Author: sfrarev

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Configuring the Caribbean through sf

Jarrel De Matas

Caribbean literary engagement with questions of being emphasize a counter hegemonic practice of denying and henceforth reimagining of historical conceptions of the Caribbean place and its people.One of the main ways Caribbean writers assert this counter hegemony is through an attention to language practices, both indigenous and Creole. I propose Caribbean sf (Csf) as an extension of Jane Bryce’s argument of ‘outsider’ fiction. [1] Bryce’s claim that ‘outsider’ fiction is best encapsulated by Speculative Fiction excludes other kinds of ‘outsider’ fiction which also consider “what might happen if submerged, sublimated or suppressed stories, voices of philosophies became so dominant as to create a radically different world” (17). As a form of outsider fiction, Csf reimagines the colonial experience by bringing together all kinds of fiction that apply sf tropes such as advanced technology, time travel, inter-planetary settings, genetically modified being, alien(ated) subjects to envision certain futured states of the Caribbean space and its people. Csf resists the exceptionalism ascribed to the genre of speculative fiction, which Bryce upholds as “the genre, par excellence, by which popular fiction reimagines the present and pushes the boundaries of a possible future through the means of Caribbean myth and magic” (17). Focusing on Csf allows for a deeper reimagining of Caribbean being that is manifested across a spectrum of representations—not limited to myth and magic. Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican-Canadian speculative fiction writer acknowledges the dearth of ‘other(ed)’ experiences which have recently surfaced in Csf. Hopkinson states, “the discourse [of science fiction] is slowly coming from other experiences: the working class, women, writers of color, queer writers, disabled writers” (591).

Csf is the focus for how Caribbean writers use sf tropes—that is, tropes related to fantasy, folklore, speculative fiction, and science fiction—to develop nuanced postcolonial versions of Caribbean identity as well as challenge the traditionalist and mainstream version of science fiction that originated in pulp magazines from as early as the 1920s. [2] The designation of Csf in this follows the imperialist underpinnings of mainstream SF discussed by Eric D. Smith. [3] Smith’s argument that postcolonial sf challenges imperial hegemony (6) also offers a way to address the dearth of attention paid to science fiction literature and theory by women and queer writers of the Caribbean. [4] However, unlike New Wave SF which still grappled with issues of exclusivity owing largely to American and British literary influences, postcolonial sf developed into a spectrum of Global South SF literatures. [5] One such form of Global South SF is Csf. In what follows I first map the foundations and development of Csf before analyzing works of Csf that take up matters related to affirming Caribbean linguistic diversity.

Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber combines the experience of crossing from a high-tech planet, Toussaint, to a primitive one, New Half-Way Tree, with an intricate web of Trinidadian and Jamaican Creole English. The protagonist, Tan-Tan, is forced by her father, Antonio, into a space-pod bound for New Half-Way Tree, the mirror planet of their home, Toussaint. Tan-Tan’s journey resembles a spatial remapping of her identity. The agency she finds on New Half-Way Tree rehumanizes her by giving the space to be free of her father’s ownership over her movement and her body. Hopkinson portrays a process of reconfiguring Caribbean identity through the space-pod which takes Tan-Tan to the technologically inferior, but no less culturally and linguistically significant, planet of New Half-Way Tree. Immediately, readers are immersed in the storytelling tradition as the narrator takes on the guise of a “master weaver” who proudly says, “I spin the threads. I twist warp ‘cross weft. I move my shuttle in and out, and smooth smooth” (21). Through the narrator, Hopkinson directs attention to the technological machine of Creole English. This new language, nannysong, mixes new sounds with creole words to create a hybrid blend of communication. Nannysong, we are told, was developed by a calypsonian. Nanny’s programming reflects its creator—an agent of socio-political commentary (153). The distinctly Caribbean voices of the novel extend the depth of science fiction past its superficial treatment of linguistic diversity as criticized in the late twentieth century by Walter E. Meyers. According to Meyers, the attention to historical linguistics in science fiction is as superficial as its pulp fixation on intergalactic difference (36-37). Hopkinson’s science fiction presents a marked departure from this generalization. Midnight Robber places the accuracy of Creole English at the center of its introspection of the differences between the technologically superior Toussaint and its inferior counterpart, New Half-Way Tree. Where language has always been critical to creating a unique Caribbean identity—epitomized by Kamau Brathwaite’s quest for nation language [6]—Hopkinson creates two worlds with disparities in technological access yet sharing the same Creole identity.

Similar to the emphasis placed on amplifying Caribbean identity through the technology of language, Midnight Robber draws attention to an inter-planetary Caribbean state of being. In doing so, the novel moves away from globality and toward planetarity. As discussed by Gayatri Spivak, thinking in terms of the planet suggests that “both the dominant and the subordinate must jointly rethink themselves as intended or interpellated by planetary alterity” (347). Hopkinson portrays the tenuous relationship between the two planets, Toussaint, a technologically superior world, and New Half-Way Tree, Toussaint’s primitive, yet culturally vibrant counterpart. In the novel, the protagonist Tan-Tan is forced by her father to travel with him via a space shuttle from Toussaint to New Half-Way Tree. The narrator describes the process as occurring in different waves and crossing many veils: “The first wave hit them. For Tan-Tan it was as though her belly was turning inside out . . . A next veil swept through them, slow like molasses” (73). The novel is grounded in a uniquely Caribbean sensibility through the comparison between space travel and molasses, the latter being a by-product of the sugar-making process which was integral to the sustenance of Caribbean economies up to the twentieth century. Hopkinson overlays the dimensional shift to another planet with an historical account of the ways in which enslavement warped the African body. The transportation from the planet of Toussaint, named after the Haitian general François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture who led slave revolts as part of the Haitian Revolution, reflects a reversion from notions of independence and anti-Black racism. The transportation pod itself is likened to slave ships that crammed as many West Africans as possible to offset the certain death during the treacherous journey across the Atlantic. As a science-fictional reimagining of forced exile, Midnight Robber doesn’t only rethink history on a planetary scale, but it also reinvents the connections between technology, language, and embodiment. Hopkinson’s utilization of Creole English is rooted in an understanding of language as a technological machine. Nannysong, a sophisticated language enabled through advancements in technology, is born out of calypso and overlaid with artificial intelligence. In the novel, Antonio learns from his cousin, Maka, that nannysong was created by Granny Nanny. [7] Before she dies, Maka explains that Granny Nanny uploaded her consciousness to an open-access AI platform which later came to be called nannysong. The submerged memory of Granny Nanny is reignited and established as a foundation of Toussaint’s cultural identity. The historical significance of Granny Nanny also humanizes the people of Toussaint, as it is through Granny Nanny that the people were able to create the future they wanted for themselves using technology rooted in their historical icon. Hopkinson claims language, specifically Caribbean languages such as Trinidadian Creole, Jamaican Patois, and Papiamento, as a survival tool. 

Granny Nanny’s history, which stands in for the society’s collective memory, converted into nannysong, survived because her consciousness was converted into four-dimensional memory space. The transhuman overtones of technologizing consciousness establishes an intergenerational relay anti-colonial history which sees knowledge of Granny Nanny passed down to Tan-Tan through the utilization of digital space. This digital space incorporates cloud technology wherein nannysong becomes easily accessible and of unlimited capacity. Maka’s description of the birth and growth of nannysong through a sound filter engineered by a calypsonian mirrors the forms of techno-driven change discussed by Curwen Best. According to Best, innovations in art forms such as soca and calypso “demonstrate how Caribbean music was being reconfigured by technology, indeed, how Caribbean culture is presently being co-constructed by technology” (32). Midnight Robber overlaps cultural memory and Caribbean music with techno-driven change. Where calypso was created out of a challenge to systems of power and some technologies evolved out of a need to communicate, nannysong represents a mode of resistance to Standard English, a survival of cultural memory, and an assertion of Creole identities. 

Hopkinson suggests that Creole survives and is sustained through the memoryspace of nannysong. Nannysong is Hopkinson’s version of a futured language that has undergone technoscientific syncretism of Creole identities. The “four-dimensional programming code” (Midnight Robber 153) of nannysong propels Creole into a higher, more complex space-time dimension. In this fourth dimension of memoryspace, Caribbean existence combines multiple and alternate perspectives of historical, cultural, and linguistic change. [8] The technology of nannysong, which naturally evolved from calypso and grows through artificially intelligent machine-learning, resembles an elaboration of Kamau Brathwaite’s Sycorax style. Sycorax, Caliban’s mother in The Tempest, who is unseen yet imbued with malevolent power, is native to the island on which Prospero becomes stranded. By naming his computer Sycorax (ConVERSations 176), Brathwaite claims the marginal figure as a muse for his own reinvention of colonial language. The videolectic style, enabled by Sycorax, takes on added proportions, and dimensions, in Midnight Robber. Brathwaite’s videolectic style of decolonizing language and identity sees him defy typographic conventions in the search for new forms of expression. In ConVERSations, Brathwaite’s description of Sycorax’s ability to reconceptualize language foretells the ability of nannysong in Midnight Robber to be an evolutionary form of Creole. Beginning with orality in the same way that Hopkinson would later do through calypso, Brathwaite explains that “the/thing about ‘oral po-/etry’—the Oral Trad/ition [OT] today—in a world of electronic/(s)—is that it’s allowing us at last to mix the two ‘traditions’ into sound/visual; to convert/script into sound via/the spirit” (217). Nannysong in addition to being language transposed in a different style—that is, tonal—substantiates the oral tradition through its extrasensory transmission among the people of Toussaint.  

Nannysong contains the essential elements of nation language in that it is adapted to Toussaint’s environment and the cultural imperative of historical preservation. What Brathwaite refers to as the “software” of nation language, that is the rhythm and syllables of Caribbean poetry (9), takes the form of an actual software program in Midnight Robber. The foundation of nannysong is its “one hundred and twenty-seven tones” sung in “basic phrases” for human intelligibility (Midnight Robber 154). The “impossibly intricate nannysong” speech pattern (44) resembles Glissant’s claim of Caribbean speech which is “first and foremost sound” (Caribbean Discourse 123). The sonic structure of Caribbean speech enables its own process of reclamation. Glissant goes on to say that “This is how the dispossessed man organized his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise” (124). Where nannysong represents a re-possession of Caribbean identity, Hopkinson portrays a reversion of dispossession when Antonio and Tan-Tan leave the technologically sophisticated planet of Toussaint for New Half-Way Tree. Although New-Half-Way Tree is not technologically sophisticated, it is no less dynamic than Toussaint. It is also no less human than Toussaint. In fact, Tan-Tan finds that the douens might be more human than the actual humans of her technology-driven home planet.

The “dimension veil” separating Toussaint from New Half-Way Tree reveals non-human beings with human sensibilities. Existing alongside the strange flora and fauna of New Half-Way Tree are the douens—creatures with heads resembling a bird, arms with fingers, leathery chests, no genitalia, legs with knees bent backward, and feet like a goat. One of the douens, Chichibud, functions as the repository of New Half-Way Tree’s history. As he guides the aliens, Tan-Tan and Antonio, from their space-pod to his home on New Half-Way Tree he interweaves the history of New Half-Way Tree with veiled criticism of the people of Toussaint. When Antonio tells Tan-Tan, “We don’t know nothing about this beast” (Midnight Robber 270), Chichibud replies: “Beast that could talk and know it own mind. Oonuh tallpeople quick to name what is people and what is beast” (270). The exchange between Antonio and Chichibud reflects the projection of animality by Western humanist thought. [9] To some extent, the beastialization of Chichibud points to a process of queering the Caribbean human. Hopkinson shatters conceptions of who and what is considered non/human by reconfiguring the bases of humanity. Chichibud’s compassion for his daughter humanizes him and counters Antonio’s reckless reproduction of colonial stereotypes which, to recall Césaire, applies thingification to beings that do not look ‘typically human.’ As with nannysong, a high-tech consolidation of nation-language, the douen’s ability to speak Anglopatwa, Francopatwa, Hispanopatwa, and Papiamento call to mind Brathwaite’s discussion of nation language as representing the vast, diverse Caribbean space. 

Hopkinson uses douen folklore in the novel to challenge notions of Caribbean culture and its people as backward, insignificant, or non-human. The folkloric aspects which are submerged, to use Brathwaite’s term, on the other(ed) planet of New Half-Way tree, are portrayed as essential to Tan-Tan’s cultural consciousness. Despite not looking typically human, the douens are nonetheless human in their linguistic identity, sentience, and affect. Through the focus on the douens, alternate-beings, who are more human than their non-human physical features would suggest, Hopkinson replicates Glissant’s call for a “defiance of a universalizing and reductive humanism” (Glissant 133). The ethnopoetics of Midnight Robber which to Glissant’s point “belongs to the future” (Glissant 134) takes place on the parallel planet of New Half-Way Tree. Hopkinson’s vision of Caribbean futurity provides a response to Glissant’s argument that “The tool is the other’s property; technology remains alien” (132). Midnight Robber uses the tools of sf to exalt nation language and folk culture. In an interview with Alondra Nelson, Hopkinson explains that the term spec-fic—which this paper incorporates into the overarching term Csf—is “a set of literatures that examine the effects on humans and human societies of the fact that we are toolmakers . . . Those tools may be tangible (such as machines) or intangible (such as laws, mores, belief systems)” (98). Both tangible and intangible tools are used in Midnight Robber to conceptualize Caribbean resistance and reclamation of place and personhood in futuristic, and technologically regressed planets. Like both types of tools Hopkinson uses, both planets are necessary to reimagining the complexity of Caribbean ontology. 

The relatively new field of Csf reckons with the future of Caribbean identity and being that is very much rooted in its history. The emphasis on native language as a counterhegemonic tool takes the form of different Caribbean languages coalescing in Midnight Robber. As a writer of Csf, Hopkinson develops our understanding of native and folk ontologies through a focus on the survival of native Caribbean languages. This survival is enabled through a technological interface called nannysong as much as a cultural appreciation of indigenous folklore.

NOTES

[1] I use the lowercase ‘sf’ as opposed to the mainstream, capitalized form ‘SF’ which has historically been used to refer to science fiction. Because science fiction is only one component of Csf, others being fantasy, folklore, and speculative fiction, the lowercase ‘sf’ is more appropriate.

[2] The pulp era of science fiction began under the label ‘scientifiction’ with Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories magazine series. These stories of science fiction more often than not tended to feature white, male, and heterosexual protagonists who fought physically and ontologically ‘alien’ species. Although magazines were dominated by male writers, Lisa Yaszek argues that women authors were very much present though disguised behind male pen names (10). However, when paperbacks began to rival magazines during the 1960s, Eric Leif Davin revealed that fewer women “made the transition to the new medium of novels” (306). The gradual waning of women’s voices in science fiction owed to the lack of transition to the novel form is one point of restitution that is brought to the fore by Csf.

[3] See the introduction to Globalization, Utopia, and Postcolonial Science Fiction for Smith’s characterization of postcolonial science fiction as born out of a challenge to imperial hegemony.

[4] Melzer argues that SF “has a tradition of conceptualizing themes of colonialism and social orders in conservative, and at times reactionary, ways. Beginning with the New Wave in the 1960s, Western science fiction texts and criticism have developed from a mainly White, male, heterosexual genre into a more diverse body of texts with the potential to radically reconceptualize power relations” (5).

[5] The classification of Csf as part of a broader Global SF field is informed by O’Connell’s argument that Global SF’s “decentering of the West as the singular site and progenitor of futurity . . . takes places alongside a postcolonial critique that interrogates SF’s relationship to technoscience” (682), amongst other things.

[6] See Brathwaite for his theory of nation language which is “the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers” (History of the Voice 5).

[7] Granny Nanny, also called Queen of the Maroons, is credited as one of the pivotal leaders of the Maroons—a group of self-liberated West Africans who used guerilla tactics to resist Spanish and British control in early eighteenth-century Jamaica.

[8] See Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s “Science Fiction, Art, and the Fourth Dimension,” pp. 69-84, for a discussion of the ways in which science fiction writers use references to a fourth dimension to give a deeper “space sense” of reality.

[9] See Zakiyyah Iman Jackson for a discussion of African diasporic writers who “not only critique animalization but also exceed critique by overturning received ontology and epistemic regimes of species that seek to define blackness through the prism of abject animality” (34).

WORKS CITED

Bernabé, Jean et al. “In Praise of Creoleness.” Callaloo, vol. 13, no. 4, 1990, pp. 886-909.

Best, Curwen. “Technology Constructing Culture: Tracking Soca’s First ‘Post-’.” Small Axe, vol. 5, no. 1, 2001, pp. 27-43.

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey. We Press, 1999.

—. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. New Beacon Books, 1984.

Bryce, Jane. “Adventures in Form: ‘Outsider’ Fiction in The Caribbean.” JWIL, vol. 22, no. 2, 2014, pp. 7-25.

Davin, Eric Leif. Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction 1926-1965. Lexington Books, 2006.

Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Translated with an Introduction by J. Michael Dash. Virginia UP, 1989.

