In Defense of Racebending

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In Defense of Racebending

Cathleen Muller

 

Abstract
In an effort to diversify fictions, many creators use racebending, changing the race of a character from an original fictional work or person from history and incorporating the altered character into a new fictional work. While racebending has been used across many forms of popular media, from comics to musicals, there has been little philosophical attention devoted to it. In what follows, I attempt to fill that gap by discussing the aesthetic value of racebending, its moral value, and how it can be understood on several prominent metaphysical views.

 

Key Words
characters; fiction; race

 

1. What is racebending?

In an effort to diversify fictions, many creators use racebending, changing the race of a character from an original fictional work or person from history and incorporating the altered character into a new fictional work.[1] Doing so yields aesthetic value, from the inner conflict generated and the potential for a multilayered impression, and moral value, from its beneficial impact on the audience’s imagination. Though other types of “bending” can occur, for example, changing a character’s gender, sexuality, and so on, here I focus on racebending for the sake of simplicity and because it is especially salient to our current cultural moment. One useful example of racebending is the comic, Watson and Holmes: A Study in Black (henceforth Watson and Holmes), in which Sherlock Holmes is a Black man with an uncanny ability to solve crimes who lives on Baker Street in Harlem, New York, while Watson, also Black, is a medical intern who fought in Afghanistan.[2] Throughout the work, Watson and Holmes maintains many points of connection to Doyle’s fictions in both superficial and central details, while creating a richly developed representation of life as a Black man in the United States.[3]

My definition of racebending is as follows:

Racebending =_df The practice of creating a secondary fictional work (F_S) based on an original fictional work (F_O) or historical event (H), in which a white character C from F_O or person from H is imported into F_S, and C’s race according to F_S is different than it is according to F_O or in H.

For example, Watson and Holmes: A Study in Black is an F_S based on the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle (F_O), into which Holmes (C) is imported and Holmes’s race in F_S is different from his race in F_O. The term ‘secondary fiction’ refers to any of a wide range of works, such as a sequel, prequel, parallel novel, rewrite, reboot, fan fiction, adaptation, or spin-off. ‘Secondary’, as I use it here, does not mean having less aesthetic merit; for example, an excellent film adaptation could be more tightly plotted and engaging than the original fictional work. For F_S to be based on F_O, it is necessary that the creator of F_S is acquainted with F_O and intends to create a fiction based on F_O. I leave it an open question whether intending to create an F_S is sufficient for doing so, though I tend to agree with Amie Thomasson that it is not, because of the potential for an “unintended reference shift” when the original character’s name is used but plays no role in “constituting the character or the plot.”[4]

As I use the terms, following convention in popular discourse, ‘racebending’ and ‘whitewashing’ are opposed to one another.[5] In contrast to racebending, whitewashing occurs when C is not White according to F_O, but White according to F_S. Although both practices involve a change of race, treating them as the same would be a false equivalence, given that their aesthetic and moral impact is significantly different. However, it is worth noting that, for every critique of racebending touched on below, whitewashing suffers even more radically from the critique, while lacking the compensating benefits. Whitewashing also supports White supremacy by depriving actors of color of roles they otherwise would have had and reinforcing the assumption of Whiteness as representative of humanity.

2. The aesthetic value of racebending

Racebending can contribute to the aesthetic value of a work in multiple ways. First, experiencing a character that was White in F_O as a person of color in F_S can produce a fresh perspective on the character that is aesthetically superior to the original production. For instance, New Yorker critic Hilton Als makes such a judgment of aesthetic superiority regarding Forrest Whitaker as Erie in the revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Hughie,” Jeffrey Wright as Abraham Lincoln in the 2001 staging of “Top Dog/Underdog” at the Public Theatre, and Maria Tallchief as the Swan Queen in Balanchine’s 1951 take on “Swan Lake.”[6] To take up the first example, Als explores the aesthetic value of casting Whitaker as Erie in a review of “Hughie,” noting Whitaker’s gracefulness balanced with his “oversized frame,”and “his emotional accessibility, his curiosity about his own pain and that of the society that surrounds him.”[7] While such an aesthetically valuable performance need not hinge on racebending per se, one might speculate that Whittaker’s curiosity about one’s own pain and the pain of society could be particularly accessible to people from marginalized communities. However, Als directly touches on the aesthetics of racebending itself when he notes, “There’s critical distance here; Erie is a white character played by a black man, and the complications inherent in that casting keep the production contemporary and important.”[8] This quote suggests that aesthetic value is added specifically through racebending, due to its inherent “complications.”

