Possible Things: Utopianism in Postcolonial Women’s Science Fiction and Impossible Things: A Novel Lisa Dowdall A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of the Arts and Media UNSW Arts and Social Sciences March 2016 1 2 Acknowledgements I would first like to express my sincere thanks to my supervisors, Prof Bill Ashcroft and Dr Stephanie Bishop, for their support of both the creative and theoretical components of this thesis. Their patience, expertise and generosity helped me accomplish things I didn’t think I was capable of. Their guidance was invaluable not only in the writing of this thesis but also in learning to think, read and write in new and exciting ways. I could not imagine two better advisers or mentors for this project. Besides my supervisors, I’d like to thank the many people who provided their feedback on various drafts of the novel and the dissertation. Tanya Thaweeskulchai influenced my work in ways that extend far beyond the parameters of this dissertation, and her friendship is one of the most precious things I take away from this doctoral experience. Prue Gibson and Jayne Chapman offered much-needed comments on the novel and the dissertation respectively. I would also like to thank Anne Brewster for the rigorous feedback she gave on the third chapter on indigenous science fiction, along with Emily Maguire and Margo Lanagan for their formative feedback on early drafts of the novel. Thank you also to Roanna Gonsalves, Jessica Ford, Melanie Robson, Sameera Karam, Shaun Bell and Phoebe Macrossan for all the writing workshops. Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents, friends and family, who supported me through all the challenges of the past four years, from helping me move house (three times) to supplying me with gallons of tea. (And for Buddy, of course: thank you.) 3 Table of contents Abstract 5 Possible Things: Utopianism in Postcolonial 8 Women’s Science Fiction Introduction 9 Chapter 1 27 Treasured Strangers: Reproduction, Biopolitics and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler’s ‘Xenogenesis’ Series Chapter 2 65 Spatial Palimpsest in South African Science Fiction: Imagining Johannesburg in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City and Rachel Zadok’s Sister-Sister Chapter 3 101 Science Fiction as Indigenous Survivance: The Multi- Species Futures of Ambelin Kwaymullina, Ellen van Neerven and Alexis Wright Conclusion 139 Works cited 141 Impossible Things: A Novel 157 Glossary 361 4 Abstract While science fiction has historically been associated with masculinist, rationalist and colonial discourse, postcolonial science fiction by women writers grapples with the genre’s key tropes, including race, gender, species and technology, to shift its canonical and geographic centre. This dissertation analyses science fiction (sf) by postcolonial women writers using Ernst Bloch’s theory of utopianism. It contends that postcolonial women writers create counter-narratives of the future, breaking down gendered and oppositional Western dichotomies – such as human and nonhuman, tradition and modernity, and nature and technology – that pervade sf. These counter-narratives are a utopian praxis that presents heterogeneous ‘ethnoscapes’ (Lavender), asserting the presence, sovereignty and futurity of postcolonial others. The dissertation focuses on the work of six key writers: first, it addresses the intersections of biotechnology and capital in Octavia Butler’s ‘Xenogenesis’ trilogy (1987-1989); second, it discusses literary geography in Johannesburg in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (2010) and Rachel Zadok’s Sister-Sister (2013); and third, it explores inter-species ontologies in indigenous sf, focusing on Ambelin Kwaymullina’s ‘Tribe’ series (2012- 2015), Ellen van Neerven’s ‘Water’ (2014) and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013). All the authors reject the absence or silence of ‘ex-centric subjects’ (Baccolini) in sf, offering images that disturb the present and propel the future. The dissertation informs the creative component of the thesis. Impossible Things is a dystopian fantasy novel set between two worlds: Kalan, where energy lords force magicians, known as elantar, to reap the non-renewable energy from ecosystems for private power networks; and Maradek, where art is a religious practice that informs socio-political life. Ada is a fourteen- 5 year-old elantar who risks being enslaved by the energy lords in Kalan. Her father, Pitr, is an artist who finds work in Maradek and hopes to earn enough money and prestige to bring his family across the sea. When the Kalani energy lords cut ties with Maradek, Ada and her mother risk the voyage on their own to avoid being separated from Pitr forever. While Pitr struggles to convince the Maradeki that, as an outsider, his art offers valid perspectives, Ada discovers new forms of magic that challenge the traditions of both art and elantry. 