'Race' and Technology in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber
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This article was downloaded by: [University of Cambridge] On: 22 October 2014, At: 02:40 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK African Identities Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cafi20 Vanishing bodies: ‘race’ and technology in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight robber Elizabeth Boyle a a University of Chester , Chester, UK Published online: 21 May 2009. To cite this article: Elizabeth Boyle (2009) Vanishing bodies: ‘race’ and technology in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight robber , African Identities, 7:2, 177-191, DOI: 10.1080/14725840902808868 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725840902808868 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions African Identities Vol. 7, No. 2, May 2009, 177–191 RESEARCH ARTICLE Vanishing bodies: ‘race’ and technology in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight robber Elizabeth Boyle* University of Chester, Chester, UK (Received 29 July 2008; final version received 16 January 2009) In her novel, Midnight robber, Nalo Hopkinson uses Afro-Caribbean folklore and magic in a futuristic setting to re-imagine stock science fiction spaces in a black Atlantic context. Hopkinson is among a small but growing group of Afro-Caribbean women writers of speculative fiction engaged in the political act of rewriting science fiction from the perspective of the marginal subject. This article will address Hopkinson’s treatment of cyberspace, the spaceship and the penal colony, which become, when placed in the context of Middle Passage narratives, liminal sites in which the ‘black’ body disappears and language and memory are dislocated from their historical and cultural context. In the light of work by Paul Gilroy, it will show how Hopkinson projects the black Atlantic into cyberspace, where expanded discourses of technology allow metaphors of the black Atlantic to become deterritorialised and a more fluid model of racial and gendered identity to emerge. Keywords: Hopkinson; Gates; cyberspace; race; body; liminal I Near the beginning of Midnight robber (2000), in what is perhaps the supreme demonstration of Nalo Hopkinson’s belief in the essential fluidity of identity and metaphor, the futuristic Afro-Caribbean heroine Tan-Tan describes a journey with her father from the planet Toussaint to the prison colony of New Half-Way Tree. Entering a Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 02:40 22 October 2014 transportation pod and passing through a series of ‘dimension veils’, Tan-Tan’s body disappears, leaving her a vague amalgam of animal and human parts: The first shift wave hit them. For Tan-Tan it was as though her belly was turning inside out, like wearing all her insides on the outside. The air smelt wrong. She clutched Antonio’s hand. A curtain of fog was passing through the pod, rearranging sight, sound ... A next veil swept through them, slow like molasses. Tan-Tan felt as though her tailbone could elongate into a tail, long and bald like a manicou rat’s. Her cries of distress came out like hyena giggles. The tail-tip twitched. She could feel how unfamiliar muscles would move the unfamiliar limb ... They were trapped in a confining space, being taken away from home like the long time ago Africans. Tan-Tan’s nightmare has come to life. (Hopkinson 2000, pp. 73–75) The act of decorporealisation of the ‘black’ body in a futuristic setting identifies, critiques and resists dominant representations of race and gender constructed within generic science fiction spaces. Traditionally, the science fiction genre has seldom *Email: [email protected] ISSN 1472-5843 print/ISSN 1472-5851 online q 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14725840902808868 http://www.informaworld.com 178 E. Boyle employed ‘non-stereotypical’ ‘characters’ ‘from the African diaspora’ (see Govan 1984, p. 83), preferring instead to repeat the racial conventions and formulaic spaces of plantation literature (Ray Bradbury’s ‘Way up in the middle of the air’ [1950] and Robert Heinlein’s Franham’s freehold [1964] are particular examples). The agency of the ‘black’ body within stock science fiction motifs like cyberspace, the spaceship and the penal colony has been the subject of little or no attention. However, the appearance of novels like Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren (1975) and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) in the latter half of the twentieth century heralded a growth of interest in the depiction of racial and gendered themes within speculative writing, and Butler’s groundbreaking novel in particular begins to engage with ideas of the vanishing ‘black’ body as a vehicle with which to explore troublesome erasures of slave history and identity. For example, Dana, Kindred’s heroine, is a twentieth-century African American who involuntarily and repeatedly disappears back in time to the antebellum South, where she unexpectedly confronts her white, slave-owning ancestor. In the final pages of the novel, Dana finds herself trapped between both worlds, her body ‘melting [and] meshing’ with a dark hole in the wall of her living room (Butler 1979, p. 261). Yet, elements of speculative fiction have been visible even in early writing from the African diaspora. Sandra Govan argues that supernatural elements can be found in early African American literature: for example Martin Delany’s Blake (1859–1862), Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in imperio (1899), Charles Chesnutt’s The conjure woman (1899) and Edward Johnson’s Light ahead for the negro (1904) (Govan 1997). Paul Youngquist identifies Amiri Baraka’s short stories ‘Answers in progress’ (1967) and ‘Rhythm travel’ (a speculative fiction piece anthologised in Dark matter [Thomas 2000], about the ability of the ‘black’ body to disappear to wherever and whenever a given piece of music is played) as ‘forerunners’ to Delany and Butler (Youngquist 2003, p. 334). Today, writers like Tananarive Due, Steven Barnes, Walter Mosley and Andrea Hairston have joined what amounts to a rebirth of diasporic African science fiction. Jewell Gomez suggests a reason for this in a commentary that appears in Dark matter: the idea of speculative fiction, which I use as a phrase to put everything together, is that speculative implies possibilities. A lot of people think of fantasy fiction or specifically science fiction as apocalyptic, a kind of doomsday, end-of-the-world narrative. For me, spec fic always implied possibilities. Meaning we can imagine the world to be a very very different place. Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 02:40 22 October 2014 As African-Americans [and writers of colour], this seems to be at the core of our getting from day to day. Speculating that there are other possibilities other than doom. (Gomez 2000, p. 358) Aside from explicit science fiction motifs, moreover, scenes of decorporealisation have occurred frequently throughout wider African American and Afro-Caribbean literature. For example, the motif of the vanishing body appears variously in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the life of a slave girl (1861), Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘My mother’, from At the bottom of the river (1983) and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1998), which features a massacre at a convent where the bodies of the murdered nuns disappear into thin air at the end of the novel, only to return in ghostly form to haunt those that hurt them. These vanishing acts dramatise racial oppression (in many cases gendered and class oppressions too) by exploiting magic realist conventions. The uncanny disintegration of the ‘black’ body re-enacts specific dislocations from family, homeland or racial heritage that occur in the plot, and at a deeper level often recalls the symbolic separation from Africa through the Middle Passage, where the very real possibilities of disease, maltreatment and suicide confronted the slave body just as the extreme psychological impact of the Atlantic separation hit home. However, decorporealisation can also signal a symbolic reclamation of agency within these magic African Identities 179 realist narratives, involving the protagonist’s healing return to a ‘folk’ self governed by tropes of tricksterism and storytelling. The protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible man (1952), for example, dissolves into a ‘wet blast of black emptiness’ following the explosion at the paint factory, reappearing to ‘climb, swim, fly’ through the Harlem streets, whose underground cellars ‘illuminate the blackness of [his] invisibility’ (Ellison 1952, pp. 230, 249, 13). The basketball court at the heart of John Edgar Wideman’s novel Philadelphia fire (1990) is a symbolic ‘black lap you’d sink into forever’, whose ‘contours ... rise and fall in unfamiliar rhythms’ and from where the troubled Cudjoe emerges energised, ‘swimming or flying or crawling’ (Wideman 1990, pp.