One way to understand the aesthetic value of these “complications” is in terms of a conflict generated within the audience members, parallel to the conflict that arises regarding the “rough hero,” as discussed by A. W. Eaton.[9] In “rough hero” and racebent fictions, one is asked to hold two conflicting thoughts in mind, and thus both require “artistry and finesse” to overcome an audience’s imaginative resistance.[10] In the “rough hero” case, the tension lies in creating a character that is convincingly monstrous yet sympathetic, while in the racebending case, the tension lies in creating a character that is convincingly the original character yet has a different race. As in the case of rough heroes, racebending divides us against ourselves, eliciting “conflict and strife that is tinged with displeasure due to the contradictory attitudes elicited,” leading to a “delicious state of conflict with no resolution.”[11] Although Eaton describes this “protracted state of ambivalence,” which makes the work “compelling and demanding of our attention,” as specific to rough heroes, I believe we feel a similar type of ambivalence when we try to imagine both that Holmes is the same character as in the original and is also Black and living in Harlem.

Christy Mag Uidhir argues, in contrast, that producing inner conflict in audience members can be a pro tanto aesthetic defect. Discussing race-mismatching in film, he argues that a lack of “consistency with respect to how film fictions invite audiences to engage with them” makes it more difficult for audiences to “properly engage with the film so as to receive its prescribed uptake.”[12] Although race-mismatching is only one type of racebending, one might worry that the problem generalizes: if a fiction “invites” us to picture a White character while depicting a racebent character, we might find it difficult to engage with the fiction. For instance, many audiences take the Harry Potter books to invite the imagining of Hermione Granger as White and thus felt a clash when the character was portrayed by Noma Dumezweni, a Black actor, in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.[13] Rowling responded that the fiction does not prescribe imagining that Hermione is White, but critics nonetheless argued that Rowling was artificially blackwashing her fictional world.[14]

Putting to one side the narrow question of whether Hermione’s race is truly left open by the fiction, suppose that we are invited to imagine Hermione as White and then feel challenged while watching Harry Potter and the Cursed Child due to conflicting imaginings. Would this challenge produce the pro tanto defect Mag Uidhir describes? To establish an answer, we need to understand the prescribed uptake of the fiction. To make his case, Mag Uidhir focuses on Running Brave, in which the race of the character is central to what we are prescribed to imagine, namely that the character is American Indian and is discriminated against due to his race.[15] Though I find Mag Uidhir’s argument compelling in this case, I would argue that the race of the character or historical person is only sometimes central to the prescribed uptake of a fiction and thus in many cases, the pro tanto defect does not occur. For instance, in Rowling’s work, we are prescribed to imagine that a group of young people band together to fight evil; even if their race is implied, as critics have argued, it isn’t central to the story. Thus, we do not miss out on enjoying the prescribed uptake. Instead, we get to enjoy Eaton’s “protracted state of ambivalence” or what Elizabeth Kett describes as a “multilayered impression” that brings out the constructed nature of race.[16] Thus, when we see Noma Dumezweni as Hermione, we might see Hermione as in some sense both White and Black, leading us to question our assumptions about race, a nuanced outcome that feels more like an aesthetic benefit than a flaw.

One might worry, however, that these aesthetic benefits come at the cost of a reductive view of race, treating it as a superficial change and ignoring its very real impacts on how a person is treated, their access to power and privilege, and so on.[17] For a striking example of a reductive view, consider the “Diverse Editions” proposed by Barnes & Noble and then retracted, in which the covers of famous fictions such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz were depicted with characters of color.[18] Notably, none of the fictions were rewritten: the company simply put characters of color on the covers, using AI to determine which fictions fail to explicitly specify the protagonist’s race.[19] As critics were quick to point out, the failure to explicitly specify race in the fiction does not mean that race is irrelevant to the story: Dorothy would have a very different life experience as a Black child in Kansas than a White child.[20] In contrast, The Wiz offers a genuinely racebent version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Like Watson and Holmes, it does so by changing other aspects of the storyline, especially in the pre- and post-Oz sections, to create a new, compelling fiction, thus avoiding the worry about the superficial treatment of race.