Henderson, Lina Dalrymple. “Science Fiction, Art, and the Fourth Dimension.” Imagine Math 3: Between Culture and Mathematics, edited by Michele Emmer, Springer, 2015, pp. 69-84.

Hopkinson, Nalo. Midnight Robber. Warner Aspect, 2000.

—. Interview by Alondra Nelson. “Making the Impossible Possible: An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson.” Social Text, vol. 20, no. 2, 2002, pp. 97-113.

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an AntiBlack World. NYU Press, 2020.

Melzer, Patricia. Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought. U of Texas Press, 2006.

Meyers, Walter E. Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science. Georgia UP, 1980.

O’Connell, Hugh. “Science Fiction and the Global South.” The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 680-695.

Smith, Eric D. Globalization, Utopia, and Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope. Palgrave, 2012.

Spivak, Gayatri. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Harvard UP, 2012.

Yaszek, Lisa. “Introduction.” The Future is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin, edited by Lisa Yaszek, Library of America, 2018, pp. 10-22.

Jarrel De Matas is from Trinidad and Tobago. He holds an M.A. in English literature from the University of the West Indies. At present, he is a doctoral candidate and teaching associate of college writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research interests include postcolonial criticism, posthuman theory, and Caribbean science fiction. He has published in the Journal of West Indian Literature, Caribbean Journal of Cultural Studies, and Criterion, to name a few. Jarrel is also the producer and host of the podcast “The Caribbean Science Fiction Network,” available here: https://linktr.ee/caribbeansfnet.

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Politics of the Margins in Octavia Butler’s Kindred: Queerness, Disability, Race

Marietta Kosma

Throughout Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the author raises numerous tensions around the notions of accessibility, disability, equality, and inclusion, exposing the crisis of black futures. My analysis focuses on the way that disability informs the protagonist Dana’s experiences in the context of slavery, her positioning in the contemporary discourse of neo-liberalism, and her positioning in the prospective future. Very few scholars perceive Dana’s subjectivity as an actual state of being that carries value both materially as well as metaphorically. The materiality of disability has not constituted part of the larger discourse of the American slave system. By examining how Butler  renders disability both figuratively and materially, I establish a connection between the past, the present, and the future. The different figurations of space and time exposed through Dana’s time-traveling help conceptualize her accessibility in different structures. Previous scholarship has focused exclusively on the origin and legacy of trauma, inflicted on the black female body of the twentieth century; however there has been too little criticism in relation to the active construction of black female subjectivity, located at the level of the body. I wish to explore how spectacles of violence against black female bodies function in the wider political imagery of the twenty-first century. The physical and psychological displacement of Dana, as a black female body, exposes her trauma and the difficulties she faces in order to reclaim her subjectivity in a society burdened by a history of violence and exploitation. Even though Kindred was written before the Black Lives Matter movement emerged, it can be analyzed in a way that asserts the continuity of African-American trauma, the perpetuation of systematic racism in the United States, and the crisis of blackness in the future. Systematic violence threatens black women’s wholeness and renders their bodies at risk.

This article discusses how Octavia Butler’s Kindred depicts how disability can be conceptualized as some form of ideological denaturalization of the domesticated able-bodied self. I take concern with issues of home, subjectivity, and health. Kindred depicts the collision of two different worlds: the antebellum past and twentieth-century Maryland. In an interview with Larry McCaffery, Butler states that Kindred originated from “a concern with how and why people reacted to slavery” (65). She wanted to describe the idea of how individuals engaged with the discourse of slavery. Through Dana, she describes how any person might react if transplanted to the antebellum past. The focus of this article is issues of health and disability, which I see as grounding race relations. Butler’s commentary on race, gender, and disability is bound to the concept of domesticity. The novel opens up in 1976, the United States’ bicentennial, when Dana and her husband Kevin have just moved to their new home in Maryland. Once they start unpacking, Dana is violently torn away to the nineteenth century to save Rufus, her white ancestor. Over the course of the novel, Dana is involuntarily summoned to the past to save Rufus when his life is in danger. The importance of the imminent change of spatiality and temporality through Dana’s time-traveling is brought to the forefront from the very start of the narrative.

Dana exists between two different homes. The concern of domesticity is clearly articulated through the first sentences of the narrative, “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm. And I lost about a year of my life and much of the comfort and security I had not valued until it was gone” (Butler 9). In this passage, the ethical implications of the individual inhabiting spaces among homes arise. More specifically, “the world of healthy Cartesian subjects is a home of comfort and security, familiarity, and acceptance” (Comer 88). Therefore it is necessary to consider what ‘home’ means for Dana since none of the spaces where she exists provides her with comfort and security. Each time she goes back to the past, Dana forms a better understanding of her family’s history. Dana, a twentieth-century racially conscious black woman “is made a slave” [1] in the sense that she needs to endure the physical burden of slavery, (multiple beatings, attempted rapes, lashing, and forced labor) but also the psychological burden of slavery. More specifically, Dana’s ultimate torment is deciding whether to help her ancestor Alice preserve her life or whether to become complicit in Alice’s rape to ensure the continuation of her African American family’s ancestral line and by extension, her own life, both in a literal and metaphorical way. Dana is skeptical toward this responsibility of hers from the first time she encounters Rufus. She wonders “Was that why I was here? Not only to insure the survival of one accident-prone small boy, but to insure my family’s survival, my own survival? . . . If I was to live, if others were to live, he must live. I didn’t dare test the paradox” (Butler 29). The decisions she makes are impacted by the instinct of self-preservation.

Through time–traveling, Dana emerges as an itinerant subject. As a woman who belongs in 1976 California, Dana feels disdain toward her foremothers. At first, she exposes contempt and disdain towards Alice who chooses to do “the safe thing” and views her as “the kind of woman who might have been called ‘mammy’ in some other household” (Rushdy 163). Alice is viewed as embodying the stereotype of the Mammy, the female equivalent of Uncle Tom. Dana separates herself from Alice’s stance and refuses to enact the role of the mammy. She disrupts the collective mandate placed on her to create generations. Therefore, viewing Dana as a maternal figure is extremely troubling. Beaulieu and Mitchell perform such a reading and disrupt Dana’s positioning as the mother of Rufus. Even though Dana takes care of Rufus, being his mother would go against her personal strategies of self-preservation. The characters in the nineteenth century view Dana as a queer figure, as she encompasses many characteristics that were diverse to other women of her community. Her actions are acts of “resistance to being confined to the roles of motherhood and domesticity” (Miletic 273). She further develops other roles in relation to her standing in the present. More specifically, Butler states from the beginning of the narrative that Dana is a writer. Dana and Kevin meet through their common interest in writing, as they work at “a casual labor agency” that “regulars called . . . the slave market” (Butler 52).

What seemed more troubling was the fact that while at first Dana was sternly resisting her designation as an enslaved female body during the past, eventually she became accustomed to mistreatment. As mentioned during the following excerpt:

Time passed. Kevin and I became more a part of the household. Familiar, accepted, accepting. That disturbed me too when I thought about it. How easily we seemed to acclimatize. Not that I wanted us to have trouble, but it seemed as though we should have had a harder time adjusting to this particular segment of history—adjusting to our places in the household of a slaveholder . . . and I was perverse enough to be bothered by the ease. (Butler 97)

It is troubling that as time was passing Dana became so accustomed to her new home. The degree to which she became complacent to Rufus’s violence and to systemic violence overall should get questioned. It could be argued that Dana turned into a stranger in the territory she inhabits. This aligns with Du Bois’s question, “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in my own house?” (8). Butler problematizes being at home. This is further extrapolated when Dana and Kevin observe some children of the slave community, playing an auction block game. Dana and Kevin remained hidden and look at the children while they:

went on with their play. . . . “Now here a likely wench,” called the boy on the stump. He gestures toward the girl who stood slightly behind him. “She cook and wash and iron. Come here, gal. Let the folks see you.” He drew the girl up beside him. “She young and strong,” he continued. “She worth plenty of money. Two hundred dollars. Who bid two hundred dollars?” The little girl turned to frown at him. “I’m worth more than two hundred dollars, Sammy!” she protested. “You sold Martha for five hundred dollars!” “You shut your mouth,” said the boy. “You ain’t supposed to say nothing. When Marse Tom bought Mama and me, we didn’t say nothing.” (Butler 99)

This passage shows that the ideology of slavery is passed on to the community from a very young age. The stance of endurance of the children is in opposition to Dana’s stance as a disabled body. These children unconsciously reproduce the roles that were prescribed for them by the antebellum south. By engaging in this game through role-playing, the actual auction block becomes normalized. This is troubling because it entails children from a very young age to reiterate the structure of slavery. In this game the little girl seems to be at a more disadvantaged state than her male counterpart as she is taught by her mother to endure the commands given to her by the boy in order to avoid greater harm. She knows that she needs to follow the boys’ commands and she employs endurance as a strategy of survival. In this context, having a black body is synonymous with objectification and degradation, of subjugation and dehumanization. It carries the power to suffocate and stifle the individual. The black female body is reduced to being a silent object that needs to remain invisible, unseen, protected from the male gaze, while embodying resilience.This scene brings to the forefront the way that black women are continuously negotiating questions of racialized denigration.

Dana differentiates herself from other members of her community and sets limits for her own body. Her standing as a member of the post-civil rights era helps her conceptualize the action of rape as criminal, while members of the antebellum era had to endure such criminality. Dana says to Kevin that:

“[Rufus] has to leave me enough control over my own life to make living look better to me than killing and dying.” “If your black ancestors had felt that way, you wouldn’t be here,” said Kevin. “I told you when all this started that I didn’t have their endurance. I still don’t. Some of them will go on struggling to survive, no matter what. I’m not like that.” (Butler 246)

She believes that she has to have the right to make her own choices instead of her whole life being dominated by Rufus. Dana believes that she needs to employ nonviolence “a practice of resistance, that becomes possible, if not mandatory, precisely at the moment when doing violence seems most justified and obvious” (27). Dana’s choice not to harm Rufus is a conscious one. While pursuing her self-preservation Dana makes sure to establish Rufus as the patriarch, even though her action entails violence towards a member of her community. She rather adopts an individualistic stance and tries to escape the predicament of victimization.

At the end of the novel, Dana escapes rape, as she views it as an occurrence that is even worse than death. She refuses getting raped by exposing itinerancy. She refuses the role of the victim and, for the first time, imposes her own conditions on her relationship with Rufus. She says, “I could accept him as my ancestor, my younger brother, my friend, but not as my master, and not as my lover” (260). When Rufus attempts to rape her, Dana kills him and returns to the present. Dana’s newfound sense of herself leads to an emancipatory revision of history. A few seconds before Rufus dies, he desperately tries to grab Dana’s arm. When Dana returns to consciousness she is back at her house in Maryland. She realizes that her arm is fused into the wall of her bedroom. Through the trope of time-traveling, Dana escapes the communal longing of reproduction and reconstructs her community’s history. She manages to survive and at the same time she rewrites history by reaching a more complex understanding of her standing in the present. She operates in her best interest as she ultimately kills the person to whom she was previously committed and protecting up to this point. The ultimate strategy that Dana chooses is refusing to allow Rufus to rape her. By killing him, she asserts her own authority. She asserts her subjectivity by resisting sexual victimization. She sets Rufus’s plantation house on fire, actively challenging the white master’s authority. By destroying the house, she renders impossible the continuation of the lives of slaves in the plantation. She provides them the possibility to escape from Rufus’s domination. By burning down the house, she gives them the opportunity to flee to the north and escape the plantation site.

I read Dana’s act as libratory to herself and others, as she gives them a chance to escape their position as slaves. She also provided the other members of the plantation with the psychological outlet of escape from slavery, as she gave them the opportunity to conceptualize a different future. However, it should be noted that she cannot be sure of the effects of her action on the slaves of plantation. Even though Dana acted in “self-defense,” she is aware of the danger in which she places the other members of her community. She voices her fears that the outcome of her own choice would have a “cost . . . [on] Nigel’s children, Sarah, all the others” (264). She values their lives but gives ultimate value to her own self-preservation. Dana’s violence takes on an institutional form, as it is addressed against the institution of slavery that renders the female body as property. Dana contests Rufus’s institutional power and intends to diminish the system that had previously enslaved her. Dana wants to protect her story as an individual, sustain herself and reach a more complex understanding of herself. There is no final resolution in the narrative, nor does Butler provide an insight to the afterlife of the other members of the plantation. As Dorothy Allison states, “Butler offers no resolutions at the end of Kindred . . . Dana is left wounded . . . [and] we do not know what will become of her marriage to Kevin, a white man” (476). Butler does not provide a resolution in the end, however she allows Dana to reach a more complex understanding of herself as she now understands the ways in which her past has affected her present. Dana “will always bear the mark of her kindred” (Salvaggio and McKee Chamas 33). Her individual needs and her communal obligations are in conflict but at the same time they are mutually supportive to a point. Even though she is in conversation with the history of her foremothers, at the same time she moves away from it.

In Kindred, disability and otherness are intricately linked. Disability “becomes an apt figure for both having one’s identity (with all the domestic violence that that implies) and not having it” (Comer 99). Disability is revealed as an oscillated exposure, between agency and submission. The assimilation of otherness from the outside to a domestic inside does not fully occur, as wholeness is not necessarily synonymous to being at home. Part of Dana’s arm is trapped in her nineteenth-century home and part of it rematerializes in a wall in her 1976 home. Her arm is a “literal and visceral reminder of her exposure to Rufus [as she is] physically strewn between two times, she will never be at home” (99). The loss of her arm not only reflects the eradication of the Other, Rufus, but also it is a highly performative act that functions as a reminder of a series of actions that cannot be wholly repressed. Dana’s murder of the Other function as the ultimate step of self-fashioning preserving the last kernel of her individualistic self. Violence against the other entails at the same time violence against one’s self. As Comer explains, “To be ontologically whole is to remain connected to others in the face of mortality—to keep the ‘house’ and all that it implies at some distance” (100). This is evident when Dana travels to the past in order to save Rufus when he and his home are in danger. She then returns to the future when she is faced with total eradication of herself. Even though she starts heading once at home, a closer look reveals that her healing begins once she is removed from Rufus’s presence. Both spaces can become domesticated as mortality functions as the origin of her oscillation between past and present and subsequently between Self and Other.

In conclusion, homes created within a normalizing ideological context become estranged in view of a disabled body. The disabled body exists both within yet outside of spatial arrangements. Dana is ideologically interjected in the discourse through her disability. Ideology “substantiates a status quo and uses actions to interpolate its subjects” (Comer 108). Then a crucial question arises: If identity is established through one’s acts, do those who are unable to perform some acts due to their disability continuously experience defamiliarization from home? Butler’s emphasis on embodiment in Kindred is agential in “refus[ing] to account for identity as reducible to the texts produced by political and cultural power for the purposes of oppressing those who do not merit representation” (Robertson 366). Her main focus is embodiment within the context of the United States’ history and therefore places the body at the very center of larger socio-cultural concerns. Instances of empowerment emerge through the process of decolonization, through undoing the oppressor’s ideology that only “able bodies” are worthy of attention. Butler’s Kindred constitutes a continuation of Du Bois’s discourse in regards to disability. Butler interrogates the privileging of wholeness, domestic boundaries, and normative bodies. Instead of dismissing the body in the pursuit of transcendence, she embraces the body, its non-domesticity, its finitude, its non-normativity, its disability and ultimately gestures toward a different way of being.

NOTES

[1] My reference is to a chiasmus from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an African Slave: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” (294).

WORKS CITED

Allison, Dorothy. “The Future of Female: Octavia Butler’s Mother Lode.” Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Meridian, 1990, pp. 471-478.

Butler, Octavia E. “An Interview with Octavia E. Butler.” Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers, edited by Larry McCaffery, U Illinois P, 1990, pp. 54–70.

–. Kindred. Beacon Press, 1979.

Comer, Todd. “The Domestic Politics of Disability in Octavia Butler’s Kindred.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. vol. 48, no. 1, 2018, pp. 84-108.

Douglass, Frederick. “The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies,” The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, edited by John W. Blassingame, vol. 3, 1855-63, Yale University Press, 1985.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folks. 1903. Vintage Books/Library of America, 1990.

Miletic, Philip. “Octavia E. Butler’s Response to Black Arts/Black Power Literature and Rhetoric in Kindred.” African American Review. vol. 49, no. 3, 2016, pp. 261-275.

Robertson, Benjamin. “‘Some Matching Strangeness’: Biology, Politics, and the Embrace of History in Octavia Butler’s Kindred.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 37, no. 3, 2010, pp. 362-381.

Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. Neo-slave narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Salvaggio, Ruth and Suzy McKee Chamas. “Octavia Butler,” Octavia Butler, and Joan D. Vinge, edited by Marleen S. Barr, Ruth Salvaggio, and Richard Law. Starmount House, 1986, pp. 1-44.

