The “Facts” of Blackness and Anthropological Worlds
This chapter discusses the origins and development of sword and sorcery in the pulps and fanzines of the 1930s. It starts with Robert Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories and reads these stories in relation to contemporaneous fanzine commentary. show an intricate process of worldbuilding whereby race is located at higher and higher levels of meaning even though its correspondence with actual “races” is deeply questioned. This interpretive strategy mirrors the work of cultural anthropologists who were critiquing biological racism, thus demonstrating that race was not so much being critiqued as it was being elevated to a different order of meaning. It details these interpretive strategies in order to show the simultaneous reproduction of race in the building of sword and sorcery as a genre with the embedding of race in anthropological thought.