In general, I believe that while one should avoid treating race superficially, this worry applies only to overly simplistic cases of racebending, such as “Diverse Editions” and perhaps Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. In these cases, race is not depicted realistically, but is merely a superficial change. In more complex cases of racebending, such as Watson and Holmes and The Wiz, more is changed: race is incorporated in robust detail and plays a significant role in F_S. The worry over treating race as a superficial change also seems to hinge on genre considerations: in a genre where the characters are already treated reductively, it seems less important whether race is also treated reductively. For instance, Heimdall in the Marvel film, Thor, has one job—guarding the rainbow bridge into Asgard—and so casting Idris Elba as Heimdall doesn’t seem to unduly flatten race, though that didn’t stop critics from becoming upset.[21] Thus, the lesson here is twofold: (1) the aesthetic worry that race is being treated superficially can be alleviated by changing enough of F_O to create a realistic depiction of race and (2) the worry seems to apply only to genres in which characters are depicted realistically.

A related concern is Joy Shim’s concept of “literary racial impersonation,” an aesthetic flaw specific to works about a marginalized group by creators who belong to an outgroup.[22] In such cases, authors may fail to “accurately depict an experience belonging to a minority racial or ethnic group in a literary work,” most notably the outlook of the minority group.[23] She discusses this flaw in the context of American Dirt, a book containing Latine characters, by Jeanine Cummins, a White, non-Latine author. The book makes numerous errors in its presentation of the outlook of the Latine characters. For instance, they are often described in terms of their brown skin, a feature indicative of the White author’s perspective and irrelevant to the Latine characters.[24] Additionally, the use of Spanish is inconsistent, and the protagonist, an educated, urban, middle-class person from Mexico, is surprised by facts about her country that would be unsurprising to anyone who lives there.[25] The characters are thus treated as the “other” and as naïve, which Shim argues constitutes both an aesthetic and a moral flaw.

One might worry that similar issues could arise in racebent fictions, if characters from a marginalized group depict a White point-of-view rather than the outlook of the marginalized group. Indeed, Lyra D. Monteiro levels such a criticism against Hamilton: The Musical, noting that “despite the proliferation of black and brown bodies onstage, not a single enslaved or free person of color exists as a character in this play.”[26] Thus, she argues, the Black outlook is erased from the play, and in its place, Black bodies are used to portray a White outlook: promoting a “bootstrap” ideology, defending the reality of the American Dream, and ignoring structural racism.[27] Similarly, Donatella Galella worries that “contemporary people of color [in Hamilton] become largely a superficial aesthetic of skin colors to showcase the harmonious rainbow hue of the United States rather than historic and continuing racial struggle” and to promote an ideal of “nationalist neoliberal multicultural inclusion,” which she sees as the dominant White outlook, rather than the perspective of people of color.[28]

In response, I return to the idea of the “multilayered impression” discussed above. Regarding Hamilton, Marvin McAllister defends this multilayered mode of viewing, arguing that scenes such as “Yorktown” work with the dissonance between “the actual American revolution [and] Hamilton’s aspirational revolution … [to] stag[e] a version of history where America’s very real racial hierarchy is figuratively flipped.” [29] As an example of this multilayered impression, consider Aaron Burr, as played by Leslie Odom, Jr. singing, “I want to be in the room where it happens.” Within the fiction, Burr is expressing his indignation at still being an outsider while Hamilton is invited into the discussion, but the phrase resonates outside the fiction, as people of color seek access to power they lack under White supremacy. Thus, although we might be deprived of a straightforward presentation of a Black outlook, we are offered in its place a complicated dissonance, allowing us to see the American Revolution as if it had been carried out by non-White people, feeling the conflict of seeing Black bodies playing slaveowners, and grappling with our own discomfort in the face of that clash.

Thus, racebending can create significant aesthetic value for a work, first by producing aesthetically superior work simpliciter, as in the casting of Whittaker as Erie in Death of a Salesman, second by producing a state of protracted ambivalence that makes the work more compelling, and third by producing a multilayered impression that encourages us to grapple with our own conflicting attitudes about race and see old work or history in a new light. Although we might worry about aesthetic defects, such as difficulty imagining the fiction, treating race superficially, and misrepresentation of outlook, I have argued that the difficulty imagining might not be as negative as it first appears, and that the worries about superficial treatment and misrepresentation can be overcome through adaptations to F_O that make the change of race realistic and detailed depictions of race in F_S that accurately represent the outlook of the marginalized group.

