I'm thrilled to find this post and wanted to share a group response I organized among the Tolkien scholars I know who shared my response of the importance of this essay as well as realizing what it reveals about academic Whiteness.
I'm in the last stages of putting together an anthology on "Racisms, Race, and Racists on J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium, Adaptations, and Readers" which I actually got an extension for right after Mills's essay came out so we could all read it, and I'm writing about the impact of its publication in my "Preface" (I have already made a note to cite your post, and Wolff's, because while there has been (since the advent of Jackson's film) a small but growing number of Tolkienists willing to move beyond defending Tolkien as "not a racist" to engage with the complexities of his legendarium, all of the ones I know are white. And the publication of the "Manifesto" was this wonderful but amazing [metaphorical] *bomb* that changed the landscape! (Well for me, anyway -- I am fairly sure some just want to ignore it!).
I do have some thoughts concerning the issue you raise here:
"If Mills concluded from his experience trying to publish this essay that a direct and unsparing critique of the racist underpinnings of a popular fantasy series was likely to engender a bilious resistance among his fellow academics, then it is even more impressive that he chose to go after a still more sacred icon of Western culture—the social contract tradition—and that he persevered in forcing the issue amongst philosophers and political theorists."
My idea could be just my bias/subjective experience as someone trained in literary studies, and who has intersected more with "critical theory" (as taught in literature programs, more under the rubric of cultural studies, than philosophy as a separate discipline)--but here I go:
First, "Tolkien" was considered trash, popular, immature, juvenile by a lot of literary critics and academics for quite a few decades. And, of course *badly* written (don't get me started on Harold Bloom). That began to change, slowly, with medieval scholars pointing out that LOTR wasn't written in a modern aesthetic (Edmund Wilson haaaaated it), but a medieval and more oral aesthetic: one of my faves is: Kirk, Elizabeth D. "'I Would Rather Have Written in Elvish': Language, Fiction and The Lord of the Rings." Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 5, iss.1, 1971, pp. 5-18.
Kirk's essay was written in response to one by Burton Raffel who was all "Tolkien's fun to read, but he doesn't write like D.H. Lawrence, or other Great Literary Types). So an essay on Tolkien's novel wouldn't have impressed a lot of the lit people -- and the Tolkienists of the time who were incredibly defensive about Tolkien (Mills correctly anticipated the defensive responses his argument would get), would have reacted badly. And do many academic philosophers write about fiction or read philosophical analyses of popular fantasy novels? Would a journal of philosophy back then even consider such a work?
Disciplinary boundaries, gatekeeping, and prejudices can be pretty weird, I have found over the years.
If the journal that never responded was The Journal of Popular Culture (the official journal of the Popular Culture Association), there was the additional issue of it not being considered a high quality or ranking journal (I don't know if philosophy as a discipline pays much attention to the sort of ranking that the STEM fields seem to), because popular culture as just "trash" not worthy of scholarly attention. ANd there are other "cultural studies" journals; I just default to JPC because I've been attending PCA on and off since the 1990s (to present first on science fiction, then later, on fandom, and the last ten years or so, as the Tolkien Studies Area Chair).
On a happier note -- I know that some of us in Tolken Studies are reading more of Mills's work because of this posthumous publication!
Good job by you and Mills to use Tolkien thinking in story and assumptions to open up thinking about race and hierarchy.
It is interesting that “Middle-Earth is [so] meaningful to people of color. It seems for reasons similar to why non-whites identify with Bart Simpson: the non-mainstream, the prankster, the “non-achiever,” the street smart.
You write that “Christianity is white” and “whiteness is Christian” are and have always been factually false.” This is routinely overlooked by mainstream Christians and extremist white nationalists alike. Christianity was an import to Europe, a Middle Eastern immigrant. We pay little attention to indigenous spirituality in Europe, and if so, it is often ridiculed or patronized. Apparently, Europeans learned their colonialist ways the old-fashioned way, by passing forward their own experiences. And these days, there are major distortions of the “Christian West”; see for example, Amy Kaufman and Paul Sturtevant, The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (University of Toronto Press, 2020); for selections, see and https://books.google.com/books?id=OMTnDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ViewAPI&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false; and for a brief essay, see Kaufman, “Medieval History and Modern Hate,” University of Toronto Press blog, August 27, 2020, https://utorontopress.com/blog/2020/08/27/kaufman-medieval-history-and-modern-hate/
"Given the fact that Middle-Earth is obviously meaningful to people of color" yes despite having little representation of them amongst Elves or Numenoreans etc. So why suddenly must the work be changed to appease them? Appease people whom you admit are already fans? Total nonsensical. This need to force every bit of fiction to represent the demographics modern day Los Angeles is not about appeasement but about an attack on the Europeans, like Tolkein, who created those fictions in the first place.
The machine did not accept my comment on your Cards on the table, Jul 25, 2022, so I place it here, in a branch of Middle Earth:
Thanks, Andrew,
Your call has resonance in other fields. For example,
Sofia Dyak and Mayhill Fowler, Center for Urban History, Ukraine, and Mayhill Fowler,”Working Between Categories or How to Get Lost in Order to Be Found,” ASEEES Newsnet, v. 62, n.4 (July 2022), file:///C:/Users/Paul's%20Laptop/Downloads/NewsNet%20July%202022.pdf
…. They call for use of non-Russian language sources to understand the diversity of Eastern Europe. Also, there can also be attention to the parts of the majority tradition that suggest, urge, and support attention to those out of power. Plus doing so will bring parts of our constituency together
I'm thrilled to find this post and wanted to share a group response I organized among the Tolkien scholars I know who shared my response of the importance of this essay as well as realizing what it reveals about academic Whiteness.
https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol42/iss1/13/
Thanks so much! And thank you for pointing me to this symposium—I'm eager to dig into all these responses to Mills!
