Author Archives: Lindy Orthia

Guest post by Koda Li: Representations of Chinese people in Doctor Who

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Doctor Who as a long-living sci-fi television show engages extensively with issues relating to ethnicity and race, especially the representation and portrayal of difference ethnic groups.

As a Chinese person who is a huge fan of Doctor Who, I naturally wonder how the show engages with my own culture and people.

Driven by this interest I wrote a paper in which, among the myriad of human ethnicities and alien that have occurred, I am concerned solely with the representation of Chinese people and how it changes. I compared the representation in the two eras of the show – Classic Who (1963-1996) and New Who (2005-) – although the scope of my investigation is limited to the end of Season 12 of New Who.

I first investigate each era separately using textual criticism, outlining the major features of its representation, and then compared them to see what changes occur. I found that both eras rely on self-referential discourses, pursuing similar tropes, including the Yellow Peril (specifically demonizing Chinese females) and Orientalism, thus undermining the self-proclaimed progressive values of New Who.

Toward the end of the paper, I used some responses that I collected from various viewers of Doctor Who to try to further illustrate my conclusion and uncover the mechanism of such unchanging representation. I argue that most audience and scriptwriters’ lack of accurate knowledge of Chinese people and culture necessitate them to refer to existing stereotypes and discourses.

In the end, I call for more engagement from the BBC with Chinese culture in order to improve the previous problematic representations. 

Download the paper here.

Belated f*** yeah!

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Clearly this conversation has happened, is happening, and commenting on this website is a mere peep in the social media ocean.

But you know, even though history has superseded the need for this website (or proven how important it was to say all we said when our book was published five years ago), for the sake of completion we can’t really go past it can we?

So here it is. Yaz. Ryan. And the rest of this season of Doctor Who.

Fckn yeah.

‘Doctor Who and Race’ book out now!

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Doctor Who and Race, a volume of essays by 23 contributing writers, has now been published by Intellect Books in this, the 50th anniversary year of Doctor Who.

It is available from all good booksellers in paperback or ebook format.

The blurb reads:

Doctor Who is the longest running science fiction television series in the world and is regularly watched by millions of people across the globe. While its scores of fans adore the show with cult-like devotion, the fan-contributors to this book argue that there is an uncharted dimension to Doctor Who. Bringing together diverse perspectives on race and its representation in Doctor Who, this anthology offers new understandings of the cultural significance of race in the programme – how the show’s representations of racial diversity, colonialism, nationalism and racism affect our daily lives and change the way we relate to each other. An accessible introduction to critical race theory, postcolonial studies and other race-related academic fields, the 23 contributors deftly combine examples of the popular cultural icon and personal reflections to provide an analysis that is at once approachable but also filled with the intellectual rigor of academic critique.

Don’t judge till it’s published

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Doctor Who and Race has received a lot of attention in the media and on blogs this week.

Almost all that attention can be sourced back to one newspaper article about the book.

Since the book has not been published yet, almost no one has actually read it. This has meant that almost everything written about it has been a distorted, false view, based on third- or fourth- hand information.

I don’t particularly want to talk about the book in depth until it is published. I prefer discussion and debate to be based on facts not hearsay, so I would like to talk about it once people have had a chance to read it.

But I do want to clear up some misconceptions about it now.

1. Not just criticising Doctor Who

First, and perhaps most importantly, the book contains very diverse views about race and Doctor Who.

Only a subset of essays are critical of the program’s casting decisions or its representations of race-related subject matter.

Others celebrate the ways Doctor Who has been cast with respect to race, or how its stories have shown racism, slavery and colonialism to be deeply wrong.

Still others don’t lean one way or the other, but instead merely document and reflect on some of the ways Doctor Who has engaged with race.

This diversity of opinions will be very clear to anyone who reads the book – stay tuned for when it is published, or for now check out the essay Abstracts.

2. Not academics versus fans

Second, an ‘academics’ versus ‘fans’ dynamic has been falsely constructed this week, as if the book’s authors are all navel-gazing academics picking on a thing that fans have no problem with. This is plain wrong.

All the book’s contributors are regular viewers, and almost all identify as fans. (And incidentally, academic fans, like other fans, are capable of dissecting something without losing the love.)

In addition, about half of the contributors are not academics. That was always the intention of the book as you can see at the original book blog. Anyone in the world who came across the announcement calling for submissions was welcome to submit a short or long essay for the book on any aspect of race and Doctor Who that took their interest (and the blog saw over 3000 visits from 43 countries while submissions were still open). Everyone who ended up contributing to the book did so because of a deep love, abiding interest and/or serious commitment to the program. Some have written in an academic style and others have not.

I myself am a fan and have been watching Doctor Who since 1979. I am also an academic by trade. But my job was not my primary motivation for editing this book, since I teach science communication, not race studies. This book was, for me, a labour of fan-love, as well as a work of academic interest. It emerged from the fact that a lot of people were already blogging about Doctor Who and race, so it seemed an opportune time for a book on the subject.

3. Newsflash – newspaper quotes someone out of context

Third, my sentence that has often been bandied about this week – “perhaps the biggest elephant in the room is the problem, privately nursed by many fans, of loving a television show even when it is thunderingly racist” – has been taken thunderingly out of context.

In the book this sentence comes towards the end of my conclusion chapter, in a section which discusses the fact that many people who study Doctor Who are also fans, and so are personally invested in what they study and write.

The sentence is not stating that Doctor Who is thunderingly racist. The sentence is saying that fans often feel inner conflict at those times when Doctor Who has moments of racism, because we love the show but don’t love racism. An example is the Doctor’s line in Doctor Who’s first episode, An Unearthly Child, in which he talks about ‘the savage mind’ of ‘the Red Indian’ – the episode may be 50 years old, but we still watch it today, and the line still sits uncomfortably because of its casual racism. My reflection on this is simply asking how we should best deal with that discomfort.

I end the conclusion by quoting from Kate Orman’s essay in the book, in which she says: “because we are fans, we’re capable of being sophisticated, thoughtful viewers, able to see both a story’s successes and its failings.”

I hope that this is true, and that future discussions about this book and its subject will be considered and thoughtful.

4. Don’t judge till it’s published

The final point I want to make for now is: wait until the book is published, read it, and make up your own mind about it then.

I established doctorwhoandrace.com precisely to enable considered public discussion and debate on this topic. There have already been many bloggers over the past several years who have discussed race in Doctor Who eloquently and sophisticatedly. I hope the book’s blog will serve as a referral point to those other blogs, as well as a place for new discussions.

Those discussions may include criticisms of Doctor Who and Race. But please read the book first.

Originally published on Intellect news blog