3. The moral value of racebending

The above prescriptions for generating aesthetic benefits through racebending also yield moral value. First, when the depictions are detailed and realistic and we imagine people of color as brilliant detectives or in other heroic roles, cognitive pathways are created that can potentially impact our affective responses to real people. Shaun Nichols and Stephen P. Stich lay the groundwork for this idea in their defense of the view that the structures governing our imagination are isomorphic to those that govern belief. Pretense representations are processed in the “Possible World Box” rather than the “Belief Box,” but both the contents and inference mechanisms are the same.[30] Nichols develops this idea further in later work, arguing that “the affective system generates the same affective consequence” when activated by pretense as it does when activated by belief.[31] Tamar Szabó Gendler adds to this point, arguing that “certain features of our mental architecture are source indifferent,” which leads to “contagion,” or carry-over from pretense into belief and action.[32] Thus, racebending has the potential to impact our real-world beliefs and actions, as seeing positive and counter-typical depictions of people of color and feeling the corresponding affective responses seems likely to impact our beliefs and actions toward real-world people. Such a hypothesis bears out experimentally, as Ellen E. Kneeskern and Patricia A. Reeder offer evidence that fictions with counter-typical characters help children overcome rigid stereotypes.[33]

A further benefit of racebending is that it can affect our modal judgments. As Nichols notes in discussing imaginative resistance, even “when we set aside [our standing] nomological beliefs, we still find limitations on what we can imagine. And those more basic limitations can still give rise to modal judgments.”[34] Some might feel imaginative resistance toward racebent characters because of racist assumptions; in these cases, overcoming their resistance through powerful storytelling could extend what they can imagine, for example, that a Black person can be a brilliant detective. Along related lines, Martha Nussbaum argues that, by engaging with fiction, “one can imagine what it is like to inhabit a race different from one’s own, and by becoming close to a person of different race … one can imagine what it would be like for someone one loves to have such a life.”[35] Thus, not only might we imagine that a Black person could be a brilliant detective but that someone one cares about could be Black.

Moreover, racebending provides people of color with characters that expand their own ideas about themselves, combatting the phenomenon of “Black erasure.”[36] As science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler explains, “When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn’t in any of this stuff I read. The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn’t manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in ….”[37] Along similar lines, Brynn F. Welch shows that characters of color in children’s books are largely confined to exploring the legacy of civil rights and slavery or the culture associated with their race, rather than adventure books or books about people just being people.[38] Such narrow representations of people of color, in turn, contribute to stereotype threat for children of color.[39] Racebending, on the other hand, can offer people of color an opportunity to see themselves in the fiction, expanding the range of representations their race and reducing stereotype threat.

Beneficial effects just discussed can occur even when negative characters are racebent, as McAllister discusses in the context of Leslie Odom, Jr.’s performance of Aaron Burr in Hamilton. Odom maintains that Burr is “arguably the best role for a male actor of color in the musical theater canon” because “[y]ou get to show all your colors.”[40] By filling the stage with actors of color, portraying both good and bad characters, Hamilton offers the chance to imagine a wide range of character and behavior associated with Blackness, from revolutionary leaders to Burr’s ”icy cool trust-fund baby,” and for Black people to find themselves along many different dimensions.[41]

Although these are clear benefits, one might worry that racebending “sanitizes” the canon, allowing White audiences to feel better about enjoying their favorite fictions, rather than directly addressing how these fictions serve and reinforce White supremacy. That is, rather than serving antiracist ends, racebending could in some cases support complacency and quietism, allowing audiences to avoid confronting the impact of race on people’s lived experience and the inherent racism of the fictions they enjoy. In reply, while I agree that racebending might sanitize the canon in simplistic cases like “Diverse Editions,” it also has the potential to direct people’s attention to the ways that Whiteness is assumed as the default in that canon. If audiences feel resistance to imagining a racebent character, it could lead them to interrogate their implicit biases more than they would have while engaging with the original fiction. Alternatively, if audiences do not feel imaginative resistance, they might be surprised to discover how easily they accept racebent characters, expanding their real-world views of race.