Marietta Kosma is a second year Ph.D. student in English at the University of Oxford at Lady Margaret Hall. Her academic background includes a master’s degree in English from JSU and a master’s degree in ancient Greek theater from the University of the Aegean. Her research interests lie in twentieth-century American literature, post-colonialism, and gender studies. Her research has been published internationally in Right for Education, U.S. Studies online forum for new writing, EJAS, Ideas and Cambridge Scholars Publishing among others . She has presented at BAAS Postgraduate Symposium 2021 and the Science Fiction: Activism and resistance conference among others.

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Greg Sarris’s How a Mountain Was Made: Stories as a Transformative Indigenous Futurism

Arwen Spicer

This is how Greg Sarris tells it: “I begin my American Indian literature course by telling a story told to me by my Kashaya Pomo elders. I then ask students . . . to repeat the story as they heard it. Invariably their stories tell them more about themselves than about the story or the speaker and culture from which the story comes” (Keeping 149). As a white reader of Sarris’s story cycle How a Mountain Was Made: Stories, I am a student, my retelling inflected by where I come from. In a science fiction studies context, I identify the text as indigenous futurism, though, to my knowledge, this is not a label Sarris has claimed. By default, I read the text first and foremost as a message to me, though its primary audience is clearly Sarris’s Pomo and Coast Miwok people. My engagement with these stories is partial, both in the sense of “incomplete” and “biased,” yet this text is partly written to white settlers like me, especially us folx who come from the Mountain—Sonoma Mountain, that is, near Santa Rosa, California. Sonoma Mountain is my home, and these stories summon me as a white settler to be part of the work of decolonizing my homeplace, with all the hope and responsibility that work implies. In a 2012 interview, Sarris, who is the chairman of the Federated Tribes of the Graton Rancheria, discusses the benefits of the casino they had recently opened, observing, “I have a big dream that it can somehow bring us all—Indian and non-Indian—home again. And the big question for today is, how do you stop this us/them dichotomy that is a cancer that will kill us?” (“Dreaming” 19). The story cycle he published five years later is, I think, a piece of the answer. It is a call to all of us from the Mountain to come home.

Framing: The Act of Transmission

How a Mountain Was Made consists of sixteen short stories from the time when animals looked like human beings, framed by a series of conversations between Question Woman and Answer Woman. These two sisters rely on each other for the transmission of stories: Question Woman cannot remember the stories on her own, and Answer Woman cannot tell them unless asked. This structure echoes a theme of Sarris’s scholarship: that stories always exist within an act of transmission. Sarris recounts how his elder relative Essie Parrish, religious leader of the Kashaya Pomo people, would add a narrative frame (“This is a story of . . .”) to stories told to white scholars but not to her own daughter; in the same way, all stories are molded by the context of the telling (“Encountering”). How a Mountain Was Made exists within diverse contexts, and the answers it offers depend on the questions brought to it. As a story cycle, the textis recursive, looping on itself to generate multiple layers of meaning. I have structured this essay the same way.

Layer 1: What Does it Mean to Live Respectfully?

On a basic level, the stories follow a consistent pattern: some character becomes discontent with what they have and resorts to selfish, underhanded behavior to get what they want. Their malfeasance is exposed, and they face some consequence. Mole, for example, marries the beautiful Fog, but when he meets and marries a second woman, Warm Wind, he forgets about his first wife. Incensed at his neglect, Fog spurns him. Warm Wind also disapproves of his fickleness and kicks him out of her house, leaving Mole humbled and hiding in the ground. In this case, Mole’s selfish behavior is his neglect of one family in favor of another, and the consequence is losing both his wives and being shamed.

The story cycle’s structure teaches that the cardinal social ill is greed, whether it is Mole’s discontent with one wife, Coyote scheming to get fantastic clothing, or a woman obsessed with gathering rocks for a gorgeous necklace to impress a man. Whether it is desire for more possessions or more attention, grasping after more than one’s fair share damages relationships, and it always backfires on the greedy individual. Mole loses his wives, Coyote ends up looking like a fool, and the woman is left searching vainly for rocks. Greed is bad: this message sounds simple, but it stands diametrically opposed to the hegemonic assumptions of capitalism, grounded in the idea that perpetual increase in consumption is essential to preventing economic collapse. Or as infamously summed up by profiteer Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street, “Greed is good.”

Yet resisting greed is essential to the Honorable Harvest, which Potawatomi environmental scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer characterizes as taking only what we are given, sharing, showing respect, and minimizing harm (183). Sarris’s characters break these guidelines repeatedly. They trick friends out of their possessions. They call in favors to demand an unreasonable amount of work. They break the rules set as conditions for borrowing something. Sometimes, they even act out in violence. Their missteps describe a cautionary framework for approaching the fundamental question of how to live in a respectful relationship. Kimmerer observes that while indigenous ancestors devoted immense thought to the question of how to consume respectfully, modern society largely ignores it (177). Our dominant culture does not recognize exploitation, extraction, and the greed that underlies them as problems. In fact, to centralize greed as a sickness requires reimagining our entire socioeconomic system, a visionary futurism, but one which our current ecological emergency demands with increasing urgency. Such fundamental change is not easy, however, and one of the impediments to overcoming greed is trauma, which reinforces it.

Layer 2: How Does Trauma Impact Life Choices?

How a Mountain Was Made takes place in an age before animals took on their present-day animal shapes. It simultaneously takes place in modern times, coexisting with fences, bicycles, and asphalt roads. This slippage between ancient and modern sharpens the relevance of cultural rootedness to the work of healing indigenous trauma sustained through generations of colonial violence. Sarris observes, “I try to make people conscious of the homelessness that seeps in the pores of my people. Why do we turn against one another? Why do we destroy one another? That’s what we know from colonization” (Sarris, “Dreaming” 17). The stories in How a Mountain Was Made condemn greed while honoring the reality that greed is an outgrowth of anxiety and self-doubt. While we all experience these feelings to some degree, trauma can endow them with outsized power, leading to destructive patterns.

In some of the stories, the patterns of greed evoke addiction, a common mechanism for coping with the stress of ongoing trauma (Maté 207). The woman obsessed gathering beautiful rocks does not need those rocks, yet her craving is so dire that she browbeats her friends into helping her make a necklace of them, overworking them until they quit and she is left alone, “wandering about, wondering how she will get someone to help her make a necklace” (Sarris, How 11). Though she does not really need the necklace, she does need something and is living under an unrelieved stress that urges her to seek a substitute for solving her real problem: her lack of belief in her own self-worth. This is the fundamental pattern of addiction, and Sarris’s emphasis on it speaks to the twenty-first-century context of his narrative. It is a narrative for people carrying the trauma of colonization; it is also a narrative of healing.

Layer 3: How Can the Community Heal?

The stories in this cycle all involve some wrongdoing and accountability, but they don’t stop with punishment. The final step is reconciliation and reintegration of the community, a stance that walks hand-in-hand with the principles of transformative justice. According to Ejeris Dixon, “Transformative justice and community accountability are terms that describe ways to address violence without relying on police or prisons. These approaches often work to prevent violence, to intervene when harm is occurring, to hold people accountable, and to transform individuals and society to build safer communities” (16). While transformative justice focuses on physical violence, the principles can apply to any kind of harm. Transformative justice differs from restorative justice in that the former seeks solutions outside state systems and the latter seeks solutions within them, by reforming them. Like many involved in transformative justice work, Sarris has expressed ambivalence about restorative justice. In conversation with Cristina Perea Kaplan, he discusses restorative justice in schools:

I think Restorative Justice is a great idea. But again, from what little I know of it, and I have talked to some people in this area about it, you’ve got people who are not prepared to really deal. It’s an idea. I hate to say it, it’s a liberal, I hesitate to say, a white liberal idea of doing the right thing. They don’t know our people. . . .

But, fundamental change has to be in our communities. And so, if you’re going to have Restorative Justice, you have to have people who are prepared to talk to our folks and council [sic] our folks, our students, and be familiar with where they are coming from and what has motivated them to fall away. (Sarris, “Learning” 13)

While restorative justice requires larger systems to reach out to communities, transformative justice originates within the community itself. It unfolds through the people directly affected.

In How a Mountain Was Made, the form this community reintegration takes varies from story to story: no single solution works for every situation. The price of Coyote’s attempts to dress impressively is merely Coyote looking like a fool. Other times, solutions are not so easy: Mole’s fickleness leaves him scorned and alone. That’s the end of one story but not the end of the transformations. A full seven stories later, Mole resurfaces, this time to warn his daughters that their jealous husbands, the Bat Brothers, will do them harm. At first, they do not believe him. As the oldest asserts, “You were an untrustworthy husband and Mother had to raise us by herself . . . Why should we believe you?” (How 158). But when his warning helps them evade their husbands, trust begins to regrow, and Mole and Warm Wind eventually reconcile. Transformation is a process that does not answer to a timeline or follow a formula. Sometimes, it takes more than one story to hold.

One theme, however, remains constant: no one is expelled, not Mole, not the jealous Bat Brothers, no one, not even Coyote after he discovers Death by inadvertently killing his own sons. This radical inclusivity is more than just a thought experiment. The Graton Rancheria itself enacts this principle by specifying in their constitution that “no current members or their offspring can ever be disenrolled” (“Dreaming” 16). That means they are always a part of the community, regardless of any harm they may commit. It should go without saying this is not a free pass to do harm; rather, it is an expression of the principle that harm is a community phenomenon and must be addressed within the community, even when doing so is messy and solutions incomplete. Exclusion cannot be the answer. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs asserts, in the work of transformative justice, “there is no way beyond but through” (2). 

And when trauma is severe, the only way through it is the promise and the pain of radical transformation. In the story “Ant Uncovers a Plot,” four doctors conspire to keep Eagle sick so that they earn more pay from treating her, and in their selfish ignorance, they bind her legs so tightly that her legs become infected and fall off, thus introducing Pain into the world. In this case, the harm the doctors have caused is so heinous that only fundamental transformation can redress it. Thus, Coyote, the headman, declares the doctors will give up their former lives to become the four local mountains: Mt. Tamalpais, Mt. St. Helena, Mt. Taylor, and Sonoma Mountain, each with its own essential healing property. Ultimately, Coyote explains that while pain is now a feature of life, the four doctors “have learned their lesson well and yearn each and every day to be of service to us” (Sarris, How 180). They learned their lesson but had to become new beings to do it.

It is not an accident, I think, that cycle’s grisliest story is also its titular story, the story of how the Mountain was made. It is a story of trauma yielding a different understanding of life. A community working through intense traumatization can never be the same community it once was. It can, however, climb higher, like the flat land transformed into the Mountain. The story of the Mountain’s making is simultaneously ancient and happening now. It is a story of atonement, transformation, and healing in the midst of irrevocable pain. 

Layer 4: Why Does Remembering Matter to Healing?

Remember the woman who ended up looking vainly for pretty rocks to impress a young man? That was her first story, not her last. In the cycle’s final story, her father attempts to shift her attention onto a different necklace, one that contains the songs and stories of the people. She listens to him, “but only as before, with the desperate hope that she might at last capture the young man’s heart” (188). Her learning is piecemeal, like any journey through trauma. There’s a small change; half of a message reaches her. After several misadventures, however, the songs and stories this other necklace holds begin to capture her interest, redirecting her eyes to her home and people. Eventually, she herself becomes a storyteller, and in the end, it is her storytelling that wins the young man’s heart. Transformations don’t happen all at once, but step by step and sometimes when least expected.

Hers is a story of decolonization. The woman’s obsession with pretty stones is symptomatic of a fundamental fear she is unworthy, that she can’t “[stand] on her own merits” (11). It is a fear built on generations of derogation under colonialism. Over the course of the story, this fear evaporates as she rediscovers her cultural identity and the worth already inside her. Finally, she finds meaning not by dazzling someone into loving her but by reconnecting with her home and sharing her knowledge. Self-worth, contentment, healing: these transformations of trauma come from remembering, from looking back.

Sarris articulates the scope of this work in a 2005 speech at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco:

There are 1,079 enrolled members of the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria. All are descendants of 14 survivors. None has living memory of any of the thirty to forty aboriginal villages. None is fluent in any of the ten to twenty native languages. None has memory of the ancient redwoods, the bunch grass, or the purple needle grass. None has seen a flock of birds so thick that it obscures the sun. None has seen a single pronghorn, a wild elk, or a grizzly bear within the native landscape. None can read that native landscape well. Never mind memory, the place has been all but destroyed. . .

Still, we sing. We dance. We speak some old words. Humbled and hurt as we face Creation, that is, as we face this place that remains home, no matter how uncomfortable at times, we pray. . . . We hope that each new song learned, each word, each dance, each remarkable basket will do what it has always done for us: awaken us to our home, and, in turn, awaken our home to us. (“Culture” 19-20)

The full title of this story cycle is How a Mountain was Made: Stories, and the subtitle is the answer to the question. The stories made the Mountain and can heal it and us. Remembering is a central metaphor for the work of decolonization, but it is not only the colonized people who need to remember.

Layer 5: What Does it Mean to Remember as a Forgetter?

In “Apocalypse Logic,” Cowlitz essayist Elissa Washuta states, “the most thorough answer to the question, ‘What can [white people] do?’ is, ‘Remove your settler state from this land and restore all governance to its forever stewards.’” When I read this, I thought, “Yes, that’s the truth,” yet I am not sure what role it asks me to fill. If the settler state of the United States ended, would I live under tribal governance? Would the tribes want to govern hundreds of millions of non-indigenous people—and if so, how? And if not, would I be repatriated to Europe? In this case, I have to say Europe is not my home. Sonoma Mountain is my home; I am inseparable from it. Yet it’s a home where I have no right to be. Indeed, for a long time, I have been aware that I do not belong in the land I belong to.

But when I first read the stories, my world tilted. I learned that I do, in fact, come from the Mountain. In “Coyote Creates People,” Coyote’s shenanigans end up creating duplicates of the people of his village. These new people, my ancestors, eventually learn the stories of the Mountain and most go off to create new villages. We settler colonists, metaphorically, are from the Mountain too, the descendants of the ones who left. But by the time we returned, we had forgotten the stories. As Answer Woman explains,

[T]he Forgetters . . . killed all of the bears and the elk and the pronghorn. They cut down trees. You see, they forgot the stories. They forgot we are all one People, and the animals, indeed the entire Mountain, began to suffer. Now, we must all try to learn to live together. We must remember the stories again. (Sarris, How 176)

This is Sarris’s futurism, a world in which everyone remembers the stories, indigenous and non-indigenous alike. It is a gentle way to speak about people who have destroyed your world and continue to destroy it. To call us not genocidal or terracidal, but people who have forgotten is more generous than we deserve, but it is also sagacious in reaching out to an audience that includes white settlers. The story is shaped in transmission, and if the message is that we need to work together, it makes sense to provide a path for that work.

I opened with Mole’s misadventures with Fog and Warm Wind because this is the story of my home. While most of the stories are set on the west side of the Mountain, Mole’s village, like mine, is on the east, the side where the Mountain often blocks out the cooling effect of the Pacific Ocean. The first time I read it, I could picture it exactly. Fog appears over the western slopes, singing,

I am coming
Singing, I am coming
The people of your village rejoice. (32)

And I thought, “Yes. Yes, we do.” Those hot summer evenings, when Fog rises in the west, I can assure you we rejoice because the next day is not going to broil us. But when Warm Wind saunters over, I wrote in the margin of my book, “No!” like a squeaky Darth Vader because I know Warm Wind too from those summer days, when she sweeps off the Central Valley like a furnace blast and drives all prayer of Fog away. I know Warm Wind in the summer. But the story is referring to Warm Wind in the spring, the wind that brings the flowers. I know the flowers, yet truth be told, I have no particular memory of Warm Wind in the spring. I think this is because summer on the east of the Mountain has always been something to reckon with. The heat describes what we can or cannot do and what times of day we can do it. That requires communication with the land, something a little bit like the awareness of the Old People. But spring is easy to live with. And because we do not rely on the Mountain directly for our food, we are not required to observe spring very deeply. In spring, we laze and let the details flow by us. I have seen over forty years of springs on the east of the Mountain, and I never paid attention to Warm Wind. I had forgotten the story.

This liminal space between intimate recognition and revelation encapsulates my experience as a Forgetter. It is a reawakening to what has always been there. We on the east side have always been Mole, pinched tight between Fog and Warm Wind. I have always known it, and I have never known it. If you asked me at any point of my life where I came from, I would have said Glen Ellen because that is the town where I was raised. I would have said I come from the west, from the West Coast of the United States, a person of Western European descent, with no ethnic roots anywhere but Western Civilization. But now I know I come from the east, and the map of my life is reversed. 

Coda: How Can We Remember the Future?

How a Mountain Was Made is a call to healing, and any such call implies action in the world. If the task is to restore the stories, the work is fundamentally educational, and the text was written with explicitly educational intent. In fact, Sarris wrote several of the stories as a collection of theatrical works already performed in over ninety schools before the book was published (Mansergh). Sarris says of the book, “I hope kids will get the message that we are all beautiful, we are all special and the minute we think we’re better than, or separate from, or want to exploit somebody, or disrespect somebody, karma will happen. . . . We’re going to need young people with a deep ethic of place and land if we’re ever going to survive” (qtd. in Rose). I am not a kid, but I am (re)learner, and as I continue to deepen my own knowledge of my home and its Old People, I hope to live into my own responsibility to lend my partial and imperfect voice to the work of bringing the present and future back into continuity with the indigenous past and, thus, help us all to be whole again.

