Restorying Arthurian Legend: Space, Place and Time in Once & Future and Legendborn

In ‘Notes toward a Black fantastic,’ Ebony Elizabeth Thomas argues that breaking the cycle of violence to which Black girl characters are subject in both fiction and life ‘requires rethinking our assumptions about magical child and teen characters. It requires reimaging who deserves magic in stories, and rethinking the treasure maps we’ve had for the past few centuries.’ Developing from this insight, and drawing on Katherine McKittrick’s analysis of Black feminist geographies this article considers how reimaginings of the Arthurian legend
for young adult audiences engage with the history of a tradition co-opted in service of white supremacist and colonialist ideologies, remapping this territory to establish spaces for the experiences of marginalized subjects. In addressing the role of Arthurian myth as the site of an ongoing negotiation of how the past matters to the present, of whose pasts and whose narratives matter, texts such as Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn, A. R. Capetta and Cori McCarthy’s Once & Future construct new ways of understanding space, place, and time.