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Full Text (PDF) 71 JULIA HOYDIS, Köln Fantastically Hybrid: Race, Gender, and Genre in Black Female Speculative Fiction In his 2003 essay "Black to the Future," Walter Mosley predicted an explosion of post-millennial science fiction writing from the black community (Mosley 2003, 204). A few years later, many critics, scholars, and readers indeed consider "Afro-diasporic, fantasy-infused, magic-centered science fiction" (Barr 2008, xvii) to be the currently important 'wave' within the genre. Taking the cue from Marleen Barr's claim that "black science fiction is the most exciting literature of the twenty-first-century present" (2008, xxi), this article addresses the rapidly growing multiculturalism and globalization of SF and fantasy, focussing in particular on black female speculative fiction. The textual examples chosen to illustrate the aesthetics and politics of hybridity marking this field of writing are Nnedi Okorafor's novel Who Fears Death (2010), Tananarive Due's My Soul to Take (2011), and Nalo Hopkinson's Sister Mine (2013). Continuing a line of tradition now taken to have started with Octavia Butler, au- thors like Hopkinson, Okorafor, and Due produce a hybridization of genres and liter- ary-cultural traditions that invites critical analysis. Although engaging with questions of genre affiliation, the goal is not to find a new classificatory label, because as Joan- na Russ aptly put it when writing to Samuel Delany: "Worrying about the purity of the genres […] is like worrying about the purity of the races" (in Delany 1987, 64).1 Rather, the aim is to see what the literary agenda of what Mark Dery in 1994 first labelled Afrofuturism potentially has to offer with regard to pushing and revitalizing the speculative fiction genre, on-going processes of (de)colonization, and discourses of race and gender, and finally, how the confrontation with these texts challenges (Western) readers in the 21st century. Still comparatively underused in academic practice, speculative fiction is a useful umbrella term for the various kinds and intermeshing subgenres of fantastic writing (i.e. science fiction, magical realism, horror, supernatural, utopia, dystopia, apocalyp- tic), which all in one way or another unsettle and violate notions of literary realism. It is thus a term "used not to differentiate, but to include all literature that takes place in a universe slightly different from our own" (Wyatt 2007, n.p.). It also suggests that these texts are more concerned with speculation and disturbing notions of reality than with scientific-technological ideas and that they often maintain a concern with history despite a distinctly futurist orientation. Additionally, speculative fiction is a label preferred by some contemporary authors in order to signify racial, gender, cultural, or spiritual differences from traditional SF and fantasy writing. 1 In this context see also Rieder's argument that generic hybridity is, of course, neither a new phenom- enon nor a special case, because "any narrative longer than a headline or a joke almost inevitably uses multiple generic conventions and strategies." Consequently, "pigeonholing a text as a member of this or that genre is much less useful than understanding the way it positions itself within a field of generic possibilities" (Rieder 2010, 197). Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 26.2 (September 2015): 71-88. Anglistik, Jahrgang 26 (2015), Ausgabe 2 © 2015 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 72 JULIA HOYDIS, Köln Black to the Future – Postcolonialism, Race, and Science Fiction The interrelations between (post-)colonialism, race, and science fiction have been the subject of a number of recent studies and articles.2 There is hardly any debate about the fact that discourses of race, slavery, and colonialism are woven deeply into the generic texture of mainstream SF and fantasy, as are depictions of conventional patri- archal and heteronormative gender relations. Therefore, re-appropriations of this ste- reotypically "white male genre" (Hoagland and Sarwal 2010, 6) by Black women, who imaginatively remake "a literature in which humans are traditionally white, and aliens, by definition are the other" (Nurse 2003, 14), are especially important. Moreo- ver, dominant tropes are often the exploration and conquering of other worlds and their inhabitants. For black people, Nalo Hopkinson poignantly argues, these do not make for "a thrilling adventure story; it's non-fiction" (Hopkinson 2011, 7). Yet this is also why the genre offers such a potent experimental ground for postcolonial, feminist and Black revisions. Above all, the (Western) claim as to what is or should be consid- ered 'proper' science fiction and fantasy is placed on increasingly shaky grounds. This means diversification on many