Lastly, racebending has positive practical impacts for actors of color, as it expands the roles that are available to them and can add jobs for writers, illustrators, and other creators of color, if they create racebent characters and write new fictions for them. One might initially worry that racebending would detract from the work of people of color, as Nnedi Okorafor wrote in response to “Diverse Editions”: “This fake diversity nonsense (where they replace White characters with people of color) is disgusting. It is not sincere or a solution. New stories by people of color about people of color is the solution.”[42] While I concur that we should support the work of creators of color as they create new stories, there is a practical benefit to using racebending instead of relying on new characters: if an existing character’s race is changed, the audience for F_O could extend to F_S, giving F_S a higher chance of success. Thus, racebending offers a practical way to promote racial diversity in fiction while reaching a large audience. Additionally, racebent work that is created by white creators can increase opportunities for creators of color: James O. Young and Susan Haley provide evidence that the creation of work by White creators that uses the work of non-White cultures can lead to an “explosion of interest” in the work of that culture and pave the way for Western acceptance of work by members of the culture.[43]

4. How racebending is possible

Although I have defended the aesthetic and moral value of racebending, critics of racebending in popular culture often invoke metaphysics, arguing that a character must be a different character if its race changes.[44] I thus turn my attention in the penultimate section to how a character can be imported from one fiction into another, even if some properties are altered. In what follows, I survey several views of the metaphysics of fiction and show that, across all of them, characters can persist despite changes in their properties. Thus, racebending is not ruled out by metaphysical concerns.

Before discussing these views, I should address skeptics like Gregory Currie, who denies the possibility of importing characters from F_O to F_S. Interestingly, Currie holds that characters cannot be imported even in cases where their properties remain the same across fictions, on the grounds that characters are world-bound.[45] More precisely, a character is, at each world, “the person, if there is one, who is the first member of the unique n+1-tuple of things that satisfies the conditions of the story.”[46] On such a view, import is impossible, because the n+1-tuple is distinct from one fiction to another. Currie finds this consequence acceptable, as he takes fictional characters to be “carved out of the stories in which they occur … [with] no kind of independent being.”[47]

I find Currie’s view to conflict with existing creative and critical practices. For example, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead would not include the characters from Hamlet, a counterintuitive outcome. Import is also frequently assumed in criticism, for example, an online review of Watson and Holmes reads, “If [audiences of an adaptation] are continually thinking of the original piece or the version they liked better, you’ve failed as a writer to draw them in, hook them into the new world you’ve created, even if that world is populated by characters they have met before.”[48] Moreover, critics and audiences in general do not require that characters have identical properties for import to occur. Instead, we allow for changes, such as the location of Watson’s singular war wound, while accepting the character in F_S as identical to that in F_O. Although the location of a war wound is minor compared to a change of race, the example shows that we do not require qualitative identity for characters to be numerically identical. It’s also worth noting that the assumption of import is the animating feature of debate over racebending: it is only because the racebent C in F_S is deemed to be numerically identical to C in F_O, rather than merely based on that character, that we find the practice of racebending interesting and exciting.[49]

Moreover, we can make sense of racebending within many views of the metaphysics of characters. Due to considerations of space, I touch on only three prominent views here: characters as abstract artifacts, characters as nonexistent objects, and characters as possible objects. On Amie Thomasson’s view of characters as abstract artifacts, a character C from F_O is in F_S only if the creator of F_S is “competently acquainted” with F_O and “intends to import” the character into F_S.[50] As noted in section one, Thomasson deems the intention to import C to be a necessary but not sufficient, condition due to the possibility of an “unintentional reference shift,” for example, “a rock, dog, or town appears in a literary work and is called ‘Sherlock Holmes’, but without this reference playing any role in constituting the character or the plot.”[51] While this limitation leaves open the possibility that some instances of apparent racebending do not succeed in importing C, for the most part the use of the same name for the racebent character does play a role in constituting both the character and the plot, and thus the unintentional reference shift Thomasson describes does not occur.

