Tolkien, Rings of Power, and the spectre of Orientalism
One part publication announcement, one part the Rings of Power production team doing my head in, and a whole lot of Edward Said frowning and sighing.
Good morning fellows, and I hope everyone is having a lovely holiday season. A short (for me) post today, with two things to discuss.
Firstly, my round table conference paper from the 58th International Conference on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo has been published in the most recent issue of Mallorn! For those who don’t know, Mallorn is the journal of the Tolkien Society and you do need to be a member to read anything new, though at the two-year point, the journal is made public access. Membership to the Tolkien Society is affordable and always recommended, but if you want to read this conference paper, drop me a line and I can send it your way.
The round table was sponsored by the University of Glasgow, where we discussed “Tolkien and Medieval Constructions of Race”. For my part, I briefly discussed part of a much larger project I am working on, which is East-Asian Orientalism and the Yellow Peril as present in The Lord of the Rings. For this round table, I only briefly discussed The Squint-Eyed Southerner, and how he represents a complex discussion of the Oriental Other in Middle-earth and Tolkien’s lifetime and has been pretty much ignored for what I can only imagine is discomfort with the subject.
Which in turn brings me to part two: the news about the new casting for Sauron in Rings of Power. It has just been announced that Gavi Singh Chera will be one of multiple actors playing Sauron in season 2 of Rings of Power. The Twitter account for Fellowship of Fans has been breaking the news here.
At first, I was very excited about this. The body text of the tweet stated that “He will play the original form version of the character which is meant to be “angelic” and “ethereal” per sources.” If Gavi Singh Chera is playing the original form version of the character, as in the version of him before his fall, in which he is Mairon the Admirable, Maia of the forge, beautiful, linguistically “precious”, then this is spectacular. To have Sauron at his least tainted and most magnificent being played by a brown actor is a power move of epic proportions. It also, for a bit of personal joy, fits in wonderfully with my headcanon that Sauron becomes paler and lighter in colour palette the further he gets from Aulë’s forge. He is at once further from the warmth and light of the forge, and also punishingly, brutally hotter, no longer helpful but harmful. (In fact, if anyone wanted to illustrate him by the time of Lord of the Rings as of blue flame that would be super cool).
But the more I think about it, the more wary I get.
Further tweets from Fellowship of Fans give me concern, though we do have to take into account that they are the middle-man and are speculating.
“As was expected, most of the Rings of Power will be forged in Season 2 in Celebrimbor’s Tower and given by Sauron to different races. Unconfirmed as to which form will be distributing the rings.”
“Can also finally confirm (Dr Nosy Report) that "Annatar" is a character name listed for The Rings Of Power Season 2. Though NO CONFIRMATION or evidence yet as to whether: Original Form Gavi = Annatar”
“EXCLUSIVE: In flashback scenes “Original Form Sauron” (Gavi Singh Chera) will have long hair, in present-day scenes in Eregion he apparently has shorter hair.”
This begs the question: If their speculation is correct and Singh Chera is playing Annatar, are the writers of Rings of Power conflating Annatar and Mairon, who are very different aspects of Sauron’s character?
And so this is beginning to send up some red flags for me, and those red flags are the same red flags raised in my article for Mallorn (See? Told you they were connected!)
If Singh Chera is only playing Original Form Sauron, that will be a tremendous power move. If he is playing Annatar, that is potentially a problem. We are potentially entering Brown!Villain territory, and Orientalism territory as well. It tentatively concerns me that a Brown actor (and I am specifically saying Brown here because Orientalism does not care for actual ethnicity) has been cast to play the most beautiful, seductive, long-haired and ethereal version of Sauron, whereas a white man was cast to play a rugged, manly-man, pseudo-kingly version of the same character. We are potentially falling into the trap of effeminizing and eroticizing the East, while bolstering the perceived masculinity of the West.