WORKS CITED

Dixon, Ejeris. “Building Community Safety.” Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarainha, AK Press, 2020, pp. 15-25.

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. “Foreword.” Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarainha, AK Press, 2020, pp. 1-3.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Mansergh, Gil. “Petaluma Profile: Greg Sarris Brings Miwok Myths to Life.” Greg Sarris, 23 Mar. 2018, greg-sarris.com/news/petaluma-profile-greg-sarris-brings-miwok-myths-to-life/.

Maté, Gabor. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, Foreword by Peter Levine, North Atlantic Books, 2008.

Rose, Jimmy. “Graton Rancheria Chairman Greg Sarris Releases Book of American Indian Stories.” Greg Sarris, 29 Jan. 2020, greg-sarris.com/news/graton-rancheria-chairman-greg-sarris-releases-book-of-american-indian-stories/

Sarris, Greg. “Culture and Memory: What Has Been Lost? What Can Be Recovered?” News from Native California, Spring 2006, pp. 16-20.

—. “Dreaming Us Home Again: Greg Sarris.” Interview by Malcolm Margolin. News from Native California, Fall 2012, pp. 16-20.

—. “Encountering the Native Dialogue: Critical Theory and American Indian Oral Literatures.” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, 1991. 

—. How a Mountain Was Made: Stories. 2017. Heyday, 2019.

—. Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts. U of California Press, 1993.

—. “Learning to Belong to the Multicultural Chorus: Interview with Greg Sarris.” Interview by Cristina Perea Kaplan. ReVision, vol. 33, no. 2, Spring 2020, pp. 11-18.

Wall Street. Directed by Oliver Stone, performances by Charlie Sheen, Michael Douglas, and Tamara Tunie, American Entertainment Partners and American Films, 1987.

Washuta, Elissa. “Apocalypse Logic.” The Offing, 21 Nov. 2016, theoffingmag.com/ insight/apocalypse-logic/.

Arwen Spicer comes from Sonoma Mountain in California and is an associate English professor at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. Her doctoral work at the University of Oregon focused on evolution and ecology in utopian science fiction. Her recent scholarship includes studies of culture and ecology in the science fiction of Jeff VanderMeer and Ursula K. Le Guin.

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Teaching Law and Science Fiction at the University of Mississippi

Ellie Campbell and Antonia Eliason

In his 2011 article “Making Space: Law and Science Fiction,” Mitchell Travis argued that greater attention should be paid to science fiction in sociolegal scholarship for two reasons: first, that the law and science fiction are already intertwined (for example, he references a number of judicial opinions comment on science fiction texts or tropes) and second, that science fiction “allows for a space in which alternate social and legal systems, conditions, and variables can be considered” (1). Travis saw these alternate systems as useful because they reflect popular attitudes that influence law. While teaching our class on law and science fiction at the University of Mississippi, we found that science fiction also allows us to consider alternate worlds that do not reflect mainstream attitudes but are particularly good for critiquing the law from a social justice standpoint.

The legal field is currently wrestling with a number of social justice issues that cannot be solved by our current system—these include racial justice, climate change, and the effects of a worldwide pandemic, all topics addressed by three of our Law and Science Fiction modules. When teaching the course, we took a “law and society” approach, where we constructed five modules around different themes and asked students to reflect on how the works helped us think about the law, its work in the world, and how it might be changed. In this essay, we discuss our approach to teaching three of our modules: race and ethnicity, climate change, and disability.

Race and Ethnicity

Working for the University of Mississippi made it particularly important to talk about race and ethnicity, both because of the history of the institution and the events that happened while we were teaching the class. UM has a long racially fraught history—the school was founded as an alternative to Northern schools for the children of the white elite in the state, who didn’t want their kids learning about abolition. Several buildings on campus bear the fingerprints of the enslaved people who built them. The entire student body quit during the Civil War and joined the Confederate Army to preserve the enslavement of other human beings; almost all were casualties in the conflict and their actions contributed to Lost Cause narratives about the university. The campus famously shut down during a two day long riot when James Meredith desegregated it in 1962. Many buildings on campus are named after white supremacist political leaders. The school’s nickname, “Ole Miss,” was a common term for the mistress of a plantation. In the years while we were teaching the class, students on campus organized to take down the state flag—which previously had the Confederate battle flag as part of its design—and to move the Confederate statue from the center of campus to the periphery. Those campaigns were ultimately successful, but they were accompanied by racist backlash that included a number of racist incidents on campus, involving everyone from fraternities to major donors.

For our race and ethnicity module, we gave students a chapter from Delgado and Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction that gave an overview of several key ideas from the field, including the normality of racism, interest convergence, the social construction of race, differential racialization, and voice-of-color thesis, and asked them to apply some those ideas to the fiction we read or watched for the week.

Derrick Bell’s short story, “Space Traders,” always led to an excellent discussion. Second- and third-year law students could easily pick out the legal references Bell makes in the story, encompassing not only the United States’ history of slavery and Jim Crow, but also Indigenous removal and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. Bell’s story always worked to bring our discussions into the present day; many of our students were used to narratives that place racial discrimination in the past, and Bell’s story displaces those narratives by bringing that past into a near future scenario, leading us to think about how the United States has and has not changed.

W.E.B. DuBois’s short story “The Comet” also worked to situate racism in American history; though it was originally published in 1920, it still resonated with our classes and helped us to discuss when and where race asserts itself in our society, and whether we have any hope of ending racism and the legal structures that uphold it.

We used several different iterations of Black Panther—first the comic book, and then the movie, once it was released—to talk about governance and gender issues. Students found the imaginary space of a never-colonized African country fertile ground for thinking about alternatives to the United States and its history. Discussions around Black Panther often involved thinking about what a truly different form of governance might look like: Governance by and for only African and African diaspora communities? Governance in which everyone is truly represented? The comic book and movie also touch on, albeit in different ways, issues of gender and colonialism, giving us room to discuss intersectional aspects of governance, and how only focusing on race doesn’t guarantee equity.

At the University of Mississippi, our students didn’t need us to tell them that racism is common and still exists in the present, or that race is socially constructed but still has material consequences. But giving them speculative fiction and an introduction to critical race theory as a framework helped us analyze our own experiences and begin thinking that other worlds, other social relationships, other campuses, might be possible.

Climate Change

Coming to terms with climate change is a difficult proposition. However much we may understand the science of climate change and its effects on our world, the realities of climate change are so profound as to manifest in almost inescapable climate grief. In Mississippi, climate change is both visible, particularly in its effects on the Gulf Coast, where sea levels are rising, and where the increasing intensity of hurricanes is being felt, and yet also ignored through climate denial.

With respect to climate change, we engaged students with material that was both speculative in a visionary sense, as in Donna Haraway’s “The Camille Stories,” which goes far beyond our anthropocentric focus to look outside of our species for solutions, and speculative in a more traditional dystopian sense, as in Sean McMullen’s “The Precedent.” Apocalyptic futures with extreme legal environments (shaped by the extreme natural environment), as “The Precedent” offers, allow students a jumping point to immediate discussion—a way to point to the legal system established in the story as a way of drawing connection with our legal system and how we deal with climate change. In “The Precedent,” people are prosecuted for their past actions—for their use of carbon—for charges such as “squander” or “denial” or “display” (174). For students used to thinking in legal terms, this is an open door for drawing connections to our criminal legal system.

Teaching about climate change requires more than just dwelling on the dystopian, however, even for law students. This is where the visionary writings of Donna Haraway provided a more challenging look to what the future could look like. “The Camille Stories” is a chapter from Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, in which she outlines a fictional narrative following the creation of alternate social structures designed to bring humans into closer communion with endangered and extinct species. Our class guided students with discussion questions, particularly on “The Camille Stories,” as we recognized this might be outside the scope of traditional science fiction formats.

Allowing the imagination of students to move from systems accounting for capitalist destruction of the planet to visions of futures that go beyond capitalism provided a platform for robust discussion of personal concerns as well as larger scale existential questions—an avenue to come to terms, or at least to engage with, climate grief.

These examinations of speculative fiction and their interpretations of our future also opened the door to fascinating discussions about actual legal instruments that are being used as tools in the fight to change our course—the public trust doctrine, for instance, which says that countries must hold in trust certain resources for future generations. This ancient Roman doctrine recognized the sea, shores, air, and water as being in the public trust. With respect to climate change, lawsuits have been brought, sometimes successfully, that a lack of action with respect to climate change is violating this doctrine by endangering future generations. This doctrine is a perfect example of where the speculative meets the law—where what may happen in the future is taken seriously in the present.

In 1972, Christopher Stone published a monograph, Should Trees Have Standing?: Law, Morality, and the Environment. This work, which imagined giving legal rights to natural objects, sparked a lot of discussion at the time, but was dismissed by most as being somewhat fanciful. Today, we are seeing efforts to give rights to natural bodies, from rivers to mountains, sometimes as a response to violent acts of colonialism, such as those in New Zealand, sometimes as a means of trying to protect the environment.

Introducing our students to these areas of law, intertwined with our discussions of the speculative, was a springboard for incredible discussions that left our students, and ourselves, feeling as hopeful as one could feel in a world of climate change and destruction.

Climate change also intersects with labor. In teaching the film Sleep Dealer as part of our unit on labor in our course, while we centered our discussion on issues of labor rights, climate change drives the narrative in that film, and discussion of water shortages, industrial agriculture and the effects of climate change on migration were an important part of the conversation on law and labor.

Disability

Speculative fiction, much like our society and its laws, often falls short in discussing disability. Many works of speculative fiction that depict disability treat it as a problem to be solved with a technological or magical fix, rather than recognizing disability as a state of being, a process of becoming, or a part of a person’s identity and worldview. In our unit on disability and science fiction, we focused on works that recognize disability as a quality or a process rather than a problem in need of a solution, without minimizing the impact of disability in different contexts.

Several of the short stories we taught came from the anthology Accessing the Future, which at the time of the course (Spring 2018) was one of the few disability-themed collections of speculative fiction to focus on disabled voices. Since then, Uncanny Magazine has published a special issue, “Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction!” in the fall of 2018, featuring many of the contributors and editors from Accessing the Future, and a few more collections have been published or are in the works. Speculative fiction that treats disability as something more than just a problem to be solved, however, remains rare, as does critical work that examines the connections between disability studies and speculative fiction.

Nicole Barischoff’s “Pirate Songs” is the first story in Accessing the Future. The main character, Margo, the daughter of a wealthy ambassador, has been captured by space pirates. Margo cannot walk and struggles on the ship without her mechanical chair, though she comes to identify with her captors as she realizes that many of them also have physical disabilities resulting from the harsh life in space. She ultimately aids them in demanding her ransom and gains a greater sense of agency in her life. Barischoff’s story helped our class unpack how class, labor, and disability can intersect; Margo can afford technology that makes her daily life easier, while the pirates have missing limbs from industrial accidents and harsh labor conditions, and have to live without being able to afford augmentation.

Aliette de Bodard’s 2012 short story, “Immersion,” won the Nebula and Locus awards for best short story and was a finalist in that category for several others, including the Hugo. Though not a story about disability in the classic sense, the narrative follows Agnes, a character from the Rong culture, who wears an “immerser” that augments her brain and allows her to speak and think in Galactic, a culture that has colonized the Rong. De Bodard uses her fictional technology to examine colonial encounters, and this story aided our class in reconceptualizing disability and technological “fixes.”

The story in “Screens,” by Samantha Rich, takes place a few years after a civil rights victory was won by the Visibility Movement, which resulted in everyone being required to wear monitors that show their emotions. The tension in the story between the legal victory that resulted in invisible impairments being made visible and the right to privacy that the protagonist, a high school student, grapples with reflects our reality, where legal victories are often more complicated than they appear at first glance. In our discussion, we asked students to reflect on the nature of cures and impairments, and what visibility entails.

The short-lived near-future science fiction legal drama TV series Century City provided a different look at disability in the context of its episode “Love and Games.” Featuring a young baseball player with a bionic eye, the episode asks whether certain adaptive technologies could act as unfair physical enhancements. Classic science fiction stories often constructed disabilities as a “problem” that needed to be “cured” with some sort of scientific or technological fix. As Kathryn Allan writes, “technology is often positioned as a solution to overcome the physical or mental limitations of the human body, but the quest to transcend the body ignores the lived realities of laboring, feeling, and suffering bodies, and is generally the luxury of the healthy and able-bodied” (11).

We also experimented with having our students read parts of the American with Disabilities Act (ADA); the first time we taught this module, they read the preamble from the Federal Register, explaining how the agencies had applied the ADA when creating regulations to enforce the statute. The technical language proved to be less interesting for our discussion than the short stories and television episode, so the next year we had them read the “Findings and Purpose” section of the ADA itself, which was both shorter and more useful for discussion. Bringing primary law into the discussion let us think through how American law conceptualizes disability, and pairing that with fiction led us to think about how the law and our society might be changed if we did not think of disability as a problem to be solved, but rather as a quality, state of being, or process. Our students often brought their own experiences with illness and disability to the discussion, reinforcing the idea that these experiences are often invisible, very common, and affect our lives in a wide variety of ways. Giving our students space to speak about their own experiences and how they were addressed—or not addressed—by our laws gave us ways to imagine very different worlds.

Conclusion

Our Law and Science Fiction course was often too relevant to our daily lives: one year, we taught our gender and sexuality module one week before #MeToo and stories about Harvey Weinstein broke in the news. Concerns over race and ethnicity were always present on our campus in particular. Race and ethnicity week often coincided with instances of police brutality or other race-related events in the news. Climate change followed a similar trajectory. And COVID-19 has only made discussions about disability and health more relevant.

Law and Science Fiction is a course that can be continuously reorganized to incorporate new materials, reflecting a greater diversity of voices. With many of the topics we initially covered only gaining in relevance, the breadth of material to incorporate into the classroom will continue to grow. The challenge lies in finding a balance between the legal and the fictional and ensuring that students aren’t overwhelmed with too much material. Our course has its limitations: ultimately, it only serves as the first step in moving students towards praxis, described by Paolo Freire as “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (133). Our Law and Science Fiction course engaged students in conversation that will hopefully lead to action in their future legal careers.

In our course, we addressed various social and political topics. Throughout, students responded positively to the space for exploration of difficult topics that was given to them. Law school can be very rigid; you learn rules and are expected to conform to certain narratives. The law itself is not—or more importantly—should not be that. Law is subject to change and to imagine a better world requires imagining better ways of approaching the law. Speculative fiction gives us an avenue to explore radical reimaginings and hopefully will gain more acceptance as a means of teaching students to think more broadly about the issues of the day.

WORKS CITED

Allan, Kathryn and Djibril Al-Ayad, editors. Accessing the Future. Futurefire.net Publishing, 2015.

Allan, Kathryn, editor. Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure. Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.

Barischoff, Nicolette. “Pirate Songs.” Accessing the Future, edited by Kathryn Allan and Djibril Al-Ayad, Futurefire.net Publishing, 2015, pp. 7-26.

Bell, Derrick. “Space Traders.” Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, edited by Thomas, Sheree R., Warner Books, 2000, pp. 326-355.

Ed Zuckerman, creator. Century City. Heel and Toe Films and Universal Network Television, 2004-2005.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi and Brian Stelfreeze. Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, Vol. 1. Marvel, 2016.

De Bodard, Aliette. “Immersion.” Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, June 2012. https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/debodard_06_12/.

Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 3rd ed., New York UP, 2017.

DuBois, W.E.B. “The Comet.” Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, edited by Thomas, Sheree R., Warner Books, 2000, pp. 5-18.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary ed., Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.

Haraway, Donna. “The Camille Stories.” Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016, pp. 134-168.

“Love and Games,” Century City. Created by Ed Zuckerman, Heel and Toe Films and Universal Network Television. Aired March 27, 2004.

McMullen, Sean. “The Precedent.” Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction, edited by John Joseph Adams, Saga Press, 2015, pp. 172-202.

Rich, Samantha. “Screens. ”Accessing the Future, edited by Kathryn Allan and Djibril Al-Ayad, Futurefire.net Publishing, 2015, pp. 65-72.

Sjunneson-Henry, Elsa, et al., editors. Uncanny Magazine: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction!, Issue 24, Sept./Oct. 2018.

Sleep Dealer. Directed by Alex Rivera. Likely Stories Productions, 2008.

Stone, Christopher D. Should Trees Have Standing?: Law, Morality, and the Environment. 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2010.

Travis, Mitchell. “Making Space: Law and Science Fiction.” Law and Literature, vol. 23, no. 2, 2011, pp. 241-261.

Ellie Campbell is a reference law librarian and clinical associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She has published on southern legal history, southern music, and utopian science fiction.

