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DYSTOPIAN LITERATURE and the PROMISE of a LIBERATED FUTURE a Dissertation Submitted by Fiona-Elle Ma

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DYSTOPIAN LITERATURE and the PROMISE of a LIBERATED FUTURE a Dissertation Submitted by Fiona-Elle Ma NARRATING THE (IM)POSSIBLE: DYSTOPIAN LITERATURE AND THE PROMISE OF A LIBERATED FUTURE A dissertation Submitted by Fiona-Elle Maurissette In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English TUFTS UNIVERSITY May 2018 Advisor: Elizabeth Ammons Acknowledgments L’union fait la force. Unity makes strength. During my time at Tufts, Haiti’s motto served as a reminder that I was only as strong as my community. From my first year until my last, my advisor, Elizabeth Ammons, believed in my abilities as a scholar and an educator. My mentors, Christina Sharpe and Modhumita Roy, ensured that I was not only doing well as a graduate student, but they also invested in me as a person with many interests and responsibilities. I will forever be thankful for having these scholars as role models. Wendy, Douglas, and Chantal: thank you for every encouraging word, gentle reminder, and inviting smile. Thank you for enriching my experience at Tufts with your thoughtfulness, generosity, and warmth. You are East Hall. James, Kyle, Shannon, Cory, Chris P., Genevieve, Asha T., Seohyon, Margaret, Jen H., Gayathri, Sukie, Anna, Daniel, Molly, Vivek, Matt S., and Brad: thank you for being my Tufts family. Thank you for all the laughter, the pep talks, study sessions, and memories. Idora, Mary, Steph, Carmen, Jen Rich, Asha A., Allegra, Christine, Ruth, Patsy, Saffiya, Eddie, Melanie, Kadian, Jerida, Shirley, Alyssa, Renata, Mayen, Sam, Crystal, Chrissy, and Damian: it was easy to write about Acorn because of you. Thank you for your friendship, love, and support. Thank you for reminding me every day that I was strong enough to get through this. Giana, Laetia, Dessaix, Sophia, Romario, Tati Elise, Elzora, and Jessica: thank you for keeping my head up. Ma famille, this is for all of us. Jon, thank you for choosing to be part of my journey. There will never be enough words in the English language to tell you what it means to have you as my partner. To my father, Amry: I would not be here without the love and support that you have given me throughout my life. Mon cœur, merci. There is so much more that I could say, and I apologize if I have left anyone out. Thank you to all my professors for your willingness to share your research with me. Thank you to everyone who has supported me throughout my Tufts career. Dedicated in loving memory to my mother, Marie Gina Maurissette. In your name, anything is possible. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One Remembering America’s Dystopic Past in Toni Morrison’s 14 Beloved and Octavia Butler’s Kindred Chapter Two Unsettling Utopias in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake 46 and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower Chapter Three Maroonage Writ Large in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and 71 Change of the Moon and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents Chapter Four Future Terrains in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead 98 and Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood Conclusion 127 Bibliography 134 1 Introduction “African Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers come readily to mind).” —Mark Dery, “Black to the Future” Dystopias are generically placed in projected futures, the final outcome of certain logics, imagined spaces of environmental degradation under totalitarian rule. However, this science fiction “abstraction [is] a disservice to the particular realities of imperialism/globalism/etc." (Freedman 60) and their impact on people of color. My epigraph, taken from Mark Dery’s seminal essay concerning Black people and science fiction, frames one of the arguments in my dissertation about how tropes used by predominantly white science/speculative fiction writers, especially in their literary utopias/dystopias, abstract the very real lived dystopic experience for marginalized communities. Thus, my dissertation, Narrating the (Im)Possible: Dystopian Literature and the Promise of a Liberated Future, challenges the literary classification of dystopias as science fiction through an engagement with the historical subjugation of Black and Indigenous people as the dystopic foundation for white settler utopias in the Americas and the Caribbean. I argue that for marginalized Black and Indigenous communities, the white settler colonial projects begun by Christopher Columbus in 1492 produced real dystopias across the Western hemisphere that continue into the present day. Rather than discuss the fantastical elements of the speculative/science narratives in my dissertation, I explore the various ways in which the writers highlight the often-obfuscated realities of New World slavery, white settler colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism. Borrowing Frantz Fanon’s phrase, “the fact of 2 blackness”1 in the context of the New World is one of rupture and dis-orientation toward Western postulations of what it means to be human and inhabit the world. Regarding Native Americans, the “fact” is the assumption that they are in the process of vanishing from the world. These “facts” allow for the implementation of white settler utopias across the Americas.2 By naming white settler colonial nations utopias, I underscore their beginnings as false sites of terra nullius, “nobody’s land,” in the Americas and the Caribbean where they could imagine themselves as the first human inhabitants. Throughout my chapters, I counter white settlers’ histories of conquest and subordination of Africanness and Indigeneity that project dystopian “futures” in which certain racial identities become figures of the past. Especially, I examine Octavia Butler’s speculative/science fiction novels that, while engaging with the dystopian foundations of white settler utopias, gesture towards a future where Black people not only exist, but they are essential to a new utopic vision for the future. My decision to include Butler in every chapter pays homage to her role as one of the first Black women to be celebrated in the predominantly male and overwhelmingly white field of science fiction. But more importantly, Octavia Butler, as the mother of Afro-Futurism,3 “has created entire alternative worlds that uncannily reflect reality and deflect and undermine it at the same time by generating subjects who improve on the available human models” (Spillers 2008, 4). In Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (2013), Ytasha 1 See Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) in which he discusses the impact of the West’s antiblackness on Black people. 2 In Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia (2005), Frederic Jameson argues that Thomas More’s Utopia is “cotemporaneous with most of the inventions we use to define modernity: conquest of the New World, Machiavelli and modern politics, Ariosto and modern literature, Luther and modern consciousness, printing, and the modern public sphere” (1). 3 “Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century techno-culture—and more generally, African- American signification that appropriates images of technology and prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called Afro-Futurism” (Dery 8). 3 Womack writes, “Afrofuturists redefine culture and notions of blackness for today and the future. Both an artistic aesthetic and a framework for critical theory, Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs” (9). In her Afro-Futurist novels, Butler considers how Black women will disrupt the material reality of dystopian societies and offer radical possibilities for a decolonized future. Concentrating on four Butler novels –Kindred (1979), Parable of the Sower (1993), Parable of the Talents (1998), and Lilith’s Brood (2000), I pair each with another visionary text: Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991). In my title, I parenthetically enclose the “im” in impossible to mark the false image of there being only rare acts of resistance by Black and Indigenous people against white settler domination in America.4 By focusing on the continuous, and continued, Black and Indigenous counter-violence to white settler contamination of land and people in their speculative/science fiction narratives, I argue that the writers I discuss show that Black and Indigenous futurity becomes not a question of if, but when. This futurity is the violent, pained, and loving process of colonized people reclaiming their bodies, histories, and land. Though some of my texts are traditionally considered to be speculative/science fiction, I read them as historical fictions that destabilize temporal and spatial specificity. In doing so, I build on critics such as Carl Freedmen, who analyzes science fiction as “perhaps paradoxically, a 4 See Herbert Aptheker’s Negro Slave Revolts in the United States 1526-1860 (1939) and Richard Price’s Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (1996) for information on Africans’ numerous (and common) rebellions, revolts, and insurrections against slavery. For an account of Indigenous
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