Racebent Casting and Gatekeeping in Austenesque Spaces

Originally posted to Austen Authors Blog on August 31, 2022

Since everyone in the Austen-verse has been talking about the newest Persuasion adaptation, I though I’d get on the wagon and put in my two cents. But, as those of you who know me through this blog are probably aware, I’m incapable of talking about things in a normal way. So, I want to talk about racebent casting and the racist dog whistles going around social media in response to the diverse casting choices.

First, lets talk about whitewashing and racebending.

Whitewashing has long been a criticism of Hollywood. This refers to when a production studio hires a white actor to play a BIPOC character. The earliest examples start with the very birth of firm. One of the very first feature length films produced, Birth of a Nation (1915) featured white actors in black-face fleeing the Ku Klux Klan. Even at the time of its release, the film garnered criticism and was attributed to inciting race-based attacks. Forty years later, Yul Brynner, a Russian born eastern European man, played the Asian Mongkut of Siam in The King and I, a role he reprised across thousands of stage performance in Russian and Europe before his death.

And we certainly do not have to go back to the era of Jim Crow to find examples of whitewashing: Johnny Depp as North American indigenous character, Comanche, in The Lone Ranger; Emma Stone played a Chinese-Hawaiian-Swedish character in Aloha; Christopher Abbott and Alfred Molina were cast as Afghan characters in Whisky Tango Foxtrot; Carey Mulligan’s character in Drive was originally written as a Latina woman in James Sallis’s novel; and Angelina Jolie (who has several additional honorable mentions in the whitewashing category) was cast as the character Fox in the adaptation Wanted, originally written as a black woman in the Mark Millar and J. G. Jones comic book series.

There are countless discussions around the interwebs about whitewashing and its effect on the entertainment industry. I hope it’s not too controversial to say that, in general, it’s a bad thing. Whitewashing disregards BIPOC experiences, eliminates or confuses representation, takes away opportunities for BIPOC actors, and pressures people who consume whitewashed media to conform to the majority culture instead of expressing their own. And this is by no means a complete list of the individual and societal harms of whitewashing the vast majority of the media we consume. Also, another entire blog post could center about the whole separate discussion of how queer characters are played by cis-gendered, heterosexual actors (Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl anyone?), or queer characters are turned into either a harmful stereotype or stripped from the story all together.

Sufficed to say, western media culture has a long way to go in representation of BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and other disadvantaged communities.

So, what is racebent casting? The concept of racebending grew out of an organic backlash on the internet to the casting of Avatar: The Last Airbender movie in about 2008. The extremely popular animated series was set in a fantasy world heavily influenced by Asian culture, anime and artic Inuit culture. The original casting had the four main characters, Aang, Katara, Sokka and Zuko, all portrayed by white, European descent actors. The backlash was swift.

As a form of protest, several websites popped up, run by fandoms across many movie genres, to call out casting issues and representation in films and TV. The concept has grown into describing anytime an adaptation content creator changes the race or ethnicity of a character.

Today, several movies and shows have co-opted the concept of racebent casting, and have started using it to bring BIPOC representation into traditionally white spaces, like Regency Era period movies.

And BOY! Do people have things to say about it!!

The conversation has been going on for a while, but the first big national discussion in the US started around the casting of the original Broadway cast of Hamilton. Many people connected with white supremacy groups around the United States lost their collective minds to have a black man playing Thomas Jefferson and other racebent actors portraying the US’s founding fathers. The musical first debuted on Broadway in 2015 and the discussion around how race and the US’s history of discrimination is still affecting our society became a flashpoint for many people during the 2016 US Presidential election.

Since Hamilton, there have been a number of prominent examples of using racebent casting to increase diverse representation. Because this is a blog primarily about Jane Austen, and I’ve now ranted for more than 700 words without mentioning anything about Jane or her books, I will focus a bit to just those media representations that play in the Austenesque space.

And every time there is racebent casting in historical period pieces where traditionally white characters are portrayed by BIPOC actors, the critics get nasty.