Terrence Parsons takes characters to be nonexistent objects, and he initially deems characters to be identical if and only if they have the same properties according to the fiction.[52] However, as Thomasson notes, such a view would not leave room for character identity across changes in properties in different drafts of the same fiction.[53] In later work, Parsons allows for identity across changes of property, first with a contextual account, noting that we sometimes use the name ‘Holmes’ to refer to a general Holmes character, which has all and only the properties shared across fictions, and sometimes to the Holmes of a specific fiction.[54] Although he introduces this point to make sense of Holmes being the same character across changes in his preferred drug, it could also make sense of Holmes being the same character across a more substantial change such as race. In later work, Parsons rejects this contextual approach and instead argues that characters can “enter into indeterminate states of affairs” when the set of “plausible sources” for a character disagree over whether it has a property.[55] On the latter view, Holmes could be understood as indeterminate with respect to race if both Conan Doyle’s fiction and Watson and Holmes are deemed plausible sources.

On the view of characters as possible objects, such as that suggested by David Lewis’s work, one might hope for a straightforward picture in which a fiction describes a possible world and a character is a person at that world.[56] Such a view would not allow for racebending due to the lack of transworld identity, but it would be elegant. However, as David Lewis notes, a fiction does not “single out a single one of the worlds where the fiction is told as known fact,” because fictions are incomplete.[57] R. M. Sainsbury spells out this view of characters by identifying Sherlock Holmes with a cluster of “Holmes-surrogates,” each of which, at a given world, is the inhabitant that has all the properties explicitly ascribed to Holmes in a specific fiction, lacks the properties Holmes is explicitly said to lack in that fiction, and has all of its remaining properties determinately.[58] While this cluster view binds each version of a character to a specific fiction, it opens up the possibility of considering a larger cluster, including Holmes-surrogates with different races, as one character.

Lastly, my preferred view is an anti-realist view of fictional characters such as Kendall Walton’s pretense theory. On his view, racebending is part of an extended game of make-believe we play with the fictions, that is, an unofficial game in which multiple fictions are props.[59] As an example of such an extended game, Walton considers “Ulysses is Odysseus,” referring to Tennyson’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey. The two fictions contradict each other regarding whether the titular character returns home, so we must make a choice when evaluating whether “Ulysses is Odysseus” is an acceptable utterance.[60] As Walton presents it, we can (a) avoid thinking about the contradiction, (b) embrace the contradiction, (c) decide the question one way or the other, or (d) dismiss the matter as silly.[61] Racebending also produces contradictions in our extended game, and I would say we generally respond with option (a), that is, we engage in the extended pretense that The Sign of Four and Watson and Holmes are both about Holmes and avoid thinking about the implied contradiction.

5. Conclusion

In this paper, I have examined the aesthetic value of racebending along multiple dimensions, discussed the moral value of racebending, and defended the plausibility of racebending on several prominent views of the metaphysics of fiction. Given the positive effects racebending can produce, I encourage us to use racebending to imagine more diverse worlds, keeping in mind the challenges that might arise and striving to avoid potential pitfalls. I am optimistic that stretching our imaginations in the way that racebending encourages will expand our beliefs about what is possible in reality as well.

 

 

Cathleen Muller
Cathleen.Muller@marist.edu

Cathleen Muller is a Lecturer in Philosophy and Religious Studies at Marist University. She is interested in various aesthetic, metaphysical, and language issues related to fictional characters, especially concerning their race and gender, and she has recently been exploring how fiction, make-believe, imagination, and play help us develop our sense of self and respond to oppression. Outside of academia, she is an accordionist, puppeteer, and stilt-walker.

Published on November 17, 2025.

Cite this article: Cathleen Muller, “In Defense of Racebending,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 23 (2025).

 

Acknowledgement
For feedback on earlier drafts and variants of this paper, I am grateful to audiences at Bard College, Marist University, The Ohio State University, the Canadian Philosophical Association, and the American Society for Aesthetics, Manasa Gopakumar, Charles Peterson, Henry Pratt, and several anonymous referees. I also benefited from reading and conversation with the Race and Gender Reading Group at Marist and the School of Liberal Arts Writing Group.

 

Endnotes

[1] I use the term ‘creator’ as a general term, meant to include authors, directors, and so on. When speaking specifically about authors, I use that term to improve readability.

[2] Karl Bollers, Watson and Holmes: A Study in Black (New York: New Paradigm Studios, 2013).