Antonia Eliason is an associate professor of law at the University of Mississippi, where her research focuses on climate change, international trade, and the decolonization of international law.

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Dystopias in the Trump Era: Anti/Immigration and Resistance in CALEXIT

Anna Marta Marini

Approaching the 2016 United States presidential election, writer Matteo Pizzolo developed the idea for a comic book that could reflect the growing political anxiety experienced in the Californian borderlands, as well as the reality at the United States-Mexico border. Drawn by Amancay Nahuelpan and published by Black Mask Studios in 2017, Calexit [1] (stylized as CALEXIT) is a dystopian story set in a near future, two years after the re-election of an autocratic president who ordered the deportation of all immigrants and deployed the National Guard to occupy sanctuary cities and enforce the law. The order sparked dystopian warfare between California’s liberal cities and conservative exurbs, respectively forming the Pacific Coast Sister Cities Alliance (including Tijuana) and the Rural Sovereign Citizens Coalition. Directly confronting both the National Guard and the neofascist vigilante Bunkerville Militia, an armed citizen movement called Mulholland Resistance fights for immigrant rights led by ruthless Zora Donato. Unwillingly involved in the conflict, smuggler Jamil—accompanied by his crow-shaped AI drone Livermore—is bound to take Zora to a secret militant camp on the border. In the attempt to annihilate the resistance and capture its leader, extremely violent confrontations ensue under the command of deportation enforcer Rossie—who at the same time lives with his Latinx wife and children in San Diego, raising the topic of existing Latinx conservative anti-immigrant stances as well. Filled with popular culture references, the comicbook directly engages with contemporary activist and political movements—evidently referring to the controversial notion of a “Calexit” [2] secession of California. The construction of the dystopian context outlines a forebodingly realistic fictional civil war within California, as parallels with actual extrajudicial border enforcement practices can be drawn. The collected edition is also rounded out with a series of interviews done by the author with local activists, political figures, and investigative journalists whose takes on the 2016 electoral campaign Pizzolo found valuable.

Make California American Again: Discourses of the Trump Era

Calexit’s plot starts halfway through the second mandate of a fictional unnamed president, whose authoritarian administration has focused on the deportation of any undocumented immigrant. As a consequence of California’s rebellion against the presidential executive order, any foreign-born citizen whose documentation was issued by Californian institutions is also bound to deportation, regardless of their status.

The references to Donald J. Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign and subsequent presidency are very clear, both visually and verbally. The comic book opens with a page focused on the president’s speech, announcing his upcoming visit to California and promising that he is not “gonna let murderers and illegals hold [American citizens] down” (3, Fig. 1). The few sentences evidently reproduce some of Trump’s most recurrent discourse strategies and speech patterns, including the use of an informal register. The reference to recognizable, widespread images depicting Trump at his presidential lectern is evident; possibly for its recurrency during his administration, this specific configuration of silhouette and suggested gesture has become one of the most used images on the internet, often turned into memes and mocking gifs.

Right from the first page, a Manichean view of reality is outlined through the autocratic president’s words, just as it happened during Trump’s administration. Trump’s discursive strategies and patterns have elicited Orwellian comparisons (Rodden 261-263), and his administration was based on what Gardiner has called “demographic dystopia” or the notion of an impending demographic shift for which White citizens would soon become a minority in the American society (Gardiner 64-68). Such a conviction clearly shapes White nationalist and supremacist fears of a possible loss of the privileges intrinsic to the majority status, supporting the “anti-immigrant sentiment embodied by Donald Trump” (Chan 62) and the related historical anxieties peculiar to the dominant class. Furthermore, Trump’s penchant for discursive strategies related to populism and post-truth has helped structure concepts that, in a much dystopian way, “presuppose the existence of universally shared, accepted ‘truths’ pre-2016 which shroud the pre-Trump, pre-Brexit period in a myth of munificence and objectivity” (De Cock et al. 4). The constant mention of “fake news” and denial of patent facts gave a dystopian prominence to mis- and disinformation, favored by new technologies and the consequent false content manipulation and dissemination (Guarda et al. 5-6). The illusionary certainty that Trump’s discourse offered to the electorate—and kept on fueling throughout his mandate, despite the lack of concrete, effective action—“[fed] on and fortifie[d] a deeply emotional rejection of existing social elites, constantly affirming he will not stop at anything in the defence of ‘his’ people” (De Cock et al. 5).

A fundamental pivot of Trump’s discourse is embodied by the United States-Mexico border and immigration issues related to it, fueling—with the help of mainstream media channels—the rooted fears of an impending immigrant “invasion” and the “evidence” of crimes perpetrated by immigrants against American citizens. Drawing on Juri Lotman’s definition of the semiosphere and the expansion of it by scholars who have intersected it with the notion of political hegemonic discourse (see, for example, Selg and Ventsel, “Towards a Semiotic Theory of Hegemony”), I argue that the United States-Mexico borderlands can be conceived as the embodiment of the boundary of the U.S. cultural semiosphere—its peripheral part as opposed to the core embodied by the national Anglo monoglossic dominant heritage. In the dystopian scenario imagined by Calexit, the disruption and boundaries that intersect and characterize the peripheral part of the semiosphere become tangible. The clash between two factions that in a way exist in reality and cohabit the geographical, institutional space represented by California, in this dystopian take becomes so strained that the fracture is irreparable and a civil war ensues.

The type of dialectic discourse proposed by Trump embodies the discourse that aims at defining and preserving the semiospheric core. The dominant semiosphere is evidently self-descriptive, according to an idealized set of values, cultural references, and signs, which are reflected in a sociocultural hierarchy. Trump’s discourse exacerbates the preexisting U.S. political core discourse, that has been—often and more or less overtly—a nativist discourse. Policies focused on immigration and the border infrastructure have represented a central issue since the 1980s with the implementation of immigration regulation measures, followed by the start of the actual building of a border infrastructure in the mid-1990s. The turn of the screw represented by the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks strengthened the security measures at the borders, leading to the creation of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in 2003. The Trumpian wall discourse is just an oversimplification, a symbol embodying this preoccupation with the definition of what is inside and what is outside the border of the U.S. semiosphere. The border is not directly shown on the pages of Calexit, but its presence is underlying throughout, as the notion of the boundary as a locus of invasion and disruption marks the story.

As Ventsel has stressed, politics “can be conceptualised as a practice for creating, reproducing and transforming social relations that cannot themselves be located at the level of the social” (9). Politics are a direct expression of the power of discourses, since problems related to the political sphere are intrinsically social, connected to “the definition and articulation of social relations in a field criss-crossed with antagonism” (Laclau and Mouffe 153). The necessity to affirm a “new” post-truth national identity intrinsic to Trump’s and his supporters’ discourse relies on the perceived necessity to reestablish the cultural homogeneity of the system, which corresponds to the U.S. dominant cultural core. Such perceived need of rearticulation of the core—and White culture as predominant—possibly “stems from the change of culture’s position due to its inner or outer factors. In most cases the main causes for intensification of identity creation are external effects” (Selg and Ventsel, “An Outline” 465). Clearly, the borderlands embody the external influences perceived as threatening, as the immigrants’ entrance and integration could lead to the tainting of American values and heritage.

Calexit does not only refer to Trump and his discourse, but also to the White supremacist groups that supported him throughout his mandate. Any operation that would be perceived as too controversial if carried out by federal institutions is handled by the Bunkerville Militia, a sort of vigilante group operating more or less overtly in connection with deportation officials. Its members are openly Nazi, they engage in local criminal activities, and they are characterized as indulging in drug use, prostitution, and in general violence, markedly masculine activities—despite the fact that the actual mind behind their new leader Crowbar is one of his girlfriends. When the National Guard accidentally tracks Zora, the agents directly call Crowbar to inform him, as he has been—extrajudicially—put in charge of the pursuit and capture of the resistant faction’s leader by Rossie. The chief deportation enforcer for the federal government purposely provokes extremely violent confrontations between the antagonist factions, in order to justify a consequent brutal intervention of the National Guard. He is ruthless and collaborates directly with the Bunkerville Militia to get the “dirty work” done, but he also visits members of the Mulholland Resistance to convince them of the uselessness of their fight—thus fomenting internal division. Significatively, at the same time Rossie’s private life contradicts his ideological convictions: he has a Latinx wife and children who live in a secluded villa in San Diego. This raises the topic of the existence of Latinx conservative anti-immigrant stances, since his wife is a stern supporter of his job and its consequences. The comic book delivers a not too veiled reference to public figures who promote discourses and ideologies that do not necessarily correspond to their personal life, and in general the double standards that often characterize the political elite.

Extremism and Dystopic Resistance

Dystopian narratives have been characterized by the attempt to identify “a utopian horizon that might provoke political awareness or effort” (Moylan 163), a motive that might elicit political resistance against the grim scenarios in which the characters are forced to move. Dystopian resistance upholds forms of what Moylan has defined as “utopian hope,” contemplating the possibility of radical social change based on the resistant characters’ refusal to abide by the rules imposed by the dominant strata of society. Clearly, not all approaches to resistance bear the same commitment or lead to the same achievements. Building on Baggesen’s notion that dystopian pessimism and its consequent reactions can be either resigned or militant (Baggesen 36), it can be argued that the construction of most dystopian narratives revolves around the opposition between an imposed hegemonic order and a counter-narrative resisting the dominant system. In particular, the dystopian fiction focusing on the construction of a totalitarian regime lends itself to parallels with reality and the articulation of storylines that draw on political action and its ethics. As Jones and Paris’s study has demonstrated, “totalitarian-dystopian fiction heightens belief in the justifiability of radical political action” (982). Faced with dystopian narratives, the study subjects’ responses highlighted the fact that in such circumstances violence seems necessary and even legitimate to subvert the totalitarian system (982-983). Due to the political charge of the narrative and the articulation of the opposition to the violation of values of democracy and equity, the performance of acts of resistance is often portrayed “as admirable (even when not or only partially successful) and readers are expected to empathize with the protagonist and even imagine how they themselves might fight such value violations” (972). Furthermore, gendered dystopian fictions seem to be marked by “a subversive and oppositional strategy against hegemonic ideology” (Baccolini 519). The construction of Zora’s character seems to be purposely exaggerated toward violent extremism to convey the main idea underlying the comic book: alleged neutrality does not exist, as inaction and refusal to take a stance is per se favoring the totalitarian system.

In the premises of Calexit’s story, it is said that the “ultimate betrayal” triggering the repressive occupation of California and the reaction of the local conservative fringes is the fact that the Pacific Coast Sister Cities Alliance—besides being formed by sanctuary cities in the U.S. territory—also included Tijuana. The inclusion is seen as inadmissible by the White supremacist, nativist segments of Californian society. In the detailed reconstruction of the dystopian context written by Pizzolo, when Tijuana joined the alliance the president felt that he could “no longer tolerate what is becoming an international conflict and decide[d] he must invade California” (106). The main character voicing this type of discourse is the enforcer-in-chief Rossie, who is leading the occupation and exploiting a paramilitary group such as the Bunkerville Militia to make the most of the local conflict. Through Rossie, the government delegates operations to an extremist civilian organization, to resolve situations by violent means that would be extrajudicial for the state to exert—even within a state of exception. Contextualizing the comic book and its dystopian depiction of an ongoing, real political climate, such delegation reminds of the existence of civilian vigilante groups patrolling the United States-Mexico border. This kind of organization started to appear along the boundary in the mid-1970s and falls within the spectrum of so-called neo-vigilantism (Brown 127-129), as they involve some types of cooperation with the federal and local enforcement. Among them, it is worth remembering the Minuteman Project, which attracted the attention of the media in 2005. Part of the broad anti-immigrant movement, these groups are unauthorized and yet to an extent condoned by border enforcement agencies such as the Border Patrol and ICE. As Doty has highlighted, the civilian border patrols interpret the border as “a war zone” and prominently employ imagery and rhetoric inherent to war and combat (125)—as the members of the Bunkerville Militia do.

Opposite the Bunkerville Militia, the Mulholland Resistance is a movement constituted by citizens fighting for immigrant rights and led by Zora Donato, who is a queer and now-illegal Mexican immigrant cyborg. She lost a leg in a past confrontation, she is very assertive and convinced of the necessity to fight the state repression and extrajudicial deportation with any possible means. The comic book starts with a sequence in which her adoptive parents are threatened to make them reveal her location; as a consequence of their reluctance, her father is killed and his head is sent to the resistance group in a box. Besides being marked by harrowing experiences, Zora is depicted as an extremist figure. If the resistance on the one hand is armed and its components defend themselves violently against the National Guard and the militia, on the other hand she does not know where to stop. During confrontations she does not stick to the agreed plan to just repel the guards without attacking them and without provoking an exchange of fire. On the contrary, she attacks the guards first, provoking the killing of several members of the resistance.

Zora’s stance is first made clear in a dialogue with a fellow activist, taking place on the ruins of a house whose militant owners were shot to death in a conflict that escalated when she opened fire on the National Guard. While her companion is appalled by her minimization of the casualties and insists that militants “won’t fight, certainly not if they think we’re just throwing bodies at the occupying army” (68), Zora opposes his view. She explains that—as it happened “in the French-Algerian war”—casualties among the resistance fighters serve as inspiration for others to join the cause, and thus more people will take part in the fight out of indignation if they see militants die (68, Fig. 2).

When Zora and Jamil are stopped at a road check—and the guards communicate their location to the leader of the Bunkerville Militia—she reacts by shooting one of the guards in the face and the reader is left with the two of them waiting for the confrontation with the militia. A dialogue ensues between them, and the smuggler realizes suddenly that the Mulholland Resistance was not aiming to get Zora to safety at the camp on the border. Rather the group was trying to get rid of her due to the damages she provoked, as her extremist views and approach to the resistance have been revealed to be too dangerous for them. If this explanation exposes the questionable consequences of her uncompromising stance, Pizzolo does not condemn them. Her character is, to an extent, constructed around the aforementioned perception of the admirable value intrinsic to the fictional dystopian resistance, whose violent acts are justifiable when perpetrated against repressive opponents. The framing of her violent resistance within the totalitarian order allows—and leads—the readers to reconcile to its consequences and accept her violent yet nearly suicidal mission.

Of Monsters and Caves: A Criticism of Neutrality

In between the two extremes represented by the Bunkerville Militia and the Mulholland Resistance, Jamil embodies the subjects that—despite being to an extent involved daily in the conflict—do not want to take a clear stance and thus juggle their relationships with both factions. Unwillingly involved in the conflict, Jamil is a smuggler working for whoever pays him, often providing National Guard agents with antidepressants and illegal drugs. He knows his way around the conflict areas, and he can move freely between the territories controlled by either the resistance or the National Guard. Albeit suggesting a critical view on the enforced occupation, Jamil seems to embody a kind of character that recurs in dystopian fiction, who “negotiate[s] a more strategically ambiguous position somewhere along the antinomic continuum” (Moylan 147).

On several occasions throughout the comic book, Jamil stresses out that he does not care to express a political position, he maintains connections with both factions for business, having “problems with no one,” and that he is in the “not-making-enemies line of work” (53).

This approach of course provokes a clash with Zora, leading to an argument during which she justifies her extremist position and plans to fight her antagonists (102-103, Fig. 3). She believes that a violent insurgency is necessary to stimulate awareness in the public and that it is necessary to face directly the enemy, or “monsters” as she calls them, otherwise nothing will ever change. She accuses Jamil as being delusional—as other people like him are—and she says “you wanna believe if you’re just patient, everything will go back to normal. If you’re just patient, the monsters will go back into their caves” (102). She clearly hints at the fact that White supremacist groups cyclically resurge and that they are never really defeated, punished, or condemned by the dominant core of the US cultural semiosphere. When Jamil says that he is “fucking neutral. That’s my job,” Zora replies that her job is to make “sure no one’s neutral” (102). Not taking a stance would already be a non-neutral position per se, but she highlights the fact that he sells drugs to depressed extremists while telling himself that that is a neutral position.

Despite his reluctance, it becomes impossible for Jamil to avoid getting involved in the conflict and, consequently, being forced to take a position in it. Unwittingly, Jamil happens to be the person in charge of delivering the severed head of Zora’s father to the resistance; militant members thus leverage his involvement to trick him into removing Zora, lying on the plan to smuggle her to a secret camp on the border. Shortly after being caught by the National Guard, he unwillingly stands by her side, assuming the political weight of his purported neutrality and eventually taking a position. The main message of the comic book seems to be, indeed, a condemnation of self-declared neutrality and a denunciation of the real consequences of the refusal to position oneself, especially for personal interest or individual “peace of mind.”

The conflict articulated in Calexit is based on a power asymmetry between the totalitarian core and the dissident boundaries of the fictional semiosphere it is set in. It is political, cultural, and ideological altogether, and it touches upon shared values and ethical issues; the deliberate avoidance to take a stance would betray implicitly a connivance with the dominant side of the conflict. The construction of the dystopian context outlines a forebodingly realistic fictional civil war within California, as parallelisms with actual extrajudicial border enforcement practices are evident. Despite the violent scenario, Calexit brings to life a dystopia aimed at celebrating the spirit of existing pro-immigrant resistance and—in Pizzolo’s words—encouraging the readers to “look fascism in the face and challenge it” (CALEXIT 109; “2017’s most dangerous comic”).

