyday life. However, it is my contention, based on a reading of several popular Fantasy texts, that Fantasy cannot be viewed as a privileged genre where 'you're limited only by your own imagination'. Fantasy is not about inventing Other‐worlds: it is not a transcendental and surpassing genre. Rather, Fantasy texts, like all texts, are socially embedded. I argue that the construction of the 'Western' characters as the 'good guys' in Genre Fantasy texts can become problematic when these characters encounter 'Other' peoples. The conflation of 'Western heroes' and 'Good' can appear to confirm feelings of moral and cultural superiority when these 'heroes' encounter 'Others' in Fantasy narratives, 'Otherness' becoming interpreted as 'alien', 'weird' and 'fundamentally different' when looked at through Genre Fantasy's moral lens. Looked at in this way, rather than describing purely imaginary spaces, I would argue that these texts continue a Western historical tradition of problematically mapping difference on to the 'Other', a mapping that serves to position the 'Fantastic West' as morally and culturally superior to the 'Fantastic Orient
Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Fantasy · Literature · Narrative · Orientalism · Popularity · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Imaginary · Wonder · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Psychology · Spatial and Cultural Studies · Travel Writing and Literature
Decolonising James Cameron's Pandora
Decoding the Orientalist Paradigm
Global Medievalism
Dungeons and Dragons
Medicine, landscapes, symbols
Othering across time and place in the suikoden video game series
Consuming the tourist gaze
The East Is Least
Orientalism on Television
Politics of literary humour and contested narrative identity (of a region with no identity)
Laughing at northernness
Where's Elvis and Trump? Where's Godzilla and Gaga? Where's Bowie and Beyoncé? Popular cultures in Social and Cultural Geography, 2000-2020
Racial Logics, Franchising, and Video Game Genres
Looking 'East
Can the Avatar Speak
Colonial and Postcolonial Literature
Good and Evil
Social formation and symbolic landscape
Maps of Meaning
New models in geography
Lost in Space
Marxism, culture, and the duplicity of landscape
Place/Culture/Representation
Geography and literature
Science fiction or future fact? Exploring imaginative geographies of the new millennium
The Novelist's Image of the North
Mapping the Modern City
Between the Book and the Lamp
Towards a critical analysis of fictive geographies
Politics of reading
Geography's literature
Geography's Empire
| Unique citing works | 15 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,71 |
| Citation span | 2005 - 2024 (20) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 14 |