6 7 Possible Things Utopianism in Postcolonial Women’s Science Fiction 8 Introduction From the sand-bogged swamp of an Australian coastal community to the roadside diner of a drought-stricken Johannesburg: science fiction by women from postcolonial situations reveals the fragile boundaries between the present and the future. As Donna Haraway states, “the boundary between science fiction and reality is an optical illusion” (Simians 149), not least for those whose material experience encompasses the scenarios of conquest, displacement, alienation and apocalypse characteristic of a genre that arose alongside “the most fervent imperial expansion” of the West in the nineteenth century (Rieder 3). While science fiction (sf) has historically been associated with masculinist, imperialist and techno-scientific discourse, postcolonial sf by women grapples with the genre’s key themes to shift the canonical, geographic and demographic centre of the genre. Such work asserts the futurity of postcolonial others who are often rendered silent or invisible in popular sf. Women writing postcolonial sf engage in a utopian praxis that radically reimagines the future to assert the presence and the sovereignty of those usually ignored or subjugated by sf. In doing so, they break down gendered and hierarchical dualisms – such as human and non-human, tradition and modernity, nature and technology – that reinforce colonial ideology. And yet sf is also a genre that explores possibility and alterity. Scholars from Darko Suvin to Fredric Jameson have demonstrated how sf, by extrapolating from the present to imagine different futures (whether utopian or dystopian in nature), both reflects on and critiques the present. For Suvin, sf is the literature of ‘cognitive estrangement’ in which “the aliens – utopians, monsters, or simply different strangers – are a mirror” (Suvin 5). This mirror not only reflects but, more importantly, transforms reality – “the mirror is a crucible” (5). In this way, sf serves the utopian function of imagining the world otherwise. It presents “images of desire” 9 and “figures of hope” in an “open space of opposition” (Moylan 1-2) and holds open the future as a space of radical difference, saying “what cannot yet be said” (Moylan 39). This differs from the literary utopias, exemplified by Thomas More, which propose blueprints for perfect societies. While blueprint utopias such as More’s Utopia (1516), Tomasso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1602) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624) serve an important critical function, sf is characterised not only by critique but also by the imagination of possibility beyond the closure and stasis of a perfect world. Sf therefore situates the future as a point of departure rather than a finished product. At the same time, Jameson argues, utopia is intimately entwined with ideology, to the extent that it is almost impossible to think outside of the present. For Jameson, sf does not offer images of the future so much as reveal the “incapacity to imagine the future” (“Progress” 153). Such tensions between ideological closure and utopian striving continue to inform representations of race and gender in sf, and reflect the difficulties of imagining the future outside of the social, political and cultural constructions of empire. While this ideological closure often manifests in sf as dystopia, Lyman Tower Sargent suggests that contemporary dystopias, which usually feature “at least one eutopian enclave” and the persistent hope that the dystopia will be overcome (“Eutopias” 222), should be regarded as “critical dystopias” because they reject the hopelessness of the traditional dystopia or anti-utopia.1 The persistence of hope is a defining feature of contemporary sf and dystopian literature. Because “the ambiguous, open endings of these novels maintain the utopian impulse within the work” (Baccolini and Moylan 7), critical dystopias resist closure. This dissertation analyses sf by women from postcolonial nations through the lens of Ernst Bloch’s utopian theory. Focusing on the work of African- 1 Anti-utopia differs from critical dystopia in that it rejects utopian thinking entirely. 10 American writer Octavia Butler, South African writers Lauren Beukes and Rachel Zadok, and Australian indigenous writers Ambelin Kwaymullina, Ellen van Neerven and Alexis Wright, it argues that postcolonial women’s sf explores the possibilities and radical differences offered by imagining feminist or woman-centred worlds. This work is extrapolative and transformative, forcing readers to “see the differences of an elsewhere” and reflect critically on their own social reality (Baccolini 165). In its compulsion