In her world, the war’s resolution was interrupted by zombies rising after the battle of Gettysburg. The central character of Ireland’s novel, Jane McKeen, is a black woman living outside Baltimore in the years after the Civil War. We are fortunate not only that the machinery of publishing selected this zombie novel by and about a black woman for publication, but also for critics from this century and the last who can make clear why Dread Nation is such an effective response to the overwhelming Whiteness of speculative fiction. Dread Nation, a YA novel from Justina Ireland that is a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards, and won the Locus Award for best YA novel of 2018, demonstrates why noticing, rather than ignoring, race is essential to truth-telling in fantasy. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference” (p. In The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas quotes Toni Morrisson’s essay Playing in the Dark: “ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous liberal gesture.
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