Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction offers a sustained, cogent analysis of race and representation in young adult speculative fiction (YASF). The collection considers how characters of color are represented in YASF, how they contribute to and participate in speculative worlds, how race affects or influences the structures of speculative worlds, and how race and racial ideologies are implicated in YASF.     The essays in the collection also consider the effects of colorblind ideology and postracialism on YASF, a genre that is often seen as progressive in its representation of adolescent pro ... More

Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction offers a sustained, cogent analysis of race and representation in young adult speculative fiction (YASF). The collection considers how characters of color are represented in YASF, how they contribute to and participate in speculative worlds, how race affects or influences the structures of speculative worlds, and how race and racial ideologies are implicated in YASF.     The essays in the collection also consider the effects of colorblind ideology and postracialism on YASF, a genre that is often seen as progressive in its representation of adolescent protagonists. Simply put, colorblindness silences those who believe—and whose experiences demonstrate—that race and racism do continue to matter. In examining how some YASF texts normalize many of our social structures and hierarchies, this collection examines how race and racism are represented in the genre and considers how hierarchies of race are reinscribed in some texts and transgressed in others.    The essays in this collection point toward the potential of YASF to address and interrogate racial inequities in the contemporary West and beyond. They critique the texts that fall short of this possibility, and they articulate ways in which readers and critics alike might nonetheless locate diversity within narratives. This is a collection troubled by the lingering emphasis on colorblindness in YASF, but it is also the work of scholars who love the genre they critique, who celebrate its progress toward inclusivity, and who see in it an enduring future for intersectional identity.