Embodying Gender and Age in Speculative Fiction: A Biopsychosocial Approach; and Relativism, Alternate History, and the Forgetful Reader: Reading Science Fiction and Historiography.
Thiess applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, American Fantastic: Myths of Violence and Redemption, with the following results:
This is the last page of chapter 3, which is an analysis of the John Henry legend, especially as it appears in popular culture. As such it contains some final thoughts about a short story by Balogun Ojetade from 2012 titled “Rite of Passage: Blood and Iron.” The culmination of this analysis notes how this story invests “Henry with a violent agency that both activates the spirit of the legendary forms and flies in the face of the critics of redemptive violence that would reduce that violence to futile resignation.” It then nods towards a prior chapter (and a prior book of mine) discussing violence in sport, putting Ojetade’s text in a martial and sporting context. The text notes that the “relationship between sport and violence” indicates how “denouncing redemptive violence in this case would directly mean Henry’s accepting the status quo. It would mean openly accepting the violent historical context that the historian makes central in their work on Henry.” This paragraph also notes that Ojetade’s story and the other fantastical reinterpretations considered in the chapter highlight “the importance of taking seriously the ‘recycling’ of the folktale.”Visit Derek J. Thiess's website.
The last paragraph is transitional, looking forward to the next chapter, which takes up the legendary figure of Blackbeard, noting that at this point the book is “transition[ing] us to a more overt entanglement of colonialism, religion, and capitalism.” However, it also underscores that “there is a tendency in the work of criticism to emphasize certain violences...over the potential of resistant violences and to co-opt such legends as John Henry within existing Christian mythic traditions.” A co-opting that will be even more overt in the coming chapters.
Because this page is signposting between two (of my favorite!) chapters it actually does a good job of highlighting most of the central concerns of the book. The random browser may, however, feel a little lost as the “Myth of Redemptive Violence” is not elaborated upon on this page—it’s an idea first developed in Religious Studies by Walter Wink, but that has become popular throughout historical and social scientific work. The general idea is that violence has become a kind of mythic (as myths are stories that authorize belief) focus of our society and has supplanted traditional religious, Christian, morality. The longer arc of the book demonstrates how this notion is revisionist, overtly working against Richard Slotkin’s germinal work on regeneration through violence, in order to carefully hold Christianity apart from its historical role (whether directly or apologetically) in those very violences. The central thesis of this book, then—that attempts to erase violence from our society often betrays a continued pacification strategy, via religious myth, to obscure religion’s role in colonial violence. This thesis is expressed in this chapter both in how Henry is uncritically recorded in the historical record as a quasi-biblical figure (i.e. Samson) and in how the wholesale denial of (systemic) violence obscures the potential for violent resistance in the various versions of Henry’s story.
Noting those various versions also does a decent job of explaining the methodology of the book, which is a comparative approach between folkloristic and fictional forms (“recycling” is a nod to Frank de Caro’s Folklore Recycled). This approach is heavily theorized in the introduction, so lacking that context, the browser will intuit this method, but perhaps still wonder why. Furthermore, they may be turned off by what is clearly an etic approach to the topic (as an early reviewer was). Yet again in the framework of the book, this is addressed as rather necessary to avoid criticism’s continued contribution to Christian supremacy via insider apologetics.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
