Globalization, Postcolonialism, and Science Fiction: Nomadic Transgressions
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Brock University Digital Repository Globalization, Postcolonialism, and Science Fiction: Nomadic Transgressions Malisa Kurtz Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD Program Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Humanities, Brock University St. Catharines, Ontario © 2016 While speculative fiction has not yet fully realized its transgressive potential, dominated as it has been by white, male, techno-fantasies—Westerns and the White Man’s Burden in Outer Space—there is still a strong undercurrent of writing that questions and subverts dominant paradigms and persists in asking uncomfortable questions. No other literature, to my knowledge, has written with so much passion about technological and social issues, nuclear war, or genetic engineering. Vandana Singh, “A Speculative Manifesto” ABSTRACT Globalization, Postcolonialism, and Science Fiction: Nomadic Transgressions By Malisa Kurtz This dissertation seeks to establish science fiction as a critical framework for interrogating contemporary neocolonial structures. Specifically, I examine the ways an emerging subgenre of “postcolonial science fiction” provides valuable conceptual tools for imagining what postcolonial relations might look like in an era defined by globalization and multinational capitalism. By linking a critique of the genre’s colonial drive to the logic of advanced capitalism, postcolonial science fiction offers a critical lens through which to examine the continuation of contemporary neocolonial structures. For example, postcolonial science fiction questions several of the assumptions that underpin science fiction, including the genre’s colonial gaze, the appeal to an ideology of progress, focus on the “future” and the construction of an assumed cosmopolitan future, and an implicit faith in technological solutions or the inclination towards techno-optimism. Postcolonial science fiction links these generic qualities to the dominance of certain ideological frameworks in contemporary neoliberal culture, revealing the colonial underpinnings of both genre and the “real-world” socio-historical contexts from which genres emerge. Importantly, postcolonial science fiction is also constructivist, offering alternative epistemological frameworks for understanding our relationship to the future beyond colonial paradigms. Through the process of deconstructing and reconstructing sf’s colonial assumptions, I see postcolonial science fiction produced from diverse national contexts as expressions of a transnational desire to understand such questions as: what do we need to do so that tomorrow is not characterized by the violence against others we exhibit today? Or, more specifically, how can we create new visions of “postcolonialism” that will materialize into more ethical practice? By explicitly foregrounding these questions postcolonial science fiction transforms the genre’s world building into a strategy of postcolonial experimentation that strives to understand the complexity of problems facing diverse global communities. Postcolonial studies might also benefit from thinking through the lens of science fiction, where creative projects function as ethical experiments towards mapping out the possibilities of transnational affiliation. As this study emphasizes, I therefore see postcolonial science fiction as simultaneously a subgenre and a process, strategy, or mode of relation established between people committed to imagining less exploitative futures. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation could not have been completed without the support of many professors, colleagues, and friends. I would first like to thank Dr. Martin Danahay for his professional guidance and sf knowledge, personal encouragement, and for keeping me on track to finish my graduate studies. I have asked him for endless advice and reference letters, and he continues to provide invaluable support in helping me navigate through the trials of academia. I would also like to thank Dr. Gale Coskan-Johnson and Dr. Dale Bradley for their valuable recommendations on postcolonial theory and science fiction texts, and for their time and effort as part of my doctoral supervisory committee. My special appreciation goes to Dr. Sherryl Vint, who I first started my research into postcolonial science fiction with during my MA. Her expertise and mentorship helped shape many of my initial thoughts on the subject, and this project could not have continued into a PhD without her support. I would like to thank Dr. Barry Grant as well for his caring concern and support of my work, as well as for many helpful discussions about science fiction and genre theory. My reading course with him helped develop many of the ideas about genre in this dissertation. Portions of this dissertation draw on previously published materials from the journals Paradoxa (vol. 25), Science Fiction Studies (vol. 41, issue 3), and Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (forthcoming). I thank the editors for their important suggestions. And finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my father, Jim Kurtz, who first taught me that it was OK to think outside of the box. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Reorienting Postcolonial Science Fiction 16 Chapter 2: From Colonial Gaze to the Logic of Advanced Capitalism 42 Chapter 3: “Race and/as Technology,” or Techno-Orientalism and 82 Science Fiction(s) Chapter 4: Globalization as Techno-optimism: Examining 132 Information Communication Technologies through Postcolonial Perspectives Chapter 5: Transversal Politics and Ethics in Postcolonial SF 186 Conclusion: Towards Postcolonialism as Process 230 INTRODUCTION A study on postcolonial science fiction (sf) faces a central dilemma: namely, how are we to understand a subgenre premised upon two terms whose definitions are often highly contested? “Postcolonialism,” for instance, is a field that continues to spark debate around its meaning and significance in our supposedly post-colonial contemporary moment. As Sandra Harding notes, postcolonialism can refer variously to the past and the end of European colonialism in the 1960s; the future, in which postcolonialism is still an imagined state that has not yet been achieved due to the continuation of neo-colonial relations; or it can refer to a “critical counterdiscourse by the colonized;” and finally it can refer to the borderland postcolonialism created through migration and conditions conducive to hybridity (15-6; my emphasis). Such diverse understandings of the term “postcolonialism” significantly affects how postcolonial science fiction has been examined by scholars and the questions that arise regarding the importance of this subgenre. For instance, does postcolonial sf include only those texts that emerge from colonized or previously colonized peoples? Or should we take a broader definition of the term and consider all texts that deconstruct sf’s relationship to colonialism “postcolonial”? What happens to the idea of postcolonial resistance in particular when the definition of postcolonialism becomes so inclusive that it can be stretched to incorporate the work of pro-military, white, North American writers such as Robert 1 Heinlein?1 Furthermore, can connections be forged between different global visions of sf, or does such a subgenre necessarily revert to a form of cultural relativism? As these questions suggest, postcolonial science fiction has been criticized for its incoherency and failure to represent a united subgenre or politics. This criticism is due in part to the ways scholars acknowledge, as well as utilize, varied definitions of postcolonialism in relation to science fiction, and as I will explore in more detail in chapter one, subsequently stake different claims for the kind of work in which sf is engaged. Importantly, postcolonial sf also resists a unitary, singular definition because of the genre’s critical stance and resistance to homogeneity. Gerry Canavan astutely points out that label of “postcolonial science fiction” risks associating the genre with simple and overdetermined definitions of “postcolonialism” that may construct the genre as a “tamed and domesticated genre, whose meaning and political import is always safely known to us in advance without our ever actually having to bother to read any of it” (496). For Canavan, the danger of reductive generic definitions is that labels such as “postcolonial science fiction” become oversimplified signifiers providing the means to easily classify and understand the thematic drive of these texts without ever engaging with them directly: “a tamed postcolonialism, reduced to a slogan, risks losing its ability to challenge and inspire us—it risks becoming dead theory” (496). Concrete definitions of postcolonial sf may therefore not only be impossible but undesirable, as the label can 1 See, for instance, Herbert Klein’s “Loonies and others in Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” in Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal’s Science Fiction, Imperialism, and the Third World: Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film (2010). Despite Klein’s insightful reading, it is hard to ignore Heinlein’s history of pro-military, genocidal, and racially problematic narratives such as Starship Troopers (1959), which pits humans (the Terrans) against an alien group known as the Arachnids, or “the Bugs,” and their allies the “Skinnies.” 2 become a means of identifying and marginalizing texts whose subversive potential involves