NOTES

[1] For the purpose of this paper, the collected edition of CALEXIT (published by Black Mask in 2018) will be used as reference.

[2] For a brief recap of the debate channeled by the Yes California independence campaign (2015) see for example Chloe M. Rispin, “Could California Secede? A Philosophical Discussion.”

WORKS CITED

Baccolini, Raffaella. “The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction.” PMLA, vol. 119, no. 3, 2004, pp. 518-521.

Baggesen, Søren. “Utopian and Dystopian Pessimism: Le Guin’s ‘The Word for World Is Forest’ and Tiptree’s ‘We Who Stole the Dream’.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 1987, pp. 34-43.

Brown, Richard Maxwell. Strain of Violence-Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism. Oxford University Press, 1975.

Chan, Edward K. “Race in the Blade Runner cycle and demographic dystopia.” Science Fiction Film and Television, vol. 13, no. 1, 2020, pp. 59-76.

De Cock, Christian, et al. “What’s He Building? Activating the Utopian Imagination with Trump.” Organization, vol. 25, no. 5, Sept. 2018, pp. 671-680.

Doty, Roxanne Lynn. “States of Exception on the Mexico–U.S. Border: Security, ‘Decisions,’ and Civilian Border Patrols.” International Political Sociology, vol. 1, 2007, pp. 113-137.

Gardiner, Steven L. “White Nationalism Revisited: Demographic Dystopia and White Identity Politics.” Journal of Hate Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2005, pp. 59-87.

Guarda, Rebeka F., et al. “Disinformation, Dystopia And Post-Reality in Social Media: A Semiotic-Cognitive Perspective.” Education for Information, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1-13.

Jones, Calvert W., and Celia Paris. “It’s the End of the World and They Know It: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes.” American Political Science Association, vol. 16, no. 4, 2018, pp. 969-989.

Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Verso, 1985.

Lotman, Juri. “On the Semiosphere.” Sign Systems Studies, vol. 33, no. 1, 2005 [1984], pp. 205-229. Translated by Wilma Clark.

Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Westview Press, 2000.

Pizzolo, Marco. “2017’s Most Dangerous Comic: Writer Matteo Pizzolo on Golden State Secession Series Calexit.” Interview by Will Nevin. AL.com, July 11, 2017. http://www.al.com/living/2017/07/2017s_most_dangerous_comic_wri.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2021.

Pizzolo, Marco, writer, and Amancay Nahuelpan, artist. CALEXIT. Black Mask Studios, 2018.

Rodden, John. “The Orwellian ‘Amerika’ of Donald J. Trump?” Society, no. 57, 2020, pp. 260-264.

Selg, Peeter, and Andres Ventsel. “Towards a Semiotic Theory of Hegemony: Naming As Hegemonic Operation in Lotman and Laclau.” Sign System Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, 2008, pp. 167-183.

—. “An Outline for a Semiotic Theory of Hegemony.” Semiotica, vol. 182, no. 1/4, 2009, pp. 443-474.

Ventsel, Andreas. Towards Semiotic Theory of Hegemony. Tartu University Press, 2009.

Anna Marta Marini is a Ph.D. fellow at the Universidad de Alcalá, where her main research project delves into the representation of border-crossing and the “other side” in U.S. popular culture. Her research interests are: critical discourse analysis related to violence (either direct, structural, or cultural); the representation of borderlands and Mexican American heritage; and the re/construction of identity and otherness in film and comics, particularly in the noir, horror, and (weird) western genres. She is currently the president of the PopMeC Association for US Popular Culture Studies.

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My Body, My Data: Orwell, Social Media, and #MeToo

Adam McLain

“Big Brother Is Watching You” is the doublethink watchword that shadows over the dystopian world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Big Brother, the created, semi-dictatorial, full-totalitarian nickname for the governmental surveillance machine, has become a nomenclature in today’s society for the government observing its citizens and enforcing its will over them. In the book and various media adaptations of Orwell’s dystopia, Big Brother is usually a fictitious non-entity, a presence that is always present but never a specific character, either vested in a representative like O’Brien or given representation in a TV screen that the characters watch and that in turn watches the characters. However, in the 2016 video game Orwell and its 2018 sequel Orwell: Ignorance Is Strength, the audience takes the spot behind Big Brother’s TV screen and becomes an operator, a part of the institution that runs the surveillance software Orwell. In this paper, I layer the positionality of various groups in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Orwell and bring them into conversation to create a theoretical matrix of interaction that can be applied to online activism. I use this matrix to approach how social media and the #MeToo movement use and abuse two specific types of bodies—that of the survivor of sexual violence and that of the survivor’s data—to enact sexual justice and legislative and cultural change.

Important to this paper is positionality. Positionality is a critical tool that was developed through epistemology, in which it discussed things as they were and are in relation to each other—the nature of their position (“Positionality”; Rowe). Other schools of thought have used positionality as a way to critique and interrogate their respective problems and questions. For example, in race, gender, and sexuality studies, positionality is used as a method to determine how one approaches their view to determine their intersectionality; in other words, an author’s biases, viewpoints, and background position their approach to a text, a problem, or a question, influencing the conclusions they draw and the arguments they make (Mikkola). Positionality is used in this paper to determine how character and audience are employed and relate to each other in a book and a video game, two different types of media that both require the attention and engagement of an audience who can invest themselves in the created world where the events of the plot take place.

In the story world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother is an autonomous nightmare who represents the government. Big Brother acts upon the citizens of Oceania, while Winston, a citizen once ignorant to being acted upon, is awakened as a resistant individual to Big Brother and the various governmental ministries. While the individual and Big Brother are enmeshed in this clash of the oppressor and the oppressed, Winston, O’Brien, and Julia become the ways the reader understands the relationships between the oppressor and the oppressed in Oceania. In addition, the proles, or common folk, exist within a nebulous field of knowing they are there but never given life through character. Four positionalities, then, arise from these points of intersections: the imaginary system of Big Brother; the Resistant Individual, who seeks to undermine the influence of the government (Winston and Julia); the Enacting Individual, who brings about the will of the system (O’Brien); and the Common Individual, who lives within the system with no seeming desire to change or disrupt the system (Fig. 1).

Along with their individual positionalities within the novel, each has relational positions to Big Brother and each other. Big Brother exerts influence over them all, as Fig. 1 shows, while the workers within the ministries and those resistant to the ministries position themselves against each other. I emphasize the relationship to Big Brother because of the hierarchical and almost-omnipotence that Big Brother exerts over the other relationships. Whereas the different individuals contend with each other, Big Brother still oppresses all. Big Brother is situated as observant, omnipresent, and almost omniscient (even though, within the novel, Big Brother hasn’t yet completely penetrated the minds of the people). This positionality, then, places Big Brother over these people, gathering information on them, directing them, and being aware of almost every action. Between the three individuals, the interaction becomes more complicated, as the resistant and enacting individuals interact with each other in a battle of oppression, and the enacting individual affects the common individual’s daily life through legislation and enforcement. Thus, a nexus or network of interactions is formed of the positions of each character that is both dependent upon Big Brother’s influence and interdependent and interactive between the positionalities (Fig. 2).

Yet outside the story world, Big Brother is not the only observer. The positionality of the reader, who observes the events of the story world through screen or page, is important to consider as well. The reader observes from an almost omniscient perspective, out of time and page, able to move back and forward through the events depicted in the novel and experience the text through their own imagination; therefore, the story world’s system of interrelated positionalities becomes encircled by a solid line to indicate that it is within itself, as the reader is placed without the story, affected by and affecting the way the narrative is understood (Fig. 3). The reader, although outside the contained system of the book, makes assumptions about the world, develops relationships with the characters, and envisions the words on the page, thus interacting, engaging, and being influenced by the contained story world.

The positionality matrix of the 2016 video game Orwell skews the reader-text positionality matrix of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Figs. 1-3) by an important dynamic: instead of the audience passively observing Big Brother through the entryway of the book, they are now the active player who both acts as Big Brother and enacts Big Brother’s will. Hence, in the representative Fig. 4, the game world’s circle is dotted and porous. Within the game world, a freelance, outsourced employee of the Nation is hired to work as an investigator of the bombing of a public square. Managing a flow of information through the new aggregate software Orwell, the investigator-player collects data on individuals through access to news sources, social media, personal communications, and desktop computer access, and then uploads various data connected with a character to the system, which provides it to an operator. The positionality of the player and the investigator is meant to be foreign, unconnected, and distant from the software to present a veil of objectivity, yet the character is still engaged in the story, interacting with it as the player interacts through the character. However, a firm line is drawn for the story to unfold: the game is linear rather than open world, even though within that linear trajectory, many decisions can be made by the player.

Managing the player-investigator’s efforts is the operator, who resides on the other side of Orwell’s screen. The operator in Orwell is Symes, a nod to the text on which it is based. Symes can only send the investigator-player messages and cannot receive any from the player-investigator; all Symes receives is the aggregated data that is input into the Orwell system by the player-investigator. The legislative and state directive is that anyone who is plausibly involved in a crime has state action performed against them. So, once the investigator-player establishes in Orwell that a person is a target—due to the collected data and the story the operator weaves from those data—the operator activates law enforcement to arrest that person. Thus, both the operator and the player-investigator make up a form of executive government as they develop a narrative with the data and information gathered to make consequential decisions on truth and reality.

In addition to the investigator and the operator using the Orwell system to discover who set off a terrorist bomb in the Nation, various hackers and activists seek to undermine Orwell throughout the game. The game simulates these hacks of Orwell by freezing the screen or messing up the language on the player’s computer. The collected data are, for the first part of the game, on the activists and hackers to discover who is the cause of a terrorist bombing; but soon, the data collection grows out of control and the player must gather data on the operator and government officials, along with the hackers. As mentioned before, this makes the gamer’s experience different from the reader’s experience. Instead of dealing with a closed-off story world, the gamer must interact with a game world that takes over the real-world computer and has in-game consequences.

Even with these interactive differences, the operators, personal data, and activists map on to the positionality from the source text. The resistant individuals are the activists, the enacting individuals are the operator and the investigator, and the common individuals are the data gathered. In this reading, data become simplistic but also subversive, just as the proles are the masses who have the capability to be used to overcome the government. Indeed, the efforts of the operator, player-investigator, and hackers/activists are subsumed into the gathering of data—of each other’s data and of their own data. At the end of Orwell, the player has four branching paths to gather data on: (1) the operator (now a high-end government official who would lose her job if her data were aggregated into Orwell; Orwell gets shut down); (2) the hacker-activists (incriminates the hacker as a threat to the nation; Orwell is accepted for use within the Nation; the investigator becomes an advisor); (3) the player-investigator (Orwell is taken down because it cannot be trusted, since the player-investigator can narrate data in a way of self-incrimination, thus proving it to be a flawed system); or (4) on all of them (in which the player tries to incriminate the government official, fails, and Orwell is brought to the public’s knowledge to neither positive nor negative feedback). However, even as these operate with each other, the system is not closed as in the book’s system (Fig. 3). The player-investigator represents a human being playing the game and a character within the game; this interaction creates the porous boundary between what is happening in the game and what occurs outside the game (Fig. 4).

Point of view and positionality, then, are very important in the video game. The interface is not a first-person shooter or an RPG-style game; instead, the game emphasizes the player doing the work of inputting information into the data aggregate system. The simulation of this aspect makes the player culpable and invested by the end of the game, since the data the player uploads affect the outcome. Indeed, this interaction could cause greater instigation for players toward activism and resistance, as they live out in the game world the consequences of a surveillance and that data are points of information that are then woven into narratives for action, rather than points of truth in and of themselves. Thus, this collapse of player and investigator, player and character, and their relationship to the Orwell system as seen in Fig. 4, shows an actionability that is not as strong within the contained system of positionality in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Whereas Nineteen Eighty-Four is an expression of a fear of surveillance, Orwell becomes a potential catalyst for action against a surveillance state.

The two systems—George Orwell’s closed book system (Fig. 3) and Orwell’s porous player-investigator system (Fig. 4)—provide two matrices of positionality and power to then investigate the positionality of social media that needs to be understood as online activism is sought more and more for societal improvement. In the case of the #MeToo Movement, a positionality matrix brought into conversation with Nineteen Eighty-Four’s and Orwell’s systems will elucidate the potential cost that bringing to light the interconnectedness of sexual harassment and violence through social media has on survivors’ experiences.

When survivors add #MeToo to a post, they are integrating their story with millions of other sexual violence survivors around the world. The hashtag allows the poster to join in a chorus of other voices that agree that they too have had sexual violence enacted against them. The act of posting with the hashtag performs three vital actions that resist cultural assumptions and attempt to change cultural understanding of sexual violence: (1) reveals actions usually kept silent; (2) creates a community through the network-system automation of a hashtag on social media websites that connects various public posts; and (3) raises awareness and heightens the discourse around the subject through trending topics that can keep a conversation going for days, months, and years.

While these three activities are necessary for resistance, a matrix of positionality shows that the act of hashtagging also re-enacts upon a data body—a social media account that represents the tangible body typing the post—by the communal demand and personal action of the hashtagger (Fig. 5). In brief: the survivor chooses to express to the community through a hashtag that sexual violence has occurred to their physical body. The hashtag connects them to a community that can interact with them—a back and forth of likes, retweets, shares, and comments. The hashtag not only connects the post to a community, but also to a greater public—sometimes even if the person shares their post privately (e.g., screenshots and word of mouth can spread a person’s private posts farther than the supportive communal interaction of allowed followers). The hashtag also allows data aggregators to collect, collate, and correlate the hashtag into statistical or marketable data.

Thus, a matrix of positionality of online posting is formed with a solid line around it to show an enclosed system. The circle in Fig. 5 represents the cohesive system within a social media website that the survivor’s #MeToo post enters when they join the resistance against rape culture and sexual violence by speaking up. The matrix is similar to the one formed with Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the reader is outside this internal system that is attempting to work itself out. The #MeToo post can be seen as its own body that, like Winston or Big Brother, is interacting within the system. This is not to say that #MeToo is morally or ethically similar to Big Brother, but rather positionally similar. The #MeToo post affects the rest of the interactions as the central figure to enacting the system of positions.

Social media is not simply contained within itself; it is devised to be social and shared. Thus, instead of a contained system, the social media activist must understand that social media created a system with a porous boundary. The survivor still uses their digital, data body to send out the post with #MeToo into the social media system, but the community, public, and data have the potential to escape that system as the stories and information pass through the social media boundary (Fig. 6). This porous boundary allows #MeToo to be used to make cultural change, but it also spreads the post beyond controllable means. Once the hashtag is placed on to a post, the survivor loses control of their body again, the violence enacted on it being repeated, retweeted, and reformed through various means (from political activism to incel jokes).

This porous boundary, then, shows that the social media post is not its own creation, divorced from the creator, but rather forms two interconnected bodies, that of the survivor (S) and that of the survivor’s social media presence (#MeToo), just as Orwell has the player and the character as two interconnected bodies. Fig. 5 makes sense when considering the data body created by the survivor, but with sexual violence, physical bodies are affected along with data bodies, and Fig. 6 shows that the knowledge of sexual violence can be spread beyond what the system.

Additionally, like the interaction between player-investigator and the Orwell system in Orwell, the #MeToo system can be expanded to include the action on the survivor’s physical body—the sexual violence—as the instigator of the entire system (Fig. 7). Just as a game’s story cannot be played without a player, #MeToo would not exist without sexual violence. In this way, we must be aware that as the collective conscious of culture encourages social media activism on behalf of cultural change, the act of #MeToo is re-ascribing violence upon survivors as they remember, reflect, and re-engage with the violence that occurred on their physical body through their digital, data body. While #MeToo can be used as an empowering moment of taking control of their body, it can also be their body being lost again to the maelstrom of social media, as retweets, quote tweets, shares, screenshots, and more take the empowering moment and twist it to other individual wills. There is resistance and power in using a hashtag to form unity and solidarity in experience, but it also reifies an act of violence upon a body, both reminding the survivor of the violence enacted against their physical body and having that same violence enacted on the data body formed through their social media interaction.

This insight is not meant to stop social media activism; it is meant to encourage activists to take a moment’s pause to consider what choices of resistance do to bodies seen and unseen. In outlining these systems, I am acknowledging what might be gained and what might be lost in taking certain actions to resist and change a cultural system. These systems help activists to realize that the effects of an action have costs, and as we attempt to change culture, the desired effect and affect can expand beyond what was first envisioned or what was first instigated by an action. Indeed, these systems elucidate the need for both critical action and communal compassion in our attempts to resist.

WORKS CITED

Mikkola, Mari. “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, 2019. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/feminism-gender/

Orwell. Steam, 2016.

Orwell: Ignorance Is Strength. Steam, 2018.

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secker & Warburg, 1948.

