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Science Fiction and the Black Political Imagination A UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE On Queens and Monsters: Science Fiction and the Black Political Imagination A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies by Jalondra Alicia Davis September 2017 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Jayna Brown, Chairperson Dr. Jodi Kim Dr. Erica Edwards Copyright by Jalondra Alicia Davis 2017 The Dissertation of Jalondra Alicia Davis is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments I would like to thank my committee chair, Jayna Brown for your time, support, and careful readings of my writing for these past four years. I would like to thank past and current committee members Jodi Kim, Eric Edwards, Dylan Rodriguez and Ashon Crawley for your thoughtful comments and questions as I made my way through this project. Thank you to the ETST comrades who so generously gave your food, showers, and couches during my years of commuting. Great thanks to all of the faculty, students, and staff at California State University, Dominguez Hills and University of California, Riverside who have offered me your brilliance, humor, advice, and friendship. Special thanks also to off-campus mentors and my Black Women Write group members, who each held me up through this more times than you know. Thank you to my family, who supported me, believed in me, and helped make my doctorate possible even when you didn’t quite understand my work. Within my family I include my dearest friends—you know who you are. A special thanks to my little sister Tiffany Aliyah, who cared for my child like he was your own so often over the past two years. And most of all, thank you to my son Shiloh Akin. I didn’t know before I started that I was doing this for you. You are the love of my life and my greatest inspiration. A special thanks to the University of California, Riverside, Ford Fellowship Foundation, and California State University Chancellor’s Office for their financial support for this research. iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION On Queens and Monsters: Science Fiction and the Black Political Imagination by Jalondra Alicia Davis Doctorate of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Ethnic Studies University of California, Riverside, September 2017 Dr. Jayna Brown, Chairperson “On Queens and Monsters: Science Fiction and the Black Political Imagination” explores how black science fiction, both within and outside of inclusion within the American institution of SF, illustrates and contests the boundaries of black political discourse. Intersecting the fields of African American literary studies, cultural studies, SF studies, black feminist, and black queer theory, I highlight the congruence between dominant readings of Afrofuturism (as a site through which to escape racial alterity) and black political discourses that frame the ‘restoration’ of patriarchy and sexual normativity as preconditions for black community progress. I consider, rather, the political productiveness of ‘uneasiness,’ the discomfort produced by narratives that cannot easily be framed as liberating. Such narratives, found in the works of Pauline Hopkins, Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due, and Nicole Sconiers complicate the meanings of resistance and challenge the normative gender, sexual, and familial arrangements to which black politics often ascribe. v Table of Contents Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter One The Gendered Dimensions of Afrotopia: Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood and Tananarive Due’s My Soul to Keep ......................................................20 Chapter Two White Man’s Woman: Matriarchy Discourse and the Sci-fi Contemporary Narrative of Slavery .......................................................................68 Chapter Three Neoliberal Nightmares: The Crisis of Ladyhood in Nicole Sconiers’ Escape from Beckyville ........................................................................117 Chapter Four Butler’s Monsters: Octavia Butler’s Dawn and the Black Communal Body .....................................................................................................................152 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................182 End Notes .........................................................................................................................184 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................206 vi INTRODUCTION My project looks at black politics in Black women’s science fiction.1 I apply an expanded definition of politics that focuses not on voting behavior and policy but the ways in which politics are shaped and practiced in black culture, everyday spaces, and popular media.2 I focus upon gender and sexuality, looking at how constructions of black womanhood within black political discourse and cultural production function to galvanize a black political conservatism that doesn’t see itself as such. What I mean here, is that narratives around black femininity are particularly productive in buttressing a black political stance able to—within a discourse of black resistance—reify patriarchy, heteronormativity, capitalism, and individualist, behavior-based rather than affinity-based and structurally-aimed strategies for racial and social justice. In short, how do the slippery discourses around matriarchs, ladies, and queens [circulate] in ways that inhibit radical responses to social conditions—even as people see themselves as radically resisting? Continuing the important work done on the gendered disciplinary features of black political discourse in black feminist and queer studies criticism, this project also engages with Afrofuturism and science fiction studies. Afrofuturism studies frequently celebrate how black science fiction destabilizes the association of Black people with a fixed, realist racial past; challenge the relegation of Black people to a realm outside of science, technology, and the innovations of the future; and interrogate popular culture’s attachments to a narrow range of archetypal performances of black personhood.3 In their definition of Astro-Blackness as an extension of Afrofuturism, Anderson and Rollins claim, “Astro-Blackness is an Afrofuturistic concept in which a black 1 person’s state of consciousness, released from the confining and crippling slave mentality, becomes aware of the multitude and varied possibilities and probabilities within the universe (Rollins 2015, 1). Furthermore, this notion of Astro-Blackness suggests a shift from the modern era or nation-state bound analog notion of blackness transitioning through a digitized era toward and in tension with post-digital perspectives as a global response to the planetary and near planetary challenges facing black life in the early twenty-first century.”4 The observation that Astro-Blackness represents a release from a “confining and crippling slave mentality” captures one recurring theme of Afrofuturism studies, a linear liberatory narrative that represents ‘outer space’ and the ‘future’ as new spaces of possibility that can liberate the confined slave subject of the modern era from a ‘slave mentality.’ While not arguing with the case that Afrofuturism opens up new possibilities, representations, and ways of engaging existing reality, I am wary of the reinforcement of an Ethiopianist narrative in which enslavement can only be read as a dark past from which to ‘rise’. Rather than a singular radical break with how slavery might have influenced and shaped us, that results in a shiny brand new, liberated, unpolluted black being freed to zoom into space and the future, I propose a critical, careful, un-judgmental grappling with that shaping, to see what can be gleaned as well as what should be left behind. The fictions that are often lumped in to these kinds of characterizations of Afrofuturism are themselves more skeptical, uneasy, and critical than such characterizations and expectations of the genre (if it can be called a singular genre) would suggest. I challenge some of the critical and popular investment in Afrofuturism as a site of progressive blackness, unmoored from the racial traumas of the past and present. 2 This investment threatens to overlook how often black science fiction is deeply concerned with the past and skeptical about a progressive narrative of liberation. While I believe in and labor towards liberation in the sense of my commitment to improving the quality and longevity of black life, I find myself questioning the limitations of liberational discourse, particularly how it is embedded in Afrofuturism. To put this more plainly, I am less interested in uber-powerful black superheroes or black-led space operas than the narratives that leave us feeling more troubled, frustrated, uneasy. This uneasiness may hold political possibility—at least complementary to, at best greater than—that derived from the psychic satisfaction of seeing ourselves in more powerful depictions. The latter, while being psychically significant and politically useful in some instances, can also threaten to reinforce the very logics through which the violence against and subordination of black people are achieved. Melissa Harris-Perry defines black common sense as, “the idea among African Americans that blackness is a meaningful political category...it is the implicit notion
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