University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository English Language and Literature ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations Fall 11-2-2016 From Recovery to Discovery: Ethnic American Science Fiction and (Re)Creating the Future Daoine S. Bachran University of New Mexico - Main Campus Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds Part of the African American Studies Commons, American Film Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, Chicana/o Studies Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, Indigenous Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons, and the Science and Technology Studies Commons Recommended Citation Bachran, Daoine S.. "From Recovery to Discovery: Ethnic American Science Fiction and (Re)Creating the Future." (2016). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/124 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Language and Literature ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Bachran i Daoine S. Bachran Candidate Department of English Language and Literature Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Dr. Jesse Alemán, Chairperson Dr. Catherine Ramírez Dr. Kadeshia Matthews Dr. Bernadine Hernández Bachran ii FROM RECOVERY TO DISCOVERY: ETHNIC AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND (RE)CREATING THE FUTURE by DAOINE S. BACHRAN B.A., English, Fort Lewis College, 2006 M.A., English, Ohio University, 2008 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ENGLISH The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico DECEMBER 2016 Bachran iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Part of Chapter 3 was originally published as “From Code to Codex: Tricksterizing the Digital Divide in Earnest Hogan’s Smoking Mirror Blues” in Volume 42 Issue 2 of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies special dossier on Latina/o speculative fiction, film and popular culture. A revised version of Chapter 2 is forthcoming as “Beyond Critical Mass: Atomic Fission and Native Science Fiction” in Grace Dillon and Brian K. Hudson’s edited collection Imagining the Future Together: Critical Essays on Indigenous Science Fiction. I want to thank my family for their decade of patience while I did this whole graduate school thing. Thank you Dr. Jesse Alemán for your unerring direction, mentoring, and faith. Your guidance has made this project what it is. Thanks to the UNM Mellon Foundation for providing funding and mentoring for the last year and a half of the project, especially to Dr. Adriana Ramírez de Arellano for your advocacy. Thanks to my dissertation committee, past and present, for providing assistance: Dr. Catherine Ramírez for your work with the project and my professionalization, Dr. Kadeshia Matthews for (so many) years of support, Dr. Bernadine Hernández for coming in at the 11th hour and providing helpful feedback, and Professor Gerald Vizenor for pointing the way and staying far longer into your retirement than you probably should have. I’d also like to thank my fellow students, especially Annie, Natalie, Stephanie, and Jen for being there over and over (and over). And a final thanks to my partner for helping me through the home stretch. Bachran iv FROM RECOVERY TO DISCOVERY: ETHNIC AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND (RE)CREATING THE FUTURE by Daoine S. Bachran B.A., English, Fort Lewis College, 2006 M.A., English, Ohio University, 2008 Ph.D., English, University of New Mexico, 2016 ABSTRACT My project assesses how science fiction by writers of color challenges the scientific racism embedded in genetics, nuclear development, digital technology, and molecular biology, demonstrating how these fields are deployed disproportionately against people of color. By contextualizing current scientific development with its often overlooked history and exposing the full life cycle of scientific practices and technological changes, ethnic science fiction authors challenge science’s purported objectivity and make room for alternative scientific methods steeped in Indigenous epistemologies. The first chapter argues that genetics is deployed disproportionally against black Americans, from the pseudo-scientific racial classifications of the nineteenth century and earlier through the current obsession with racially-tailored medicine and the human genome. I argue that the fiction of Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due, and Andrea Hairston reveals the continuing scientific racialization of black Americans and complicates questions of humanity that still rise from genetic typing and medical testing. Chapter 2 interrogates the nuclear cycle, revealing what has been erased—the mining of uranium on the Navajo Nation, nuclear testing on Paiute and Shoshone land in the United States, similar tests on Bachran v Indigenous soil in Kazakhstan, and nuclear waste buried in the New Mexico and Texas deserts. I contend Leslie Marmon Silko, William Saunders, and Stephen Graham Jones reveal the destructive influence of the buried nuclear cycle on Indigenous people globally, as they posit an Indigenous scientific method with which to fight through their novels. The third chapter exposes how the Latina/o digital divide in the United States elides a more disturbing multinational divide between those who mine for, assemble, and recycle the products that create the digital era and those with access to those products. From mining for rare earth elements in the Congo to assembling electronics in Mexico’s maquiladoras and “recycling” used electronics across the developing world, the novels of Alejandro Morales, Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, and Ernest Hogan reveal the hidden price of the digital world and demand representation—digital, scientific, and historical. Chapter 4 builds on current discussions of Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer to argue that Chicana/o and Indigenous authored science fiction films reveal how the global harvesting of natural resources has expanded to include life itself and organisms’ interiors. Films and other visual productions by Robert Rodriguez, Reagan Gomez, Federico Heller, Jose Nestor Marquez, Rodrigo Hernández Cruz, and Nanobah Becker predict biocolonialism’s expansion as they create worlds reflecting current practices where life forms become no more than patented, mechanized resources for neocolonial capitalist production and consumption. Bachran vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: SCIENCE, FICTION, AND RACE ........................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: XENOGENESIS, SYMBIOGENESIS, AND AUTOPOESIS: GENES AND GENRE IN AFROFUTURE FICTION ...................................................... 16 CHAPTER 2: BEYOND CRITICAL MASS: ATOMIC FISSION AND NATIVE SCIENCE FICTION ................................................ 59 CHAPTER 3: FROM CODE TO CODEX: TRICKSTERIZING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE ................................................................. 103 CHAPTER 4: (UN)NATURAL RESOURCES: BIOCOLONIALISM, HOLLYWOOD, AND SCIENCE FICTION FILM .................. 153 CONCLUSION: AFTER THE POSTAPOCALYPSE .......................................................... 193 FILMOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................... 198 WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................................ 199 Bachran 1 Our image of evil space aliens surely derives from a fear that they will treat us just as we treat one another. -Neil deGrasse Tyson, Twitter. It’s hard to be an artist and not be an activist. Not if you are going to tell any kind of truth about what you see in the world. Whether it’s art that I’m making or whether it’s political activism, fighting for voting rights, it’s all essentially the same thing. It’s about fighting for that space, expanding outward, fighting against this extremely limited space that we are confined to. I think the power of specifically science fiction/horror, and why that is a genre that we continue to break new ground in, is because it is essentially about the present. Horror and science fiction are all about examining the present and then questioning it, and pushing beyond that. So much of limiting the space we have access to is about getting us to stop thinking beyond that current moment. -Bree Newsome, from Octavia E. Butler Celebration of Arts and Activism Introduction: Science, Fiction, and Race Historically, race and science in the Americas have an undeniably problematic relationship—from eugenic biology “proving” black people are less intelligent and more animalistic than whites to the technological revolution exploiting people of color’s bodies and environments to create “advancements” that remain inaccessible to those who bear the brunt of their development. Science fiction, perhaps science’s literary avatar, often replicates this abusive relationship. In her introduction to So Long Been Dreaming, Nalo Hopkinson relates an anecdote about meeting a black critic who asked her the question she was unprepared to face: is writing in science fiction, for a black person, trying to dismantle the “massa’s house” with the “massa’s tools?” (7). Hopkinson freezes, not ready to defend herself from within “the unholy marriage of race consciousness and Bachran 2 science fiction sensibility” (7).