DEPARTMENT OF MODERN LANGUAGES FACULTY OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI THE SEMIOSPHERES OF PREJUDICE IN THE FANTASTIC ARTS THE INHERITED RACISM OF IRREALIA AND THEIR TRANSLATION MIKA LOPONEN ACADEMIC DISSERTATION Doctoral dissertation, to be presented for public discussion with the permission of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Helsinki, in Auditorium XII, University Main Building, on the 26th of April, 2019 at 12 o’clock. Akateeminen väitöskirja, joka Helsingin yliopiston humanistisen tiedekunnan suostumuksella esitetään julkisesti tarkastettavaksi auditoriumissa XII, yliopiston päärakennus, perjantaina 26. huhtikuuta 2019 klo 12. The Faculty of Arts uses the Urkund system (plagiarism recognition) to examine all doctoral dissertations. © Mika Loponen Cover image from pixabay.com under the Pixabay license. ISBN 978-951-51-4887-2 (print) ISBN 978-951-51-4888-9 (e-text, PDF) Unigrafia Oy Helsinki 2019 Abstract This study discusses the evolution of racialized concepts in the genres of the fantastic, especially fantasy, science fiction, and supernatural horror. It provides the first detailed interpretation of how such concepts are constructed and how they develop based on their interaction with the evolving cultural landscapes, thus showing how characteristics are borrowed from real world cultural stereotypes. The analysis concentrates on fantastic renderings of racialized stereotypes based on real world cultural fears. The concepts are examined both in their source cultures and through the lenses of transmediality and translation. As the fantastic arts have always been heavily transmedial in nature, the study is not limited to a certain art form, but views all media as complementary in producing concepts of the fantastic, either by adding new facets to the concepts, or by changing them on a temporal basis. Contextualizing concepts in the fantastic arts through their linkage to the real world cultural development provides a method through which we can perceive how the concepts are built on – and preserve – racialized stereotypes of their cultures of origin. In order to do so, this study provides a framework that utilizes several approaches from cultural semiotics as well as translation studies. Furthermore, it presents a view of the evolution of the genres in specific media through case studies. The framework is applied to some well- known fantastic concepts (orcs, dwarves, goblins, and gnomes), by mapping their entry into the fantastic arts and examining how the changes in their signifying imagery have affected their allusive links to the real world stereotypes that are (intentionally or non- intentionally) portrayed through them. In addition, translational tools are applied in a case study to examine how racialized features are transported to a new cultural setting in translation. The study argues that the inclusion of properties of racialized stereotypes from real world cultures to fantastic concepts is widespread and that especially negative racialized allusions often survive in texts of the fantastic, even after they have been perceived as offensive in the real world cultures from which they stem. It displays how racialized narratives can change when fantastic concepts inherit properties from new real world racialized stereotypes, and how inheriting signifiers from a “positive” real world racialization can affect the negative properties of fantastic concepts. Keywords: semiotics, fantasy, science fiction, game studies, transmediality, racism THE SEMIOSPHERES OF PREJUDICE IN THE FANTASTIC ARTS – THE INHERITED RACISM OF IRREALIA AND THEIR TRANSLATION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As with any dissertation, this one has required help from many people and instances. I’m eternally grateful for everyone who have helped in its creation and who have either seen the development of the study from the start to the end or who have at a specific point of time contributed to its creation, directly or indirectly. My hugest gratitude goes to my supervisors, Professor Bo Pettersson, Doctor Merja Polvinen, and above all, Docent Ritva Leppihalme (who also supervised my Master’s Thesis). Their awesome guidance has been invaluable, and their patience in seeing through the twists and changes of focus in the dissertation was extraordinary. I could not have finished – or even started – this study without their help. I am also grateful to my wonderful pre-examination readers, Jerry Määttä and Adam Roberts, both of whom provided excellent and insightful comments that helped me polish many rough edges. I’m deeply indebted to the Translation Studies and Terminology Research Community (TraST), both for its excellent research seminar and the economic support for my participation in conferences. The