Decolonizing the Mind, Writing Outside the Identity Box: Vandana Singh’s Complex Speculative Fiction1 Sara Martín
[email protected] Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona October 2020 ABSTRACT: Taking as a case study Vandana Singh and her speculative fiction collection Ambiguity Machines (2019), I deal here with the difficulties experienced by women writers whose work is strongly influenced by factors outside the habitual definition of identity. Singh, a professional scientist with a long career, migrated from her native India to the United States to further her education in physics. Her writing, celebrated for its high literary quality, is closely connected to her scientific practice, as she herself has often stressed in interviews. Yet, academic analysis of Singh’s work highlights, above all, her ethnic identity and background, thus exaggerating its influence on her writing. This means that, unlike white women authors, Singh must struggle simultaneously to decolonize her mind, a concept she has often invoked, and resist academic readings of her stories as, primarily, examples of diasporic, post-colonial, or transnational writing, while she tries to offer clues about how her writing should be assessed. KEYWORDS: Vandana Singh, women’s writing, race, ethnicity, science fiction Introduction: The Limits of Racial and Ethnic Identity Politics The intensive academic analysis of race and ethnicity as essential factors in the work of non-white women writers has served the purpose of unmasking the discrimination techniques employed by the white literary establishment but may also have become a hindrance for their advance. On the one hand, discrimination can never be totally over as long as white women writers are not assessed following racial and ethnic parameters as well.