Anti-Racism in Fantasy/Animation and Academia
At Annecy 2020, Women in Animation held a digital summit on the theme ‘Reimagining the Future: Race, Solidarity and the Culture of Work’. At the panel ‘Black Women in Animation: Looking to the Future’, moderator Jamal Joseph from Columbia University asked, ‘What needs to happen now? How do we get more women in animation and how do we get more women of colour in animation and film?’ The panelists – Karen Rupert Toliver from Sony Animation, screenwriter Misan Sagay, Camille Eden from Nickelodeon and writer Jade Branion – all agreed: Hire us! Hire more black women and indigenous women! Elsewhere on the internet, the hashtag #BlackInTheIvory lit up Twitter with accounts of the racism and roadblocks Black academics face in academia. When asked what universities could do to address academia’s structural racism, #BlackInTheIvory’s co-creator, Shardé M. Davis, echoed the panelists, advocating for ‘[h]aving or hiring more folks of color in upper administrative positions, including presidents, provosts, and deans’ (Diep 2020). The international #BlackLivesMatter revolution has made us all aware of our complicity in the systemic racism of both animation and academia. It is time for this to change.
Fig. 1 - Ayanni Cooper explores black joy in Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts.
The COVID-19 pandemic has ruptured the weak, crude sutures stretched across some very deep and old wounds. BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour), queer, poor, disabled grief and pain is out in the open. We as human beings must act to address these wounds, including and especially the wider Fantasy/Animation community. For centuries, critics have levied fantasy fiction as a genre of ‘mindless escapism’ without import or consequence. More recently, popular opinion has equally asserted that animation is ‘merely cartoons’, a frivolous medium hardly on par with defunding the police, racial justice, climate change or any of the multiple, myriad issues that beset us in 2020. However, fantasy/animation is a vital site of cultural capital. The ‘escapist cartoons’ we create and how we discuss them is a reflection on us, on the stories we think are worth telling and retelling. If BIPOC are not included in those stories, then we erase them. If we do not discuss how an animated text is racist, then we are complicit in its racism. It would be easy for fantasy/animation academics and creators to remain sheltered and comfortable inside animation’s assumed innocence (misguided and contentious as it may be), even as we argue against that innocence. Yet if we are to make the progress BIPOC rightly demand, then we must confront our complicity in upholding the structures that perpetuate this racism.
A memory and an example: my first major conference was the Society for Animation Studies’ annual conference in Canterbury in 2016. It was a wonderful, welcoming, invigorating week. Still, I was struck by the one male academic who attended a ‘Women in Animation’ roundtable discussion and insisted sexism and misogyny were not problems in his classroom. His female students never mentioned such issues, he argued, so why have this conversation? I was equally struck by the female academics who quietly conferred among themselves later: if his female students are not telling him about such issues, it is because they do not feel safe doing so. The male academic had a clear blind spot that he was not willing to address. If this is how SAS members deal with gender parity, then how does SAS deal with race? I do not remember SAS hosting discussions on animation and race that year, and indeed, I distinctly remember that the overwhelming majority of attendees and presenters were white. Why was this the case? What is animation studies doing to address this?
Fig. 2 - Jojo Blan's Black Girl Magic (https://twitter.com/i/status/1275208920425009155)
Our institutions need to centre more BIPOC voices (as well as more disabled voices, more LGBT+ voices, and more voices that are not young, white, cisgender, heterosexual, abled and male). Fantasy/Animation has already made steps towards this with Misha Mihailova’s post, ‘An Anti-Racist Syllabus’. However, as Mihailova so aptly wrote, “the syndrome of the “token week”” (on race, on anime, on the entire continent of Africa) continues to plague many an animation course’ and, indeed, animation research in general. My curation of Anti-Racist posts for Fantasy/Animation is only a small step in what I hope will be a continued, concerted effort to dismantle the racism inherent in animation research. I hope that by platforming these Black and Indigenous scholars and animators I will inspire others to do the same. My fellow academics, if you wish to carry my work forward, read the blog posts published in the upcoming month. Bring the writers to your own platforms. Consider them for your special issues and indie projects. Ask them to recommend fellow artists and academics to follow or work with. Then ask yourselves: who am I mentoring? Who am I hiring? Who am I publishing? How are we structuring our conferences and our panels? Where are we advertising them? In short: what can we do to welcome more BIPOC and intersectional voices into our discipline and our craft?
I am grateful to the writers – Ayanni Cooper (Fig. 1), Dr. Hannah Marie Robbins, Mark Chavez and JoJo Blan (see left) – for their scholarship and their insights. We need the joy, the music, the mythic imagination and the experience that their posts speak to. Moreover, we need them full stop. In 2016 I began work to launch my 2017 Queer/ing Animation symposium, part of which was a curated theme for animationstudies 2.0 on queerness in animation. Once I posted the CFP for that curated month, I had no trouble filling the slots and even had to double up on one week to fit everyone in. This month was different: despite casting a wide net beyond animation and animation studies, despite asking friends and colleagues to signal boost the CFP, despite my own efforts to directly connect with potential contributors, I struggled to find specifically BIPOC writers. I can only imagine that the structures and support are not there for potential BIPOC animation academics. Create these structures in your own practice and watch the fantasy/animation community become a better place.
**Article published: October 9, 2020**
References
Diep, Francie. “”I Was Fed Up”: How #BlackInTheIvory Got Started, and What Its Founders Want to See Next,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 9, 2020), available at: https://www.chronicle.com/article/I-Was-Fed-Up-How/248955.
Women in Animation. Black Women In Animation: Looking To The Future (2020), available at: https://online.annecy.org/product/carte-blanche-women-in-animation.
Biography
Kodi Maier is a queer Film Studies PhD at the University of Hull. Their doctoral thesis, 'Dream Big, Little Princess: Interrogating the Disney Princess Franchise from 2000 to the Present Day' will be done just as soon as they stop committing to other projects, such as their article 'Camping Outside the Magic Kingdom’s Gates: The Power of Femslash in the Disney Fandom' published in Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, their forthcoming publication, ‘The Other Maiden, Mother, Crone(s): Witchcraft, Queer Identity, and Political Resistance in Laika’s Coraline’ in Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio Laika’s Stop-Motion Withcraft (forthcoming), and their ongoing work for Fantasy/Animation. All four touch on Maier’s academic interests, including animation merchandise, the formulation of female gender roles in the US, queer identity and queer theory. If you ask them to write something on queer issues and animation, they’ll probably say ‘yes’. For updates on their work, follow them on Twitter @KodiMaier.