Chromatic Recasting

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Related terms: Recasting
See also: Race and Fandom, Genderswap casting, racebending, Social Justice
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During discussion of whitewashing and racebending in Western media fandom, fans sometimes recast popular media sources entirely with actors of colour in order to make a point and challenge traditional assumptions about how media should look. In January 2010, this became something of a meme, sparked off by two DC and Marvel recastings posted by handyhunter on Livejournal (the original posts have been lost and sadly are not archived).

In the words of bossymarmalade, writing in January 2010,

The point of this meme is NOT to insinuate that white characters are the only interesting or important ones. It it NOT to mean that diversity in media is as simple as "browning it up" a little. It is NOT to devalue the chromatic characters who already exist and are awesome.

What this meme is for is to disturb the idea that white actors can and should play not only canonically white characters, but also canonically chromatic characters. It is to offer imagination fodder that also issues a challenge: movies already want us to re-imagine chromatic stories as white ones, so why shouldn't we re-imagine white stories as chromatic ones? It is, not least of all, to have some fun imagining people who look like us in these iconic roles.[1]

The following list includes both recasting of white characters, as well as original casting for textual sources with chromatic characters.

Comics

Movies

TV Shows

Books

References

  1. ^ bossymarmalade (January 11, 2010). "starring fyvush finkel as krusty the clown". Dreamwidth. Archived from the original on November 9, 2020. Retrieved July 5, 2022.