NP? "the formerly colonised coming back to haunt us"
Doug Millison
millison at online-journalist.com
Sun Dec 15 21:02:10 CST 2002
The Mass Appeal Of Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings Is Rooted In Racism, Says
University Lecturer
For further information, please contact:
Jenny Murray
University of Warwick
jennifer.murray at warwick.ac.uk
02476 574255
13 December 2002
keywords
Literature & creative writing, History
The Two Towers, Tolkien's second instalment of the Lord of the
Rings, is rooted in racism and Middle Earth's mythology represents
anxieties about the mass immigration taking place in mid-1950s Britain,
says Dr Stephen Shapiro, an English Lecturer at the University of Warwick.
For Dr Shapiro Tolkien's novels make racial prejudice innocent by
presenting bigotry through a fantasy world, and the mass appeal of the
recent movies may well lie on racist codes.
In The Lord of the Rings a small group, the fellowship, which consists of
emotionally complex characters, is pitted against the onset of a 'foreign'
black, unattractive, inarticulate, and psychologically undeveloped horde,
which marks long-standing Anglo-European anxieties about being overwhelmed
by non-European populations. While Tolkien describes the Hobbits and Elves
as amazingly white, ethnically pure clans, their antagonists, the Orcs, are
a motley dark-skinned mass, akin to tribal Africans or Aborigines. The
recent films amplify a 'fear of a Black planet' and exaggerate this
difference by insisting on stark white-black colour codes.
Dr Shapiro radically asserts that rather than encourage his readers to
participate in, or celebrate, a forward-looking Britain at ease with modern
cultural exchanges, Tolkien urges his audience to lament the loss of a past
time, when the British did not have to imagine foreigners as their equals:
"Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings because he believed England's original
culture and mythology was destroyed by the Norman invasion, and thought his
surrogate story-cycle would recreate the world of pre-invasion Britain. The
concern for a fictional past quickly descends into portraying the encounter
with racial and cultural others as an event of terror and apocalyptic
threat. For today's film fans, this older racial anxiety fuses with a
current fear and hatred of Islam that supports a crusading war in the
Middle East."
The trilogy was written at the onset of decolonisation, when the first mass
waves of immigrants from the Caribbean, India, and Pakistan came to
Britain. The Midlands, Tolkien's model for the Shire, was quickly becoming
one of England's most multicultural regions. The tale of how the small,
isolated culture, the easy grace of the Hobbits, becomes threatened by the
arrival of distant barbarian populations, the Orcs, reinforces the racial
hatred in the Britain of his time.
Dr Shapiro added: "But the motivation behind the fables of Middle Earth is
never hard to recognise as the vanishing world of the Hobbits seems to
transmit into a 'little England' nightmare about the past acts of the
Empire and responsibility for the formerly colonised coming back to haunt
us."
Notes for editor
For more information contact: Dr Stephen Shapiro, Department of English and
Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, Tel: 02476 523317
(work) or 02476 677578 (home)
Jenny Murray, Assistant Press Officer, University of Warwick, Tel: 02476
574255 or 07876 217740 (mobile)
After completing a first degree in Chemistry at Williams College, USA, Dr
Stephen Shapiro studied at the Department of Cultural Studies at Birmingham
University, England then conducted research at the Gramsci Institute in
Rome. Before joining Warwick, he taught at John Jay College for Criminal
Justice (CUNY); the New School; and Harvard University.
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