“Positionality.” Gender & Sexuality Dictionary. http://www.dictionary.com/e/gender-sexuality/positionality/

Rowe, Wendy E. “Positionality.” The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research, edited by David Coghlan, and Mary Brydon-Miller, SAGE Publications, 2014, pp. 628. doi:10.4135/9781446294406.n277.

Adam McLain is currently a Harvard Frank Knox Traveling Fellow, studying twentieth-century dystopian literature and the legal history of sexual violence in the U.K. He earned a master’s of theological studies in women, gender, sexuality, and religion from Harvard University, and a bachelor of arts in English literature from Brigham Young University.

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Controlled (Post)Human Bodies in Minister Faust’s War & Mir, Volume I: Ascension

Zita Hüsing

Questioning In/Equalities

Minister Faust’s self-published and under-researched science fiction (SF) novel War and Mir, Volume 1: Ascension (2012) addresses the attempted control of (post)human bodies within fictional systems of biopolitics. As the first novel in a trilogy, the narrative recounts the turbulent story of the human protagonist Harq, a man in his thirties, who is suddenly confronted with a powerful princess, an intergalactic system of power, life beyond earth, and a journey through space. This description positions the novel as a fascinating SF space opera, a genre which scholar Sherryl Vint describes as a narrative filled with “thrilling space battles, heroic masculinity, stunning technology, and imperiled women,” while it also relies on the fulfillment of prophecies and the presence of “a mysterious force” (2). In this regard, the novel shares many narrative parallels with George Lucas’s famous Star Wars saga, a movie series that spans over four decades (2). The saga also includes a variety of masculine heroes as well and introduces the “force,” which imbues Jedi knights with their powers.

However, Vint’s description of the genre can be misleading or interpreted as incomplete since Faust’s novel also includes a critical commentary on systems of power and possible abuses of hierarchical structures. As I observe, the novel emphasizes and condemns the horrific enslavement and mistreatments of predominantly black bodies. I elaborate through the example of War & Mir how the larger genre of SF works as an important tool of social critique which makes systemic racism visible. I compare the political treatment of the (post)human bodies in Faust’s novel to the treatment of black, disenfranchised people who suffer amongst systems of discrimination and racism across borders. The Canadian novel includes racist structures with regards to the treatment of othered black bodies that are similar to those in the U.S. antebellum South while it also reveals how racism and black diaspora moves beyond borders and into space. Accordingly, Alexander Weheliye rightfully asserts that “questions of humanity . . . have relied heavily on the concepts of the cyborg and the posthuman,” while at the same time not taking into account “race as a constitutive category in thinking about the parameters of humanity” (8). While presenting an inherently racist system, Faust’s novel reflects upon the interests of leading powers in maintaining regulatory mechanisms over the life and death of these bodies. The novel arguably approaches bodies as a biopolitical problem whose control demonstrates an exertion of power in an inherently racist system, which is interested in maintaining regulatory mechanisms over life and death.

The narrative focuses on representations of black diaspora by introducing the characters Harq and Thagó. I contend that the two black men are central to the racial framing of the novel. When the protagonist Harq is confronted with the revelation of an unknown universe filled with foreign species, and unknown systems of power, he slowly begins to investigate and question the mechanisms of the regulations in place. Similarly, this analysis is going to investigate Faust’s narrative, which represents attempts to control bodies within fictional systems of biopolitics that use biopower to control human and non-human populations. The French philosopher Michel Foucault famously introduced the theoretical concept of biopolitics in his lecture “Society Must Be Defended.” In his lecture, Foucault provides the broad definition of biopolitics as the “State control of the biological” productivity of bodies (1440). Importantly, Foucault’s construct of biopolitics does not consider systemic racism. While referring to the nineteenth century, he situates man as a living being who is under the control of the state who has the “power’s hold over life,” also known as “biopower” (1440). In Faust’s novel, Harq experiences various systems of such “biopower.”

On his journey to foreign planets, Harq not only becomes aware of his lack of control over his own (post)human body, but he also witnesses an excessiveness of wealth enabled by enslavement. Importantly, I investigate the portrayed bodies as ‘posthuman’ because of the transformative aspects of the ontological explorations of the human. Rosi Braidotti provides a useful definition of the complex term ‘posthuman’:

The posthuman predicament is such as to force a displacement of the lines of demarcation between structural differences, or ontological categories, for instance between the organic and the inorganic, the born and the manufactured, flesh and metal, electronic circuits and organic nervous systems. (90)

Thus, the posthuman concerns the transgression of binaries between human and non-human, between subject and object, and to take it one step further while considering insights from Critical Race Theory (CRT), between free and enslaved bodies. The posthuman attempts to move away from a human-centered, anthropocentric approach. In conjunction with Foucault’s observations on biopolitics, Braidotti offers an insightful observation of bodies as liminal, taking on blurry ontological positions. While Foucault observes the control of a state over human bodies, I inquire whether his theory is applicable to posthuman bodies as well. I ask: How are posthuman bodies controlled in Faust’s narrative and by whom? Zakiyyah Iman Jackson also calls attention to the fact that early posthumanist scholars of the 1990s “sidestepped the analytical challenged posed by the categories of race, colonialism, and slavery” (671). It is problematic that race as a critical term is absent in much posthumanist discourse (Ellis 7). Therefore, a CRT investigation of “the relationship among race, racism and power” and its critical engagement with “the very foundations of the liberal order” serves as a guide throughout this analysis (Delgado and Stefancic 3). Thus, this essay establishes linkages between Foucault’s observations, posthumanist thought, and constructions of racism.

While especially focusing on the treatment of children as slaves, the sexual exploitation of bodies and the control over bodies through systems of racism and sub-human re-categorization, this essay discusses the dehumanization of posthuman, ‘othered’ bodies. In this context, I investigate the co-dependent but isolated enslaved groups of humans and numans in Faust’s novel within the framework of CRT. In comparison to humans, numans are the only other sentient population in the universe apart from humans (Faust46). Posthumanism continues to rapidly evolve while establishing connections to fields such as postcolonialism, animal studies, queer studies and CRT (Jackson 674). “Numans” appear almost virtually indistinguishable from humans, apart from their skin marks. They are the only other sentient population in the universe apart from humans and are responsible for abducting humans from earth (Faust 46). In comparison to humans, numans are the only other sentient population (46).

Uncovering Biopolitical Hierarchies: Harq’s Journey and Awakening

Harq begins his journey in his home on earth in Edmonton, Canada. He finds out that his friend Thagó is indeed a Suftem, or “a former human who was abducted from earth and was raised by monks” on a planet called Quorodis (Faust 37). His friend Thagó enlightens the confused Harq by describing to him the knowledge of Yuthi, a mysterious, magical knowledge of the universe (73). This knowledge is comparable to the dark side of the force present in the Star Wars franchise and already touches upon constructions of biopolitics since power is inextricably linked to knowledge as Foucault observes (1444). Similarly, Weheliye suggests the idea of “a technological assemblage of humanity, technology circumscribed here in the broadest sense as the application of knowledge to the practical aims of human life . . . of what it means to be human in the modern world” (12, emphasis added). The technological assemblage and the dark force of the Yuthi thus signifies the idea of a powerful knowledge that commands the fictional universe in Faust’s novel. In a biopolitical hierarchy, the Yuthi finds itself the mediator and facilitator of such a hierarchy. Thus, Harq suddenly finds himself in a traditional SF scenario of cognitive estrangement due to his introduction to an unfamiliar “novum” of knowledge that forces him to re-establish his world-view (Vint 38).

Following this incredible discovery of life beyond earth, mysterious men chase Harq and Thagó. The two escape these alien “terrorists,” who nonchalantly kill humans in their pursuit with their technologically advanced weaponry, resulting in “people hitting the ground like cows electro stunned in slaughterhouses” (Faust 26). This violent description points to a comparison of humans to chattel. Similarly, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson compares the African American slave to “distributable” or “moveable” thing, to an “animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course” (144, 146). With this comparison between the enslaved and animals, Jefferson exemplifies the dehumanization of the enslaved and excuses slavery. Faust’s narrative thus begins a similar description that dehumanizes human bodies, referring to humans as disposable bodies, a notion that continues throughout the narrative.

After freeing the beautiful and seductive Princess Azir Utto and journeying through outer space in a tumultuous journey, Harq arrives on the planet Tuwitl. In a plot twist, Azir Utto turns out to be the controlling monarch of Tuwitl, a space associated with extraordinarily cruel power structures. Azir Utto enslaves humans whose only “freedom is death” (Faust 95). Thus, on his first journey into space, Harq witnesses an excessive amount of wealth enabled by the enslavement of humans. At the top of this hierarchy are so-called “numans” like Princess Azir Utto who profit from the physical labor and involuntary sexual exploitation of the enslaved. Harq learns that numans are responsible for abducting and enslaving humans from earth (46).

Enslavement as Racial Biopolitical Violence

However, in Faust’s narrative, Azir Utto struggles to maintain her power. As a monarch, the princess attempts to combine a system of medieval sovereignty with biopolitical control on the overarching structure of the astriarchy, the “(m)ajor political, economic power” in the solar system (40). Harq’s companion, the Suftem priest Thagó regards himself as a protector of the Astriarchy, the underlying “star kingdom” or “star order” (38). Furthermore, the Suftem complicate the power structures as a government-sanctioned religion that prays to a powerful entity named “the Glory” (45). The narrative thus also hints at the possibility of an underlying theocracy structure that enforces a racist treatment of humans by numans. For instance, the Suftem theology states that “human are the degenerate reprobate miscegenates from an ancient misflowering, purely material beings lacking Souls, whereas the very Nature of Numans is glorious, consisting of and imbued with the Divine, radiation from deepest interior the celestial Immanence that is the essence of sublime Consciousness’” (172). The theology bears similarities to racist power ideologies (like the ones mentioned in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia) that utilize biological racism and prejudices to distinguish humans from “non-human” slaves. Overall, it becomes apparent that many of the various power structures in place share the characteristics of dominating and controlling human bodies. Additionally, War & Mir inhabits underlying systems of racism and sub-human categorizations, which further the biopolitical power structures.

Thagó shares his suspicion that the princess is indeed a saiyarkutlet, or unempathetic “soul-eater,” a being that craves power (127). This attribution of insatiable power to the character Azir Utto certainly reflects the sovereign’s power and the biopolitical structures at play. Thagó elaborates (in his local dialect):

Saiyarkutlet not having conscience. Maybe you go back far enough, maybe they are being manipulators of us all since long-ago time, since first-times. Making the systems, societies, making all of us slaves to them, making us livestock on their farm. (127)

He evokes here Foucault and the biopolitical control over the productivity of bodies, but he is also again evoking U.S. notions of chattel slavery due to the comparison of human and enslaved bodies as a livestock. This description establishes enslaved human bodies in War & Mir as “posthuman” because their treatment as dehumanized slaves moves beyond an anthropocentric approach to the human. Their position displaces “the lines of demarcation” between “ontological categories, for instance between the organic and the inorganic,” between the free and the enslaved body (Braidotti 90). Due to their treatment as slaves, the humans take on a new, posthuman ontology, one which is emphasized due to their exploitation within systems of biopolitical control.

War & Mir demonstrates underlying systems of racism and sub-human categorizations which further the biopolitical power structures. Thagó recalls: “Over centuries, steal dozens-dozens-thousands. Breed millions of babies, and enslave them, too” (Faust 41). The breeding or “production” of enslaved humans is hence essential to maintain the biopolitical hierarchies. Additionally, the abduction of “millions of babies” also reveals that Tuwitl’s power system especially exploits children (41). One of them is Ti-Joto, a young boy in whom Harq takes a protective and parental interest. The human child grew up in Turwitl and in an Anakin Skywalker-like twist, he evokes the pity of Harq. When Harq first thinks about freeing and adopting Ti-Joto he is confronted with the harsh bureaucratic reality of his endeavor. His companion MarAset elaborates: “You’ve gotta buy him and then free him yourself. But even then it’s not over because if we freed him here, he’s got no savings, nowhere to love” (106). MarAset reveals that the system of biopolitics on Tuwitl is highly bureaucratic and difficult to disrupt due to its complex and entangled structures.

Desperate, Ti-Joto violently attempts to break out of the system after being asked to submit himself sexually to a guest on Tuwitl with his mother. This demand reveals that the system enforces sexual enslavement. Sexual encounters become a matter of biopolitical regulation. After Ti-Joto’s resistance to sexual exploitation, the princess condemns him to participate in the Taïzahfohn, an obscene gladiator-like tournament where spectators watch children massacre each other (96). In addition to the sexual regulations, the Taïzahfohn seems like the ultimate grotesque embodiment of the biopolitics in place, a control over human bodies in Hunger Games fashion, so to speak. The event evokes the question if our societies similarly are increasing to switch off between an “all work” to “all play” mentality, a change which might be amplified by the presence of information technologies (Haraway 300). The competition demonstrates here how the Princess’s sovereignty over death is opposed to the regularization of life by technologies of biopower (Foucault 1446). In systems of biopower which do not include the sovereign’s power, death can be reconceptualized by technologies of biopower as being less ritualized and hidden away.

After winning the Taïzahfohn, “the coliseum screams [Ti-Joto’s] name, worshipping him with their collective hatred” (Faust 102). The hatred directed towards Ti-Joto reveals that despite his win, he is still regarded as sub-human due to the fact that he is a human. Ti-Joto’s discrimination indicates parallels to systemic racism. Indeed, War & Mir reflects how “race can be placed front and center in considerations of political violence” (5). When Harq ultimately decides to free Ti-Joto from his state of oppression, he encounters Ti-Joto’s mother. After Thagó elaborates his intentions to free Ti-Joto, she demands payment for her son, which Thagó submits to. In this short glimpse of her, Ti-Joto’s mother is thus portrayed as unempathetic and marked by the capitalist exploitative system of Tuwitl. She lets her son go, but not without re-evaluating his material worth as a body in the system. His mother positions his body as a consumer good or ‘capital’ in an economic context.

The example of Ti-Joto demonstrates how the biopolitical hierarchies on Tuwitl are maintained by representing humans as less or othered through the employment of racist mechanisms of dehumanization. I connect the dehumanization of the enslaved to Weheliye’s idea of “racializing assemblages” (3). In the prominent work Habeas Viscus, Weheliye interprets racialization as a “conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans,” thereby facilitating the process of othering (3). In particular, black bodies are stereotypically described as akin to the non-human or animal. Similarly, Barbara Johnson observes: “Many entities that could be—or later are—defined as persons are represented as non-persons in the eyes of the law: slaves and fetuses and corporations, for example. Does it mean they are things? Not necessarily” (2). Racism reflects this struggle of which “humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot” (Weheliye 3). With this inquiry Weheliye points towards “the layered interconnectedness of political violence, racialization, and the human” as well as the ‘thingification’ of human bodies (1). Likewise, Faust’s work successfully asks questions about the complex power structures of master/slave relationships, of the sovereign’s power dynamics in an intergalactic system which is also marked by what Foucault determines as structures of biopolitics or the control of the productivity of bodies.

Faust’s work critiques the complex power structures of master/slave relationships and of sovereign power dynamics in an intergalactic system. Especially on Tuwitl, bodies are transformed into “private satisfaction- and utility-maximizing machine(s)” (Haraway 306). Furthermore, Faust’s novel positions racism as a systemic problem that is deeply embedded in these structures. In fact, systemic racism can be read here as furthering the biopolitical power structures. This reading is especially relevant for SF narratives in general. SF creates a safe distance to discuss prevalent issues of race and power while being able to critique and challenge present structures with loosened metaphors (Vint 5). It remains important to continue investigating the “triangulation of race, sovereignty, and the human” within SF (Nyong’o 253). I found that SF novels like War & Mir remind us that a technically advanced fictional universe does not necessarily imply an equally “advanced” social treatment of bodies within that same universe. Our goal now is to criticize the systems at hand to dismantle them for a more socially equitable future.

WORKS CITED

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, 1998.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity, 2013.

Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 3rd ed., New York University Press, 2017.

Ellis, Cristin. Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Fordham University Press, 2018.

Faust, Minister. War & Mir, Volume I: Ascension. Narmer’s Palette, 2012.

Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended: From Chapter 11. 17 March 1976 (Biopower).” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitsch, 3rd ed., Norton, 2018, pp. 1440-1450.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, Routledge, 2000, pp. 291-324.

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. “Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism.” Feminist Studies, vol. 39, no. 3, 2013, pp. 669-685.

Jefferson, Thomas. “Query XIV.” Notes on the State of Virginia. 1785, edited by Frank Shuffleton, Penguin Books, 1999, pp. 137-155.

Johnson, Barbara. Persons and Things. Harvard University Press, 2010.

Nyong’o, Tavia. “Little Monsters: Race, Sovereignty, and Queer Inhumanism in Beasts of the Southern Wild.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 2015, pp. 249–272.

Vint, Sherryl. Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed. Bloomsbury, 2014.

Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham and London, 2014.

