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Introduction: the Desire Called Postcolonial Science Fiction Notes Introduction: The Desire Called Postcolonial Science Fiction 1. J. Díaz (2007) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead), p. 6. 2. Perhaps the earliest book-length commentary on the genre’s preoccupation with imperial themes is James Osler Bailey’s Pilgrims Through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction (1947) in honor of which the Science Fiction Research Association named its Pilgrim Award for life- time scholarly achievement. A more recent example of this line of inquiry is Patricia Kerslake’s Science Fiction and Empire (2007). 3. J. Reider (2008) Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press), p. 3. 4. P. Kerslake (2007) Science Fiction and Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), p. 191. 5. I. Csicsery-Ronay (2002) “Dis-Imagined Communities: Science Fiction and the Future of Nations,” Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cul- tural Transformation, Eds. Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 215–37 (p. 231). 6. Reider, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, p. 10. 7. C. Freedman (2000) Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan), p. 17. 8. Ibid., p. 18. 9. Ibid., p. 20. 10. D. Suvin (1979) Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 9. 11. Freedman, Critical Theory, p. 27. 12. Ibid., pp. 27–8. 13. Ibid., p. 40. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 86. 16. F. Jameson (1971) Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectcal Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 6, 8. 17. Ibid., p. 45. 18. D. Suvin (1994) “On Cognitive Emotions and Topological Imagination,” Versus, LXVIII, 165–201 (191). 19. Csicsery-Ronay, “Dis-Imagined Communities”, p. 237. 20. Ibid., p. 237. 21. Ibid., p. 218. 22. N. Hopkinson (2004) So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction (Vancouver: Arsenal), p. 9. 23. I. McDonald (2010) “Interview with Ian McDonald,” SFFWorld.com, http:// www.sffworld.com/interview/210p1.html, date accessed June 15, 2010. 24. Freedman, Critical Theory, pp. 48–9. 25. Ibid., p. 49. 196 Notes 197 26. Ibid. 27. F. Jameson (2005) Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso), p. 284. 28. Ibid., p. 284. 29. Ibid., pp. 285–6. 30. Ibid., p. 289. 31. F. Jameson (2002) A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso), p. 159. 32. Ibid., pp. 180, 215. 33. Ibid., p. 215. 34. P.E. Wegner (2007) “Jameson’s Modernisms; or, the Desire Called Utopia,” Diacritics, XXXVII, Number 4, 2–20 (7). 35. Ibid., pp. 8, 9. 36. Ibid., p. 9. 37. A. Carpentier (1949) “On the Marvelous Real in America,” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 75–88 (p. 88). 38. Ibid., pp. 84–5. 39. Ibid., pp. 85–6. 40. F. Jameson (1986) “On Magic Realism in Film,” Critical Inquiry, XII, p. 311. 41. Ibid. 42. D. Cooper (1998) Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye (New York: Routledge), p. 1. 43. M. Denning (2004) Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso), p. 51. 44. See also C. Miéville (2009) “Afterword: Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory,” Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. Eds. Mark Bould and China Miéville (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan), pp. 231–48. 45. J. Rieder (2010) “On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History,” Science Fiction Studies, XXXVII, p. 193. 46. Ibid., p. 206. 47. I follow here Suvin’s influential claim that “utopia is not a genre but the sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction” (Metamorphoses, p. 61). 48. R. Pordzik (2001) The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in New English Literatures (New York: Lang), pp. 149, 168. While several significant new studies have emerged, none have offered a comprehensive theorization of the form as I attempt it here. Nicholas Brown’s Utopian Generations: The Political Horizons of Twentieth Century Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) uses the field of utopia to map the dialectical interrelation of British modernist and postcolo- nial African literary production; Amy J. Ransom’s Science Fictions from Quebec: A Postcolonial Study ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), a regionally oriented examination of specifically francophone SF production, effectively establishes the validity of postcolonial analytic approaches to such works, but attempts no broader historicization; while the more recent essay collection edited by Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal extends its foci to include postcolonial perspectives on canonical western SF writers like Heinlein and Butler. See E. Hoagland and R. Sarwal (eds) (2010) Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World: Essays on Postcolonial Science Fiction ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland). 49. Ibid., p. 4. 198 Notes 50. Ibid., pp. 29, 9. 