Does the Depiction of the Calormenes Make the Narnia Stories Racist?
In his well-known and well-respected commentary Companion to Narnia, Paul Ford, typically a strong supporter of Lewis, includes a short entry titled, “Racism and Ethnocentrism,” where he claims, “C. S. Lewis was a man of his time and socioeconomic class. Like many English men of this era, Lewis was unconsciously but regrettably unsympathetic to things and people Middle Eastern. Thus he sometimes engages in exaggerated stereotyping in contrasting things Narnian and thing Calormene. He intends this in a broadly comic way, almost vaudevillian. But in our post-September 11, 2001, world, he would, I am sure, want to reconsider this insensitivity” (363). In his less well-known and less well-respected book The Magical Worlds of Narnia, David Colbert goes further, claiming that Lewis’s writing is “spiced with bigotry that is anything but unconscious” (166). In “In Defense of C. S. Lewis,” which appeared in The Atlantic in October 2001 and which in the end is supportive, Gregg Easterbrook write
