Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World

Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World This page intentionally left blank Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film EDITED BY ERICKA HOAGLAND AND REEMA SARWAL Foreword by Andy Sawyer McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Science fiction, imperialism and the third world : essays on postcolonial literature and film / edited by Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal ; foreword by Andy Sawyer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-4789-3 softcover : 50# alkaline paper ¡. Science fiction, American—History and criticism. 2. Science fiction, Indic (English)—History and criticism. 3. Science fiction, Mexican—History and criticism. 4. Science fiction films—History and criticism. 5. Imperialism in literature. 6. Postcolonialism in literature. 7. Literature and globalization. 8. Utopias in literature. 9. Dystopias in literature. I. Hoagland, Ericka, ¡975– II. Sarwal, Reema. PS374.S35S335 20¡0 809.3'8762—dc22 2010023305 British Library cataloguing data are available ©20¡0 Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover image ©20¡0 Brand X Pictures Manufactured in the United States of America McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com Acknowledgments We would first like to thank all our contributors, not only for their arti- cles, but also for their patience and co-operation. Thanks also to Stephen F. Austin State University for the research mini- grant to Ericka Hoagland in the early stages of the project. Whole-hearted thanks to Prof. Andy Sawyer for his enthusiastic response to the manuscript and for writing the Foreword. Personally, a big thank you to Amit Sarwal for all his help and uncon- ditional support. Some of the essays in the collection have been published previously. They have been re-edited and revised here to make them more up-to-date and rel- evant. Permission given by the following copyright holders (authors, editors, and publishers) is gratefully acknowledged. Gerald Gaylard, “Postcolonialism and the Transhistorical in Dune,” Foundation 104 (Summer 2009): 84–101. Diana Pharaoh Francis, “The Colonial Feminine in Pat Murphy’s ‘His Vegetable Wife,’” Phoebe: Journal of Gender and Cultural Critiques 17.2 (2005): 35–43. Shital Pravinchandra, “The Third-World Body Commodified: Manjula Pad- manabhan’s Harvest,” Un/Worldly Bodies, Special. issue of eSharp 8 (Autumn 2006): http://www.gla.ac.uk/esharp. Debjani Sengupta, “Sadhanbabu’s Friends: Science Fiction in Bengal from 1882 to 1974,” Shaping Technologies, Spl. issue of Sarai Reader 03 (2003): 76–82. Herbert Klein, “Loonies and Others in Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” Revista Litteralis 3 (2004): 39–60. Permission granted by EdiUri, Santo Angelo, Brazil. Dominic Alessio and Jessica Langer, “Hindu Nationalism and Postcolonialism in Indian Science Fiction: Koi... Mil Gaya (2003)” New Cinemas: Journal of Con- temporary Film 5.3 (2007): 217–229 (Intellect Books). v This page intentionally left blank Table of Contents Acknowledgments v Foreword Andy Sawyer 1 Introduction: Imperialism, the Third World, and Postcolonial Science Fiction Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal 5 Part One: Re-inventing/Alternate History 1. Postcolonial Science Fiction: The Desert Planet Gerald Gaylard 21 2. History Deconstructed: Alternative Worlds in Steven Barnes’s Lion’s Blood and Zulu Heart Juan F. Elices 37 3. The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Silence, Slippage and Subversion Suparno Banerjee 50 4. Organization and the Continuum: History in Vandana Singh’s “Delhi” Grant Hamilton 65 Part Two: Forms of Protest 5. The Colonial Feminine in Pat Murphy’s “His Vegetable Wife” Diana Pharaoh Francis 77 6. Body Markets: The Technologies of Global Capitalism and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest Shital Pravinchandra 87 vii viii Table of Contents 7. “Smudged, Distorted and Hidden”: Apocalypse as Protest in Indigenous Speculative Fiction Roslyn Weaver 99 Part Three: Fresh Representations 8. Sadhanbabu’s Friends: Science Fiction in Bengal from 1882 to 1974 Debjani Sengupta 115 9. Critiquing Economic and Environmental Colonization: Globalization and Science Fiction in The Moons of Palmares Judith Leggatt 127 10. Loonies and Others in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress Herbert G. Klein 141 11. Science Fiction, Hindu Nationalism and Modernity: Bollywood’s Koi... Mil Gaya Dominic Alessio and Jessica Langer 156 Part Four: Utopia/Dystopia 12. The Shapes of Dystopia: Boundaries, Hybridity and the Politics of Power Jessica Langer 171 13. Narrative and Dystopian Forms of Life in Mexican Cyberpunk Novel La Primera Calle de la Soledad Juan Ignacio Muñoz Zapata 188 14. