NP? "the formerly colonised coming back to haunt us"

[Cyrus]

This is a load of crap (please pardon the expression). What's racist 
here is not Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings, but Shapiro's reading of it. It 
seems that, centuries later, people still need to find witches to burn. 
It is now, as it was back then, a form of entertainment. I hope Dr. 
Shapiro is having a good time.

Cyrus

Doug Millison wrote:
> 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.
> 
>