You're very welcome!
I'm in the last stages of putting together an anthology on "Racisms, Race, and Racists on J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium, Adaptations, and Readers" which I actually got an extension for right after Mills's essay came out so we could all read it, and I'm writing about the impact of its publication in my "Preface" (I have already made a note to cite your post, and Wolff's, because while there has been (since the advent of Jackson's film) a small but growing number of Tolkienists willing to move beyond defending Tolkien as "not a racist" to engage with the complexities of his legendarium, all of the ones I know are white. And the publication of the "Manifesto" was this wonderful but amazing [metaphorical] *bomb* that changed the landscape! (Well for me, anyway -- I am fairly sure some just want to ignore it!).
I do have some thoughts concerning the issue you raise here:
"If Mills concluded from his experience trying to publish this essay that a direct and unsparing critique of the racist underpinnings of a popular fantasy series was likely to engender a bilious resistance among his fellow academics, then it is even more impressive that he chose to go after a still more sacred icon of Western culture—the social contract tradition—and that he persevered in forcing the issue amongst philosophers and political theorists."
My idea could be just my bias/subjective experience as someone trained in literary studies, and who has intersected more with "critical theory" (as taught in literature programs, more under the rubric of cultural studies, than philosophy as a separate discipline)--but here I go:
First, "Tolkien" was considered trash, popular, immature, juvenile by a lot of literary critics and academics for quite a few decades. And, of course *badly* written (don't get me started on Harold Bloom). That began to change, slowly, with medieval scholars pointing out that LOTR wasn't written in a modern aesthetic (Edmund Wilson haaaaated it), but a medieval and more oral aesthetic: one of my faves is: Kirk, Elizabeth D. "'I Would Rather Have Written in Elvish': Language, Fiction and The Lord of the Rings." Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 5, iss.1, 1971, pp. 5-18.
Kirk's essay was written in response to one by Burton Raffel who was all "Tolkien's fun to read, but he doesn't write like D.H. Lawrence, or other Great Literary Types). So an essay on Tolkien's novel wouldn't have impressed a lot of the lit people -- and the Tolkienists of the time who were incredibly defensive about Tolkien (Mills correctly anticipated the defensive responses his argument would get), would have reacted badly. And do many academic philosophers write about fiction or read philosophical analyses of popular fantasy novels? Would a journal of philosophy back then even consider such a work?
Disciplinary boundaries, gatekeeping, and prejudices can be pretty weird, I have found over the years.
If the journal that never responded was The Journal of Popular Culture (the official journal of the Popular Culture Association), there was the additional issue of it not being considered a high quality or ranking journal (I don't know if philosophy as a discipline pays much attention to the sort of ranking that the STEM fields seem to), because popular culture as just "trash" not worthy of scholarly attention. ANd there are other "cultural studies" journals; I just default to JPC because I've been attending PCA on and off since the 1990s (to present first on science fiction, then later, on fandom, and the last ten years or so, as the Tolkien Studies Area Chair).
On a happier note -- I know that some of us in Tolken Studies are reading more of Mills's work because of this posthumous publication!
Now back to copyediting!
Thanks, Andrew,
Good job by you and Mills to use Tolkien thinking in story and assumptions to open up thinking about race and hierarchy.
It is interesting that “Middle-Earth is [so] meaningful to people of color. It seems for reasons similar to why non-whites identify with Bart Simpson: the non-mainstream, the prankster, the “non-achiever,” the street smart.
You write that “Christianity is white” and “whiteness is Christian” are and have always been factually false.” This is routinely overlooked by mainstream Christians and extremist white nationalists alike. Christianity was an import to Europe, a Middle Eastern immigrant. We pay little attention to indigenous spirituality in Europe, and if so, it is often ridiculed or patronized. Apparently, Europeans learned their colonialist ways the old-fashioned way, by passing forward their own experiences. And these days, there are major distortions of the “Christian West”; see for example, Amy Kaufman and Paul Sturtevant, The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (University of Toronto Press, 2020); for selections, see and https://books.google.com/books?id=OMTnDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ViewAPI&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false; and for a brief essay, see Kaufman, “Medieval History and Modern Hate,” University of Toronto Press blog, August 27, 2020, https://utorontopress.com/blog/2020/08/27/kaufman-medieval-history-and-modern-hate/
Thanks for this. I'll read almost anything about Tolkien, even articles primarily about conservative American intellectuals. :)
"Given the fact that Middle-Earth is obviously meaningful to people of color" yes despite having little representation of them amongst Elves or Numenoreans etc. So why suddenly must the work be changed to appease them? Appease people whom you admit are already fans? Total nonsensical. This need to force every bit of fiction to represent the demographics modern day Los Angeles is not about appeasement but about an attack on the Europeans, like Tolkein, who created those fictions in the first place.
The machine did not accept my comment on your Cards on the table, Jul 25, 2022, so I place it here, in a branch of Middle Earth:
Thanks, Andrew,
Your call has resonance in other fields. For example,
Sofia Dyak and Mayhill Fowler, Center for Urban History, Ukraine, and Mayhill Fowler,”Working Between Categories or How to Get Lost in Order to Be Found,” ASEEES Newsnet, v. 62, n.4 (July 2022), file:///C:/Users/Paul's%20Laptop/Downloads/NewsNet%20July%202022.pdf
…. They call for use of non-Russian language sources to understand the diversity of Eastern Europe. Also, there can also be attention to the parts of the majority tradition that suggest, urge, and support attention to those out of power. Plus doing so will bring parts of our constituency together