levels, and in particular literary characters and crea- tures of different shapes and colours. Deepa Dharmadhikari stresses the need for this: "I cannot continue to escape into worlds of fantasy that treat people that look like me as orcs or savages or servants or invisible beings not worthy of including in a narra- Winter Journals tive. Dragons are not universal, and fantasies are not homogenous" (Dharmadhikari 2009, 20). However, deep prejudices exist on both sides of the colour line. Black communi- ties view the speculative genres generally as inappropriate, white, and escapist. Hop- kinson explains: "To be a person of color writing science fiction is to be under suspi- cion of having internalized one's colonization" (Hopkinson 2011, 7). Elsewhere, she gives a response to the question why she, as a black Caribbean woman, writes science for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution fiction, and whether she might, by doing so, ignore realities of black Caribbean fe- male lives (by implication) worthier of literary representation: "I find myself thinking something along the lines of ain'tIawomanthisiswhatsicecefictionlookslikemyscience- fictionincludesme" (Hopkinson 2004, 6). One reason for thePowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) genre's original hostility to Black people is that race and racism were not considered to be pressing problems of imagined futures; unspoken, "whiteness" persisted as the dominant or exclusive colour. Meanwhile, Afro-American and Afro-Diasporic writers were typically con- fined to writing realist accounts of history and racial protest. The concern with sci- ence itself, Mark Dery explains, functioned as an additional dividing line: "And tech- nology was like a placard on the door saying, 'Boys Club! Girls, keep out. Blacks and Hispanics and the poor in general, go away!'" (Dery 1994, 188). Nowadays, although the SF literary landscape has changed significantly, the ground is still not an easy one to tread on, be it for the writers themselves or those involved in the academic and commercial marketing of their works. There remain the hard to abolish, racialized ideas of the literary-cultural "roots" a writers has to follow and the fact that because especially on the North American book market readers want to know if a book has any Black characters in it, the texts end up being placed in the Afro-American rather than the speculative fiction category. Literary criticism, Ingrid Thaler notes, faces 2 See, e.g., Barr (2003); Grayson (2003); Hoagland and Sarwal (2010); Kelso (2004); Raja and Nandi (2011); Rieder (2008); Smith (2012). Anglistik, Jahrgang 26 (2015), Ausgabe 2 © 2015 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) RACE, GENDER, AND GENRE IN BLACK FEMALE SPECULATIVE FICTION 73 similar risks of reintroducing segregation through "the backdoor of hybridity and in- betweenness" (Thaler 2010, 13).3 Regarding the development over the last three decades, speculative fictions and films are in many ways an important "last hurdle" (Mosley 2003, 203) that positive black re-appropriations of culture have to claim for themselves. Sandra Jackson and Julie Moody-Freeman underline the importance of remedying the absence of people of colour from imagined futures in fictional works, which instead should "decenter whiteness, Eurocentrism, and Western cosmologies and offer new visions of what could come to be" (Jackson and Moody-Freeman 2011, 9). However, while black speculative fiction is generally seen to have emerged in the mid-20th century and to be coming of age at the beginning of the 21st, the tradition can be traced back well over a hundred years. Black authors have experimented with the genre for a long time, but in contrast to later generations not identified as writers of speculative fiction.4 The his- torical lineage reaches from early texts like W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Comet" (1920) and George Schulyer's Black No More (1931), to Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler. The latter two are heralded as being the successful forerunners for the new generation of writers like Stephen Barnes, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Jewelle Gomez, and Nnedi Okorafor, and, in Butler's case, also for first uniting feminist science fic- tion and Afro-American fiction. According to Rutledge, this recent group of authors, "all publishing their first FFF [futurist fiction & fantasy] novels after 1996, constitute the most rapid appearance of new Black FFF authors in the short history of the genre" (Rutledge 2001, 247). Although the most canonical authors to date are undoubtedly Delany and Butler, academic criticism is catching up on other writers, as the publica- tion of various recent journal issues and critical studies shows.5 Afrofuturism and
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