51. T. Moylan (2002) “Utopia, the Postcolonial, and the Postmodern,” Science Fiction Studies, XXIX, 265–271 (267). 52. E. Hoagland and R. Sarwal (2010) Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World: Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film (Jefferson, NC: Mcfarland), pp. 5–19 (p. 7). 53. Ibid., p. 8. 54. Ibid., pp. 9–10. 55. Ibid., p. 13. 56. Ibid., p. 14. 57. Ibid., p. 15. 58. N. Lazarus (2011) The Postcolonial Unconscious (New York: Cambridge University Press), p. 99. 59. Hoagland and Sarwal, Science Fiction, p. 10. 60. J. Langer (2011) Postcolonial Science Fiction (New York: Palgrave). 61. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 9. 62. N. Larsen (2005) “Imperialism, Colonialism, Postcolonialism,” A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Eds. H. Schwarz and S. Ray (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 23–52 (p. 24). 63. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 106. 64. Ibid., p. 106. 65. F. Jameson (1992) The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 199. 66. D. Harvey (2000) Spaces of Hope (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), p. 57. 67. For more on globalization as “denationalization,” see S. Sassen (2006) Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 68. Jameson, Archaeologies, pp. 312–13. 69. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, p. 57. 70. A. Badiou (1982) Theory of the Subject. Trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 280. 1 “Fictions Where a Man Could Live”: Worldlessness Against the Void in Salman Rushdie’s Grimus 1. M. Syed (1994) “Warped Mythologies: Salman Rushdie’s Grimus,” ARIEL, XXV, 135–51 (148). 2. Ibid. 3. C. Cundy (1992) “Rehearsing Voices: Salman Rushdie’s Grimus,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature XXVII, 128–38 (128). 4. Ibid., p. 128. 5. Ibid., pp. 137, 129. Cundy further suggests that Grimus figures a merely “nascent and tentative study of migrant identity … a chaotic fantasy with no immediately discernable arguments of any import” (p. 131). The novel’s fantastical “voyage of discovery,” she claims, ultimately “buckles under the weight of the different elements it seeks to assimilate” (p. 131). Similarly, in his study of Rushdie (Salman Rushdie [New York: Twayne, 1992]), James Notes 199 Harrison gives this developmentalist account a curious nuptial twist by claiming that the reader who first encounters Grimus “after reading any or all of Rushdie’s next three novels will, like a newly married couple explor- ing each other’s family albums, recognize the early stages of what they are familiar with in the later version” (p. 33). Harrison further maintains that in Grimus Rushdie “has not yet found either the theme or the style that will allow him to be the writer he will in time become,” that his first novel “lacks energy, stylistic assertiveness, and confidence in what it is attempting to be, but the potential for most such qualities is there” (pp. 33, 40). The arch skepticism of these readings of the early 1990s can be traced in each case to the groundbreaking analysis of Timothy Brennan’s Salman Rushdie & the Third World (London: Macmillan, 1989), the first scholarly monograph on the author and the first critical treatment to sound a timely note of caution regarding his cosmopolitan appeals to a modernist/postmodernist aestheti- cism as well as his ability to speak to third-world interests. For Brennan, the singularly fatal flaw of Grimus is its refusal to ground its profoundly dialogic narrative innovations in a definite national culture: It would be hard to find a novel that demonstrated better the truth of Fanon’s claim that a culture that is not national is meaningless. For if novels do not necessarily have to be set in one location, or be resistantly pure to foreign importations, they must be anchored in a coherent “struc- ture of feeling,” which only actual communities can create. … Grimus fails even though it is carried off with professional brilliance simply because it lacks a habitus. (p. 70) As a result Grimus, Brennan goes on to assert in an oft-quoted passage, “doesn’t know where it is and ‘tries on’ cultures like used clothing” (p. 71). The problem thus seems to be that the polyphonic excesses of the novel’s complex tropology cannot be sensibly interpreted within a postcolonial hermeneutic and its now familiar taxonomy of binaries. Indeed, as Brennan phrases it, “If the conflict between Third World peoples and European colonizers is evident here, it is carried out in terms so metaphorical as to be unrecognizable” (p. 71). 6. A. Teverson (2007) “From Science Fiction to History: Grimus and Midnight’s Children,” Salman Rushdie. Contemporary World Writers. Ed. John Thieme (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 112. 7. Ibid., p. 111. 8. Ibid., p. 116. 9. Ibid., p. 116. 10. Ibid., p. 120. 11. Rushdie, Grimus, p. 66. 12. Ibid., p. 66. 13. Ibid., p. 66. 14. Teverson, “From Science Fiction to History: Grimus and Midnight’s Children,” p.
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