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: The Third World as Topos for a U.S. Utopia Gavin Miller 202 About the Contributors 213 Index 217 Foreword ANDY SAWYER “Sf,” writes Uppinder Mehan in an essay on Indian science fiction published in Foundation in 1998, “is as Western as Coca-Cola, big cars and com- puters” (54). He then, however, points out that science fiction in several of the languages of the Indian sub-continent has been published since the early years of the twentieth century. Some years later, Mehan, with Canadian- Caribbean writer Nalo Hopkinson, edited So Long Been Dreaming, an anthology of explicitly “postcolonial” science fiction and fantasy. In her introduction (as at least one essay in this book reminds us) Hopkinson noted that while heading off into the galaxy to colonize new worlds is often a theme of science fiction “for many of us that’s not a thrilling adventure story; it’s non fiction” (7). However (as again we are reminded), the tools of sf, its speculative drive and its ability to subvert language and situation, are among the most powerful weapons available to those who want to “[make] it possible to think about new ways of doing things” (9). Far too many arguments about what sf is and does center upon describing an origin for the form in sources such as Shelley’s Frankenstein, Wells’s “scientific romances,” More’s Utopia or simply the identification in Hugo Gerns- back’s first issue of Amazing Stories in April 1926 of the “Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision” as scientifiction (3). A more creative approach, perhaps, is to consider whether all cultures, at all times, have reacted to the idea that change is fueled by both actual science and technology and the very speculation that sciences and technologies do change the world. Such an approach, perhaps, allows more voices to be heard and a more open (and critical) examination of the nature of such change, and of what we mean by such slippery concepts as “change,” “difference,” and “otherness.” An explicitly postcolonial science fiction not only has to be written from 1 2 Foreword (Sawyer) outside the traditional strands of Western science fiction (claiming them as progenitors, perhaps, while recognizing that the future nowadays is a very different world to that which it once was) but explained and criticized from outside them too. Writers such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, or Van- dana Singh; and anthologies such as Sheree Thomas’s Dark Matter (2000), Andrea Bell’s Cosmos Latinos (2003) or the aforementioned So Long Been Dreaming have brought new and exciting fictions to sf. Equally, however, the recent issues of Science Fiction Studies on Afrofuturism (July 2007), or Latin- American sf (Nov 2007), and books such as Marlene Barr’s Afro-Future Females and John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (both 2008) present new and fruitful approaches to how writers and critics make it possible to utilize the toolkit given to us by sf in this process of think- ing about new ways of doing things. This collection continues the debate. By examining such examples as sf in Bengal, Mexican cyberpunk, the portrayal of the Native American in science fiction, sf written by Indigenous Australians and texts such as the Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning The Calcutta Chro- mosome, as well as the undercurrents of colonialism and Empire in such traditional examples of twentieth-century sf as Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress or Frank Herbert’s “Dune” sequence, this book adds to the conversation. It explores the nature of sf ’s critical stance as well as its sometimes uncritical acceptance. It emphasizes, as the editors stress in the introduction, the fact that both “postcolonial literature” and “science fiction” are in fact processes characterized by contradictions and qualifications; dynam- ics rather than “things.” As such, and as approaches which focus upon change and difference, they have much in common, especially their resistance to easy definition. A postcolonial science fiction allows space for the different “voices” of science fiction in Europe, Latin America and the Asian and African Disaporas, and explores the nature of Otherness and Futurity, and what happens when these ideas are expressed by those who were the subjects of earlier versions. It arises from the sense, articulated by Farah Mendlesohn in the introduction to Foundation 100: The Anthology, that the default future of what John Clute calls the “First SF” of the Hugo Gernsback/John W. Campbell model is neither possible nor desirable from where we stand now. (Mendlesohn goes on to note that the futures of the science fiction which echoes the model of the sf many of us grew up with are “so clearly not the futures of the places that so many of us live in” [3].) It asks what happens now that Gernsbackian “First SF” is, if not dead, a very different animal from what readers of the early American pulp magazines were encouraged to grow up to create, or what happened to that future which H.

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