Now, there is a vast body of scholarship regarding this issue in Orientalism, and I can’t cite all of them. If you haven’t read Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) you really should, it is a must-read. Another good essential read is Linda Nochlin’s “The Imaginary Orient”. One of the many effects of this Orient vs Occident (East vs West) dichotomy is a bolstering of Western Masculinity by creating its opposite in the East. And so the East was more erotic, more sexually voracious and tempting, more effeminate (and so either more homoerotic or more lazy or more passive), to prove that the West was more controlled, more moral, more righteous, more masculine.
So, now I’m beginning to get concerned. It is certainly a choice to make a Sauron who is supposed to be a reluctant but capable king and seducer of women (Galadriel) a rugged white man, and then to make a Sauron who is a beautiful and ethereal devious seducer of men (Celebrimbor, albeit in a weird order that is going to be clunky as hell) a Brown man. Because Annatar is not Mairon. Annatar is a trap, Annatar is a devious, seductive power player who aims to control the will of others through a silver tongue and a beautiful face rather than through force (again, see Orientalism, because Orientalism is a Janus-faced trap designed to be inescapable).
The thing about Sauron, the further we get into the Second Age and certainly into the Third, is that he is an industrialist imperialist. He wants to control everything and remake the world in his image, because he believes his vision of the world to be superior in every way, and believes his remaking of the world in his image to be a gift, not an imposition. And if that doesn’t shout Western Imperialist White Man to you, I don’t know what does. The fascist villain archetype exists for a reason: we have seen this story play out in real time, in the real world, and the villain is 9 times out of 10 a white imperialist.
It’s almost a tragedy, then, that we had a brief glimmer of (in my opinion) the truest Sauron we could have possibly gotten. When Sauron pretends to be Finrod, when he dons the face of someone Galadriel trusts, who looks like her, to manipulate her through love and sweetness only to become violent when confronted—that’s him. That’s Sauron.
It worries me that a show that is specifically fighting back against a fascist backlash, at a time when white supremacists are actively trying to claim Tolkien as theirs, is willing to cast their seductive villain as a Brown man (and so giving them exactly what they want even though they haven’t figured it out yet) instead of leaning into the obvious villainy of his imperialism, and how that is best visually coded as whiteness.
I love Sauron as a character, that much everyone knows. I find him absolutely fascinating. I also love minority!villains. I love a queer-coded villain myself, sometimes you want to see some well-earned evil vengeance in your fictional media. But we’re not playing in nuanced waters here, because frankly this show is incapable of successfully manoeuvring nuance. So call a spade a spade. Maybe they should just depict Sauron as a fascist archetype and be clear about it, instead of attempting sloppy representation that risks doing more harm than good.
On one hand, representation is an amazing thing that we need more and more of, as much as possible. More is More. On the other hand, are we sliding back into post-9/11 territory where actors who fit into the “Orientalist” framework can only play villains, even the most beautiful and seductive kinds? Maybe I’m overly cautious because I was an 11-year-old New Yorker when everything went to shit, and I saw first-hand the effects on media and on New Yorkers of colour. But the creators of this show are also millennials (but importantly NOT New Yorkers), and they saw this media too. Maybe we learned different lessons from our experiences. If Singh Chera is playing Mairon, that is amazing and I look forward to it. If Singh Chera is playing Annatar, we should be cautious given all of this loaded history. If the Rings of Power writers are conflating the two, that is just lazy and sloppy.
If you got this far, thanks for reading a bit of a structured rant. I’m hoping for the best, but bracing for the worst.
EDIT: As this is now making unexpected rounds, I do want to make something explicitly clear: I am in no way saying not to be excited about this casting. I am only saying we should be cautious about it, and we should pay attention to whatever comes next because the showrunners cannot be trusted and we are in the dangerous territory of giving fascists and white supremacists what they want if we are not very careful. This was also in no way intended to lecture POC about Orientalism, but rather to inform white fans who may not know better, and am genuinely sorry that it has come off that way.