American Fantasies of Race

This thesis examines contemporary American fantasy literature, film, television, and comic books which allegorize race and racial differences through the figure of the monster. Using the theoretical framework of Paul de Man’s deconstructive allegory, Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, and Stuart Hall’s “Race as a Floating Signifier,” the project begins by analyzing the network of racial discourses which are allegorized in contemporary fantasy narratives. Part One of the thesis establishes a connection between nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientific and legal discourses, which define racial differences, and monstrous characters in fantasy narratives of the same period. A detailed analysis of the figurative language and rhetoric in each of these discursive ontologies reveals the fantastical construction of racial Otherness through monstrosity. Part Two examines contemporary texts that rewrite the monster to question previous stigmatizing configurations of the racial Other. Each chapter identifies a different way in which race is conceptualized in fantasy narratives through the use of allegory, exposing the way in which racial identity is (de)constructed through metaphor and metonymy. I argue that contemporary texts which use the traditional form of allegory and its reliance on metaphor reinforce the racial binary as “natural” and pre-discursive. In contrast, narratives that use deconstructive allegory expose the metaphorical constructions of race as metonymical and contingent on a network of signifiers, pointing to race as mere fantasy.