International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) and the Finnish Fantasy Researchers’ Association (FinFaR) have been the perfect academic homes for my studies. The Department of Modern Languages has supported me academically and financially, enabling me to attend all the important conferences and seminars on the field. The Chancellor’s Travel Fund has been of invaluable help in keeping my academic travels afoot. Without the peer support of the translation studies group Maanantaipiiri (Monday Circle) and especially its inner circle, Minna Hjort, Maarit Koponen, and Meri Päivärinne, as well Merja Polvinen, Jari Käkelä, Päivi Väätänen, and Kaisa Kortekallio of the SF post- graduate group, I would have quit long ago in desperation. Colleagues from other academic fields have been of immense help: Jaakko Stenros and his invaluable insights and collaboration (some of the concepts discussed here would not exist in their current form without our discussions), Markus Montola and Kaisa Kangas for many early stage insights, Aidan-Paul Canavan’s suggestions and notes regarding the orcs. I’m deeply indebted to Johanna Vainikainen for giving me her notes on the translation of Gene Wolfe. Hanna Järvelä’s comments on an early version were pure gold. Valuable help was provided by Minna Holm, Jenni Tyynelä, Ida-Emilia Kaukonen, and countless others I couldn’t have finished this paper without the immense support and flexibility of my partner Hanna Hakkarainen. And last, my thanks to my daughter Maia for giving the spark for this study by making me explain the treatment of “good” and “evil” in translated fantastic fiction. With gratitude, Mika Loponen i PREFACE “Well, you have forgotten the meaning of imposing artificial values. It’s really useful!” – Unidentified character in the webcomic Oglaf “Orcs don’t cry.” – Coilla in Legion of Thunder ”Why are those orcs always so evil?” my daughter asked me once as I was reading Kersti Juva’s Finnish translation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit to her as a bedtime story. No, they aren’t, I thought, and tried to elaborate: there must be good orcs somewhere, orcs just minding their business, building their homes, enjoying orcish theater perhaps, and caring for their children. “But if some orcs are good, how can the heroes just kill them without checking whether they are good or bad,” she wondered. A problematic question: early fantasy and science fiction – and practically all genre literature – have shortcuts in their morals by color-coding ethics as black and white. This coding has been quite literal: black has been the color of evil and white the color of good, from clothes to skin, and often in absolute terms. While heroes have been allowed their moments of greed or selfishness, true evil has tended to be absolute – and black. After reading The Hobbit to my daughter, I started revisiting other childhood favorites, and none painted a better picture. Practically all contained the same images, from the evil (and black) dark elves of the Dragonlance novelizations to the presentation of monsters in H.P. Lovecraft’s straightforwardly racist fiction. While this period racism can be partially understood in the context of the early twentieth century in which many of the tropes originate, the real issue is how the tropes were ingrained in subsequent works and in the actual grammar – in the semiotic meaning of the word – of the genres. The features related to blackness and racial stereotypes have been woven into the fabric of the genres, carrying imagery loaded with dated racial values into the fabric of today’s fiction. I became interested in the following questions: How did racialized imagery become ingrained in fantastic fiction? How does the evolution of the genres affect it? How does it change in translation between languages and cultures? Since much of the imagery is based on either colonialist roots or racial stereotyping and reflects the portrayals of minorities, how is it changed when societies evolve and texts are translated between different cultures? Like Severian, the protagonist of Gene Wolfe’s (Wolfe 2000: 14) Book of the New Sun, notes: “We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us [...] it is profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them.” Culture is built on culture, and fiction on earlier fiction. References and allusions may be lost in time, but they still guide conceptions that arise in our cultural products as pre- ii anchored signifiers. What we have learned by reading and watching fiction, by playing games, and through all the cultural products that have built on earlier cultural products influences us, whether we know of their original cultural anchors or not. Genre literature has a transmedial history: texts have been adapted into films, games, and