[3] Many instances of racebending are more complex, such as the creation of multiple universes, across which Spider-Man differs in race, gender, and even species. To keep the discussion simple, I stick to simpler types of racebending, such as the Watson and Holmes case mentioned above, The Wiz, Hamilton, and instances of cross-racial casting.

[4] Amie Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 68.

[5] For an example of this opposition in popular culture, see Tevin Murphy, “The Incomparable Differences between Whitewashing and Racebending,” Geeks of Color, April 9, 2017, https://geeksofcolor.co/2017/04/09/the-incomparable-differences-between-whitewashing-and-racebending/.

[6]  Hilton Als, “Hide and Seek,” The New Yorker, March 1, 2021: 66-67. Published online as “Acting Black and White Onscreen,” The New Yorker, February 22, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/01/acting-black-and-white-onscreen.

[7] Hilton Als, “The Night Crawlers,” The New Yorker, February 28, 2016.

[8] Als, “The Night Crawlers.”

[9] Though the phrase originates with Hume, I find the most compelling defense of the aesthetic value of the rough hero to be in A. W. Eaton, “Robust Immoralism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 281-292.

[10] Eaton, “Robust Immoralism,” 287.

[11] Eaton, “Robust Immoralism,” 287.

[12] Christy Mag Uidhir, “The Aesthetics of Actor-Character Race Matching in Film Fictions,” Philosophers’ Imprint 12, no. 3 (January 2012): 6, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0012. Mag Uidhir clarifies that the pro tanto defect he identifies does not apply to “ersatz race matching,” that is, cases in which the race mismatch is epistemically equivalent to a race match.

[13] Gael Cooper, “J. K. Rowling on the Reaction to a Black Hermione: ‘Idiots were Going to Idiot’,” CNET. June 6, 2016, https://www.cnet.com/news/j-k-rowling-on-reaction-to-a-black-hermione-idiots-were-going-to-idiot/.

[14] Cooper, “J. K. Rowling.”

[15] Mag Uidhir, “Actor-Character Race Matching,” 7.

[16] Elizabeth Klett focuses on gender, not race, arguing that Fiona Shaw’s portrayal of Richard II “revealed both the performativity of gender and the instability of masculinity.” Nonetheless, I believe her observation extends to race as well. Elizabeth Klett, “Many Bodies, Many Voices: Performing Androgyny in Fiona Shaw’s and Deborah Warner’s Richard II,” Theatre Journal 58, no. 2 (May 2006), 178-179.

[17] Thanks to Manasa Gopakumar for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, especially regarding the superficial treatment of race and the worry about sanitizing the canon below.

[18] André Wheeler. “‘Fake Diversity’: Barnes & Noble Cancels Race-Swapped Classic Covers,” The Guardian, Feb 20, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/05/barnes-and-noble-diverse-classics-backlash.

[19] Wheeler, “‘Fake Diversity.’”

[20] Wheeler, “‘Fake Diversity.’”

[21] For an example of the fury over Elba’s casting, see Pamela McClintock and Tom Appelo, “Black ‘Thor’ Actor Blasts Race Debate Over his Casting,” Hollywood Reporter, March 7, 2011, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/black-thor-actor-blasts-race-164994/.

[22] Joy Shim, “Literary Racial Impersonation,” Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8, no. 31 (2021). Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing me toward this article.

[23] Shim, “Literary Racial Impersonation,” 224.

[24] Shim, “Literary Racial Impersonation,” 233.

[25] Shim, “Literary Racial Impersonation,” 233-234.

[26] Lyra D. Monteiro, “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Hamilton,” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 62. Although Sally Hemmings is briefly depicted within one song, Monteiro notes, she is not a full-fledged character in the musical. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that I include Hamilton in this paper.

[27] Monteiro, “Race-Conscious Casting,” 66.

[28] Donatella Galella, “Being in ‘The Room Where It Happens’: Hamilton, Obama, and Nationalist Neoliberal Multicultural Inclusion,” Theatre Survey 59, no. 3 (September 2018), 369-370, 364.

[29] Marvin McAllister, “Toward a More Perfect Hamilton,” Journal of the Early Republic, 37 (Summer 2017): 284.

[30] Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich, “A Cognitive Theory of Pretense,” Cognition 74, no. 2 (February 2000): 122, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(99)00070-0.

