UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Speculative acts : the cultural labors of science, fiction, and empire Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0t89s175 Author Bahng, Aimee Soogene Publication Date 2009 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Speculative Acts: The Cultural Labors of Science, Fiction, and Empire A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Aimee Soogene Bahng Committee in charge: Professor Shelley Streeby, Chair Professor Lisa Cartwright Professor Lisa Lowe Professor Roddey Reid Professor Winifred Woodhull 2009 Copyright Aimee Soogene Bahng, 2009 All rights reserved. The Dissertation of Aimee Soogene Bahng is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Chair University of California, San Diego 2009 iii This dissertation is dedicated to Octavia Butler June 22, 1947 – February 25, 2006 iv EPIGRAPH “We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.” --Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents v TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page……………………………………………………………………. iii Dedication………………………………………………………………………... iv Epigraph………………………………………………………………………….. v Table of Contents………………………………………………………………… vi List of Figures…………………………………………………………………….. viii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………. ix Curriculum Vitae…………………………………………………………………. xv Abstract…………………………………………………………………………... xviii INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………. 1 Science Fiction and Empire……………………………………………………. 1 The “Hard” and “Soft” of Science Fiction………………………………........... 8 On Speculation………………………………………………………………... 10 Postcolonial Speculative Fiction: Subaltern Space Travelers…………………... 14 The Political Economy of Speculation and Technologies of Fictitious Capital………………………………………………………………........... 18 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………. 26 CHAPTER 1: Imperial Rubber—Illegal Oranges: The Speculative Arcs of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest and Tropic of Orange… 29 Extrapolation through Excavation: Through the Arc of the (Haunted) Rainforest…... 41 Imperial Rubber: Residues of U.S. Empire in the Brazilian Rainforest………… 53 Migrant Oranges: The Fruits, Labors, and Technologies of the Borderlands…... 69 On Ships and Trucks………………………………………………………….. 78 Se Cayó El Sistema: Theorizing the Digital Borderlands through Speculative Acts and Migrant Technologies……………………………………………. 85 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….. 90 CHAPTER 2: The Speculative Futures of Race, Reproduction, and Citizenship…… 92 Whose Future? Technologies of Reproduction and Representation in Children of Men…………………………………………………………… 101 Race and the Visual Iconographies of Futurity…………………………………. 109 Midnight Robber’s Diasporic Constellations……………………………………… 116 Queer Families in Midnight Robber………………………………………………. 134 vi CHAPTER 3: FANtastic Speculations: Slash Fictions and the Fantasies of Global Cinema………………………………………………………….…… 139 Hacking the Matrix: Queering Techno-Utopianism……………………………... 139 Sex/Race/Space………………………………………………………………… 144 Walking/Hacking/Queering…………………………………………………….. 161 Space-Walker/Fan-Writer/Hacker-Slasher……………………………………… 172 EPILOGUE………………………………………………………………………... 189 Back Down to the Crossroads…………………………………………………... 191 The Politics of Apocalypse: Shifting the Site of Emergency……………………... 193 Postscript: Octavia Butler’s Politics of Speculation……………………………… 195 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………….. 197 FILMOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………222 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Penetrative assimilation. The Matrix: Reloaded (2001)………………………. 160 Figure 2: Smith holding Morpheus. The Matrix (1999)………………………………. 180 Figure 3: Interrogation interrupted. The Matrix (1999)………………………………. 181 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project has taken shape primarily under the auspices of the UCSD Literature Department, which I entered in September 2001. Many people at UCSD and beyond have helped to bring this project to fruition, and I am grateful for the opportunity to acknowledge their support, labor, and friendship over the years. I thank first and foremost my advisor, Shelley Streeby, whose insightful comments and thoughtful suggestions on drafts of my work were delivered with a rare combination of candor and kindness. Those who have been lucky enough to work with Shelley can also attest to her uncanny capacity to read, edit, and turn around scholarly work with an indefatigable spirit. Our program is so fortunate to have such a rigorous and generous American Studies scholar who also provides through her work and ethics an excellent model for her many advisees. Along with Shelley, my committee members have also been wonderful sources of support in many forms. I thank Lisa Lowe for her leadership in the department, her inspiring scholarship, and her exemplary teaching. Her commitment to activist scholarship and her consistently gracious support of students foster productive intellectual communities wherever she goes. I also owe much to Roddey Reid and Winnie Woodhull, who early on encouraged my interests in film studies, Marxist critique, and feminist theory. Thank you both for helping me think about speculative fiction in conjunction with transnational frameworks, histories of science and empire, and critical inquiries into gender and sexuality. I also want to thank Lisa Cartwright, whose work on visual culture and medical technologies first animated my interest in science studies. I ix truly appreciate the diverse set of critical approaches she encouraged me to consider as well as her always incisive comments and feedback. I am also greatly indebted to those professors who, during their time at UCSD, provided me with an immensely useful set of analytics with which to approach the study of literature and culture. In the earliest stages of this project, J. Jack Halberstam was an important mentor, who always encouraged and challenged me to push the stakes of my project even further. Her provocative contributions to queer theory and cultural studies have been of course influential to my own thinking, but I also thank her for consistently holding me to more radical standards of critical inquiry. Likewise, I owe much to the teachings of George Lipsitz, who always emphasized the importance of the question rather than the object of study in developing scholarly projects. Thanks also to Michael Davidson and Nicole King, who at various times have shared with me keen insights and helpful references that allowed me to take my project in different directions. I also take this opportunity to thank the administrative team in the Literature Department, including Ana Minvielle, Dawn Blessman, and Thom Hill, whose unwavering support enabled me to maintain a home base in San Diego even while I relocated to the East Coast. That relocation would not have been possible without the additional backing of two departments at New York University. In NYU’s Music Department, I thank in particular Michael Beckerman, Jason Stanyek, Suzanne Cusick, Lawren Young, and Pauline Lum for helping me carve out a second departmental home by providing me access to Bobst Library and welcoming me into their intellectual community. While at NYU, I was also welcomed by the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge. I thank Eileen Bowman and Troy Duster for facilitating my x transition into that office as a Visiting Scholar, and I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the thought-provoking and helpful conversations I was able to have at IHPK with Sarah Franklin, Emily Martin, and Mary Poovey at a crucial time in my academic career. In addition to fellowships from the Literature Department, a few other campus programs have provided me with the funding to pursue my research and writing for this project. Thanks go to the Center for Humanities and California Cultures in Comparative Perspective for their support. My research on Fordlándia in particular would not have been possible without the aid of research librarians Carol Whittaker, Peter Kalinski, and CarolAnn Missant at the Benson Ford Research Center at the Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan. In the final stages of this project, I was able to maintain a certain momentum primarily because of my time at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, where I participated in an invigorating research residency. Convened by Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar, the “Speculative Globalities” group also included Cesare Casarino, Colin Millburn, Geeta Patel, Rita Raley, and Sudipta Sen. It was an incomparable privilege to engage with this group of stunning interlocutors. Not only did they help me articulate the connections between speculative fiction and financial speculation, but they also encouraged me to speculate on my own future by extending my lines of inquiry beyond this project. I am so grateful for their support and friendship, and I look forward to future collaborative endeavors with them. I must also thank editors Stephen