Obviously, the biggest example of introducing diversity into the Regency Era drama is Bridgerton. The Netflix series used race, British colonialism, and discrimination as central themes of both the first and second season. Arguably, the world they created is an alternative historical universe where people of color were accepted, elevated and regularly introduced into the highest echelons of Regency British society. However, this was used to great effect in the show. It provided the show writers, producers, and cast to bring in authentic diverse experiences which are still relevant to BIPOC people today. It also, in my opinion, gave the character of Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings, a deeper motivation for his hatred of his father, which drives the main conflict in the whole first season.

Even though the show made it clear that they were rewriting history for this new narrative, internet critics and trolls came out in droves to let us all know that they thought it was inappropriate, not true to life, historically inaccurate, motivated by political correctness, and overly forced for the sake of diversity. Many people also said that it was a corruption of the original author’s work, even though Julia Quinn was heavily involved in the production of the show and has said on many occasions that she loves how they have woven diverse narratives into her stories and characters.

Another significant example is the PBS Masterpiece show Sanditon. This show has some problems, for sure, and BIPOC fans have discussed those at length. I am not going to try and rehash that discussion, but I bring up Sanditon as an example where Jane Austen herself created a character who belongs to a racial minority, all the way back in the 1810s. However, members of the Austen community completely disregarded that Caroline Lamb was always supposed to be a black woman heiress and criticized PBS for reverse racism or being social justice warriors.

Next is Mr. Malcolm’s List, a new feature length movie which came out on July 4th 2022 weekend in the US. Initial reviews almost all made mention of the color-blind casting, some noting that certain characters do not match ethnicities of their close family members. Again, you can find many criticisms of the movie on the internet and social media accusing the producers of historical inaccuracy, forced diversity, and reverse racism.

Finally, we come to Netflix’s 2022 adaptation of Persuasion, starting Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot and Cosmo Jarvis as Capt. Wentworth. By now, I’m sure this readership has heard all the story-based criticisms of the movie, mostly centered around the changes to Anne Elliot’s character traits. But I’m don’t really care about that. As an Austenesque pastiche writer, I trade on changing things about Austen’s books and characters, then writing an whole alternate reality based on those changes. I look at the newest Persuasion as another pastiche variation, interesting in its own right. Maybe they should have managed expectations a little better in the marketing, letting the fandom know it was not going to be a strictly faithful, canonical representation of the book, but I’m not a movie producer.

The thing I want to talk about is what the racebent casting criticisms of Persuasion, Hamilton, Bridgerton, Sanditon, Mr. Malcolm’s List, and many others have in common – they are often racist dog whistles, upholding a long tradition of gatekeeping in the community and continuing white supremacy.

Our community has long battled boundaries around who is able to fully participate in the fandom. Diverse creators in Austenesque spaces on social media are often attacked when they try to engage with hurtful content. Those of us who are not members of minority communities should listen when our BIPOC friends tell us about their lived experiences. It’s important not to disregard or downplay things we find uncomfortable. And there is nothing more uncomfortable then realizing that certain people are being kept out of enjoying all the amazing things the Jane Austen’s novels have to offer just because of the color of their skin.

Even well-established authorities in the Austen space have faced backlash when they try to bring in historical context, address discrimination, and provide support to diverse movements. After the Black Lives Matter movement gained significant footing in the US and UK, the Jane Austen Museum at Chawton House was roundly criticized when it debuted an exhibit exploring the Austen family’s ties to the slave trade and the broader context of slavery in which Jane herself lived. Within days of the exhibit opening, the Daily Mail said that the museum was making “a revisionist attack” on Jane Austen’s life and conducting a “BLM-inspired interrogation” of the author and her family for drinking tea. All these critics conveniently left out that Jane’s father was a trustee of a sugar plantation on the Caribbean island of Antigua where many slaves were transported by British ships during the Regency era.

For me, the biggest problem with the continued gatekeeping in the Austen community is that it is driving away younger fans. Millennials, Gen Z, and the oldest Alphas (who are starting middle school this fall) are demanding more thoughtful engagement and safe spaces for everyone in the community.

So where does this leave us. Like most big, societal issues, there are no easy answers. Even acknowledging that many of us have different views on these issues is a big step. Certainly, openly discussing issues of race, discrimination, representation, and the future of our community can only provide a better understanding of the lived experiences of other people. I hope that I live my life with empathy first, open ears and a closed mouth. That is how I learn and do better tomorrow than I did today.