[31] Shaun Nichols, “Imagining and Believing: The Promise of a Single Code,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2004): 133, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1559197.

[32] Tamar Szabó Gendler, “Imaginative Contagion,” Metaphilosophy 37, no. 2 (April 2006): 183, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24439598.

[33] Ellen E. Kneeskern and Patricia A. Reeder, “Examining the Impact of Fiction Literature on Children’s Gender Stereotypes,” Current Psychology 41 (March 2022): 1472-1485, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-00686-4.

[34] Shaun Nichols, “Imaginative Blocks and Impossibility: An Essay in Modal Psychology,” in The Architecture of the Imagination, ed. Shaun Nichols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 246.

[35] Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 92.

[36] This term is widespread on the internet. See for example, Brittany Spanos, “The Year in Black Erasure,” Pitchfork, December 22, 2014, https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/615-the-year-in-black-erasure/.

[37] Octavia Butler, “We Tend to Do the Right Thing When We Get Scared,” New York Times, January 1, 2000, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/01/books/visions-identity-we-tend-to-do-the-right-thing-when-we-get-scared.html.

[38] Brynn F. Welch, “The Pervasive Whiteness of Children’s Literature: Collective Harms and Consumer Obligations,” Social Theory and Practice 42, no. 2 (April 2016): 374, https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract201642220.

[39] Welch, “Pervasive Whiteness,” 377-378.

[40] Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution (New York, NY: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), 90, 275. Cited in McAllister, “Toward a More Perfect Hamilton,” 286.

[41] McAllister, “Toward a More Perfect Hamilton,” 286.

[42] Wheeler, “‘Fake Diversity’.”

[43] James O. Young, and Susan Haley, ‘‘‘Nothing Comes from Nowhere’: Reflections on Cultural Appropriation as the Representation of Other Cultures,” in The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation, eds. James O. Young and Conrad G. Brunk, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 271-272.

[44] For example, see the comments on u/IAmAN00bie, “CMV: There is No Reason to be Offended When a Fictional Character Race or Gender is Swapped,” Reddit, July 17, 2014, https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/2az65z/cmv_there_is_no_reason_to_be_offended_when_a/#bottom-comments.

[45] See Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 160-161.This view bears some similarity to that of James O.Young, on which characters are artistic elements that organize the work. However, they differ due to Young’s view that characters can and should be “appropriated and used” in secondary fictions. James O. Young, Radically Rethinking Copyright in the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2020), chap. 2 and chap. 6. Ebook. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for prompting me to consider Young’s work here.

[46] Currie, The Nature of Fiction, 160.

[47] Currie, The Nature of Fiction, 161.

[48] Luke Goldstein, “Graphic Novel Review: ‘Watson and Holmes: A Study in Black’ by Karl Bollers, Brandon Perlow, and Paul Mendoza,” Blog Critics, January 3, 2014, https://blogcritics.org/graphic-novel-review-watson-and-holmes-a-study-in-black-by-karl-bollers-brandon-perlow-and-paul-mendoza/. Emphasis added.

[49] Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to say more on this point.

[50] Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics, 67.

[51] Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics, 68.

[52] Terrence Parsons, Nonexistent Objects (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 23.

[53] Amie Thomasson, “Fiction, Modality and Dependent Abstracta,” Philosophical Studies 84, no. 2/3 (Dec. 1996): 311, n. 27, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4320720.

[54] Parsons, Nonexistent Objects, 189. Maria Reicher draws a similar distinction between maximal and sub-maximal characters in Maria E. Reicher, “The Ontology of Fictional Characters,” in Characters in Fictional Worlds, eds. Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis and Ralf Schneider (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 129-130.

[55] Terrence Parsons, “Fictional Characters and Indeterminate Identity,” in Truth in Fiction, ed. Franck Lihoreau (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 36-37.

[56] David Lewis, “Truth in Fiction,” American Philosophical Quarterly 15, no. 1 (January 1978), https://www.jstor.org/stable/20009693.

[57] Lewis, “Truth in Fiction,” 42.

[58] R. M. Sainsbury, Fiction and Fictionalism (New York: Routledge, 2009), 86.

[59] Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 406-408.

[60] Walton, Mimesis, 408.

[61] Walton, Mimesis, 408.