Zita Hüsing is a Ph.D. candidate at Louisiana State University. She received her M.A. in English literatures and cultures and her M.A. in North American studies from the University of Bonn in Germany. Her primary area of research is twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature with an emphasis on science fiction studies. Her critical approaches include the posthuman, critical race theory, and critical disability studies.

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Crips Claim Space: Disabled Writers Resist Eugenicist Ideology Through Science Fiction

Laura Alison Nash

Humans shape the future in many ways, from developing technology to advocating for policy change to manipulating genetic material and beyond. In her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, adrienne maree brown even suggests writing science fiction is one way to shape the future:

Art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice. We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future. (197)

Science fiction presents a ready medium for imagining possible futures, but as brown asserts, it isn’t neutral. Science fiction can reinforce harmful societal structures, as well as disrupt them.

American science fiction tends to reinforce eugenicist ideology, particularly regarding disability. [1] Consider the 1997 science fiction film Gattaca. In the world of Gattaca, most parents rely on genetic selection to reproduce. “In-valids”—those conceived and born without genetic intervention—face tremendous barriers. In-valid protagonist Vincent Freeman dreams of going to space. He knows he’ll never be chosen, no matter how hard he trains and studies, so he turns to the black market. “Valid” Jerome Morrow agrees to sell Vincent genetic material. Armed with Jerome’s blood, sweat, and urine, Vincent successfully tricks his way to becoming an astronaut.

Gattaca reveals societal anxiety about disability. When Vincent’s employers finally schedule him for a mission, Jerome remarks, “They’re sending you up there, for Christ’s sake. You! Of all people!” He comes across as both impressed and disgusted, revealing ingrained genoism. Raised in a genoist society, Jerome feels so inadequate after winning a silver medal, he steps in front of a bus to attempt suicide, becoming paralyzed in the process. Then, when Vincent is finally on his way to Saturn, Jerome successfully commits suicide, incinerating himself. Thus, Gattaca falls prey to the kill-or-cure trope. As described by Jay Timothy Dolmage in Disability Rhetoric, “Just as a loaded gun shown in the opening scenes of a movie will eventually be fired, a disabled character will either have to be ‘killed or cured’ by the end of any movie or novel in which they appear” (34-35). The kill-or-cure trope perpetuates the belief that disabled lives aren’t worth living.

America demands ever more able and productive citizens. In “Cripping Neoliberal Futurity,” Kelly Fritsch observes, “the child of reproductive futurism is not only able-bodied, but must also be better than able-bodied or able-minded” (14). Gattaca illuminates this reality—neoliberal society’s reliance on hyper-ability to fuel an obsession with continuous improvement and productivity. It even offers some critique of it. But the film fails to give a glimpse of a brighter, more just alternative. One in-validcheats his way to success through persistence and identity fraud, but he doesn’t lift anyone else up in the process. Another man kills himself rather than continue to live with a disability. We’re led to view Vincent as an exception to the rule:one man with sufficient drive to achieve his dreams within a broken system, but no hope of changing the system, and absolutely no hope for disabled people.

Disabled people deserve a different kind of science fiction story. Not only do we deserve disabled characters who survive into the future; we deserve disabled characters who thrive. Though they haven’t yet reached mainstream audiences, these stories do exist. Disabled writers like Nisi Shawl, Mia Mingus, Erika Hammerschmidt, and John C. Ricker have gifted us with science fiction stories that confront eugenicist ideology and envision brighter futures for disabled people.

Confronting Eugenicist Realities

In her short story “Hollow,” Mia Mingus describes a community of disabled people—or “UnPerfects”—living on a planet called Hollow. Years ago, on Earth, UnPerfects staged a revolution, briefly taking over the government. After only a week, the New Regime seized power and sent all UnPerfects to camps, torturing and murdering many of them. Then a leader of the New Regime had a baby—an UnPerfect baby—and, suddenly, they called off the slaughter. The New Regime put the remaining UnPerfects on a space shuttle and launched them to Hollow, where biodomes had already been established. It’s clear that the leaders of the New Regime assumed the UnPerfects would die; it was simply more palatable to send them to space than continue to commit genocide, particularly when they realized they would have to slaughter their own children. Instead, the UnPerfects thrived and built a beautiful, accessible city.

Mingus spends a few paragraphs with a character named Seva, who sits on a couch remembering and grieving. At three years old, her family left her in an institution and never returned, not even to visit. Seva’s experience mirrors the experience of thousands of disabled people. Throughout the 1900s, U.S. doctors and social workers persuaded mostly poor and immigrant families to send their children to state-run institutions, convincing them that institutions could provide better care and relieve the family’s financial burden. In some ways, sending the UnPerfects to Hollow functions similarly to sending disabled people to institutions, removing them from family and community, banishing them from sight. “They couldn’t bear to look at us,” says a character named Rex, “but they couldn’t bring themselves to continue killing us” (“Hollow” 113).

Kea’s Flight, a novel written and self-published by wife and husband Erika Hammerschmidt and John C. Ricker, has a similar premise to “Hollow.” A couple hundred years in Earth’s future, protagonist Karen tested positive in-utero for a high likelihood of developing Asperger’s syndrome. Her embryo was removed, cryogenically frozen, and placed on a spaceship with thousands of other embryos that had also tested positive for developmental disabilities. Once in space, en route to a planet named New Charity III, the embryos resumed gestation. Karen and her fellow rems (short for removals) grew up in transit to New Charity III, expecting to arrive when they turned twenty-one years old. They’re also accompanied by non-disabled “benevolent guardians” (BGs) tasked with caring for the rems and the ship. As they age, Karen and her friends feel more and more stifled by the structures imposed by the BGs and slowly become aware of how likely the mission is to fail. It becomes clear that Earth didn’t equip them to survive, but rather constructed a spaceship with cheap technology to get disabled embryos off an overpopulated Earth as quickly as possible.

The spaceship, which the rems call the Flying Dustbin because of how Earth threw them away like trash, parallels an institution in several ways. As an illustration, I employ Oregon’s state institution, Fairview Training Center, which was in operation from 1908 to 2000. The Oregon Public Broadcasting documentary In the Shadow of Fairview paints a vivid picture of Oregon’s state institution for “the feeble-minded, idiotic, and epileptic,” which was representative of similar institutions across the United States. Former patients describe it as a prison, overcrowded and underfunded, rampant with abuse and neglect, in which residents were forced to take psychotropic medication and perform unpaid labor. The people committed to Fairview had little control over their own lives, subject to strict schedules and cruel punishments. Many underwent forced sterilization before they were permitted to leave the institution. In Kea’s Flight, Hammerschmidt and Ricker describe a fictional world clearly influenced by a very real experience like the one at Fairview. The rems are kept to strict schedules and constantly surveilled. If they make a simple misstep, robots appear and drag them to re-education rooms where they’re forced to watch propaganda for hours. At meals, each rem receives an energy bar and nutrient fluid calculated for their body size, infused with psychotropic medication and contraceptives. If they refuse to eat, a robot force feeds them. The BGs consistently cover up fatal accidents, including an explosion and technical malfunctions. Similarly, Fairview attempted to cover up accidents and injuries, rape, and murder. An investigation eventually led to the closure of Fairview in 2000, and many similar institutions across the United States have also closed, but de facto institutions still exist in other forms, like psychiatric hospitals, group homes, and prisons. Kea’s Flight imagines how these institutions might continue into the future.

Like the characters in “Hollow” and Kea’s Flight, the characters in Nisi Shawl’s short story “Deep End” have also been sent to colonize another planet. However, they weren’t expelled from Earth due to disability. Instead, they’re expelled from Earth because they’ve been convicted as criminals. Psyche Moth is a prison ship. Each passenger’s mind has been downloaded into “freespace,” destroying their original body, and uploaded into a clone of a wealthy individual from Earth. Due to the systemic racism of the criminal justice system and wealth inequality, most prisoners are Black or Brown, while the bodies their minds are uploaded into are White. (While privileged people remain safe on Earth, they are intent on spreading their genes throughout the universe.) This results in dysphoria, as prisoners feel unsettled in their new, unfamiliar bodies. In addition, several of the prisoners experience health concerns. For example, the main character, Wayna, develops unexplained shooting pains.

“Deep End” reflects difficult truths about the U.S. incarceration system. In “Disabling Incarceration,” Liat Ben-Moshe speaks to criminalization, institutionalization, and psychiatrization as a continuum, facets of a unified carceral system. They work together to remove “undesirable” people from communities. It’s not uncommon for people to move from one carceral location to another (e.g., from prison to a psychiatric hospital). One reason for this: “the prison environment itself is disabling” (13); prisons cause mental and physical harm. “Deep End” points to this reality. Several of Psyche Moth’s prisoners become disabled after they’re downloaded to cloned bodies, and the ship AI refuses to take their pain and health concerns seriously, simply prescribing rest. People currently and formerly incarcerated have reported similar treatment by prison staff, who refuse them medical attention and medication. By writing from Wayna’s point of view, Shawl emphasizes the absurdity of this treatment. Wayna’s health, along with her fellow prisoners’, is in the metaphorical hands of a cold, rule-abiding AI.

By reflecting on eugenicist realities from disabled characters’ points of view, the authors of these three stories draw attention to the inhumanity of institutions, incarceration, and other practices that sought, and continue to seek, to erase disabled people. The pain and grief, love and hope expressed by the characters humanizes them. This is a subversive act. As Eli Clare writes in Brilliant Imperfection, “Many of us have been seduced into believing the need to eliminate disability and ‘defectiveness’ is intuitively obvious” (27). Too often, stories are a part of this seduction, dehumanizing disabled people by relegating them to stereotypes. But the disabled characters in “Hollow,” Kea’s Flight, and “Deep End” aren’t the disabled characters we’ve grown to expect. Instead, Mingus, Hammerschmidt and Ricker, and Shawl write disabled characters who experience a wide range of emotions, have complex relationships, and fight tooth and nail for survival and liberation—humans worthy of life.

Envisioning Crip Futures

NASA requires astronauts to meet rigorous qualifications. Minimum standards for applicants include academic achievement and professional experience in engineering, science, or mathematics; vision correctable to 20/20; blood pressure and height requirements. Final-round applicants undergo a week of personal interviews and medical screenings. Successful astronaut candidates spend two years in strenuous training and evaluation, at the end of which NASA still may not select them for a mission (“Astronaut Selection and Training”). In short, one must be both hyper able-bodied and able-minded to become an astronaut. But what if hyper-ability isn’t a necessity for astronauts? As Rose Eveleth writes in “It’s Time to Rethink Who’s Best Suited for Space Travel,” “If you want to find people who are the very best at adapting to worlds not suited for them, you’ll have the best luck looking at people with disabilities, who navigate such a world every single day.” She uses the example of the Gallaudet Eleven, a group of deaf men engaged in a series of tests during the early 1960s to learn how humans might function in space, specifically chosen for their imperviousness to motion sickness. Eveleth also points to people who use ostomy bags, a medical device that could solve the problem of human waste management in space, as well as people who use wheelchairs, who are already familiar with modes of propulsion employed by astronauts in zero gravity. It seems many disabled people would make excellent astronauts.

We see this reversal of expectations in “Hollow.” The characters know the New Regime didn’t expect them to survive their journey to Hollow. In a turn of events, the UnPerfects do more than survive. They thrive by transforming the planet’s previously constructed living spaces to meet their needs: “They built new adaptations for their chairs, lifts, canes, crutches, braces, and their UnPerfect bodies, without thought to what was allowed or having to rely on the Perfects to do so” (Mingus, “Hollow” 118). Having escaped the ableist barriers imposed by the Perfects back on Earth, the UnPerfects build a city more accessible and welcoming than they’ve ever experienced before. This is a glimpse of what could be possible not only in the future on a distant planet, but here and now on Earth, if we recognized disabled people as leaders and offered supports rather than impediments.

Similarly, in Kea’s Flight, the non-disabled BGs so underestimate the rems that they don’t notice a group of friends organizing a coup right beneath their noses. Karen’s special interests in linguistics and chess lead her to create a secret language using a game board so she and her friends can communicate about illicit topics in plain view. Her boyfriend, Draz, uses his coding prowess to hack into the ship’s systems, allowing the rems to slowly gain more control over the ship’s operations. He uses his skills multiple times to fix lethal malfunctions, saving everyone. And when they discover their destination, the planet New Charity III, is uninhabitable, their friend Lefty’s knowledge of astronomy and mathematics allows them to chart a new course. The characters’ neurodivergent traits—special interests, hyper focus, pattern recognition, etc.—facilitate the rems’ survival and eventual takeover of the Flying Dustbin.

The idea that disabled people would make excellent astronauts and space colonists is a more literal interpretation of these stories. Another read considers the elements of space travel, colonization of extraterrestrial planets, and the genre of science fiction itself as symbols representing futurity. Space travel, both real and fictional, is inextricably tied up in visions of humanity spreading throughout the solar system and galaxy. One argument for space colonization: the survival of our species. If an extinction event occurred on one planet, at least humans would live on somewhere else in the universe. This raises many questions, of course. One question I’m concerned with here: Who would be chosen to colonize space and carry our species into the future? Extrapolating from NASA’s astronaut selection criteria, only the hyper-able-bodied and able-minded would find their way onto other planets, resulting in a eugenicist project. For now, space colonization is a distant possibility, opening space for dreaming, a screen onto which we can project our imagination, our hopes and desires. So much could change in the next hundred or thousand years, which is why science fiction stories about space travel and colonization provide fertile ground for envisioning different ways of living. Hammerschmidt and Ricker, Mingus, and Shawl take advantage of this fecundity to plant visions of communities where disabled people thrive.

Despite their limiting environment, the characters in Kea’s Flight create a community of friends. They gather almost every day to converse via Karen’s game board language. When dangers emerge, they look out for one another; they support each other to find courage and joy in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges and loss. The rems’ complementary strengths and weaknesses, and their love and respect for one another, enable them to pull off a successful coup. While only Draz possesses the necessary hacking skills to manipulate the ship’s surveillance and navigation systems, each friend brings value to the group. Even Chris, who is frequently critical and picks fights, is still valued among the friends. They may grow frustrated and angry with him, but they don’t discard him. Their loyalty pays off near the end of Kea’s Flight when Chris attacks a robot, sacrificing himself to draw attention away from his friends. If not for him, they wouldn’t have made it to the ship’s engine control room.

Mainstream American society places a premium on capitalist productivity, esteeming bankable traits and skills over other, less lucrative skills. Neoliberal rhetoric dubs people with profitable traits and skills “productive members of society” and without placing “burdens on society.” Far too often, disabled people are labeled “burdens.” In contrast, disability justice affirms “that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met … we are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them” (Berne). This is a direct challenge to eugenicist ideology, recognizing that every person is valuable and brilliant, including people who don’t have “marketable” skills or who have cantankerous personalities, like Chris. According to author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, true access is a “radical act of love” (76). It means we give each other access even when we don’t like each other; no one gets tossed aside, and that benefits everyone.

Shawl also emphasizes the beauty and complexity of relationships in “Deep End.” At the beginning of her story, Wayna enjoys a close romantic relationship with two lovers: Doe and Thad. Doe’s mind, like Wayna’s, has been downloaded into a clone body, but Thad’s mind still only exists in freespace. Doe and Wayna visit him there, where they can interact with each other, appearing as their old selves. However, a crack forms in their relationship when Wayna starts experiencing pain. Doe hesitates to have sex with Wayna in her new physical form, worried she’ll hurt Wayna, and Thad suggests she remain in freespace with him. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to [download my mind] anyway,” he says. He adds sarcastically: “Now it sounds so much more inviting? ‘Defective body?’ ‘Don’t mind if I do’” (129). In the end, Thad and Doe decide to remain in freespace, while Wayna chooses to descend to Jubilee in her clone body. Wayna establishes a new community with new friends and lovers. She builds rapport with other people experiencing the same sudden onset disability, and they swap tips and tricks for managing the pain. Shawl doesn’t suggest that Wayna feels any rancor toward Doe and Thad as she grows apart from them; she simply forms new relationships with people who share her experience and meet her needs.

Karen Hammer speaks to this phenomenon of bonding over shared experiences in “A Scar is More than a Wound: Rethinking Community and Intimacy Through Queer and Disability Theory.” Hammer examines how the character Jess in the novel Stone Butch Blues and the author Riva Lehrer of personal essay “Golem Girl Gets Lucky” “use the surface of the scar to build community and intimacy” (167). In both pieces, the characters endure exclusion and abuse: Jess because she doesn’t conform to gender expectations, and Lehrer due to her physical disability. Yet, for Jess and Lehrer, “common vulnerability creates an opportunity to embrace a sense of interdependence through mutual precarity” (Hammer 159). They build strong, caring relationships with others based on common traumas. Hammer refers to this bond as “queer/crip kinship.” While Shawl only mentions Wayna’s newfound kinship in passing—“She met prisoners who had similar symptoms, and they traded tips and theories about what was wrong with them” (132)—it reads as critical to Wayna’s decision to continue in physical space. Crip kinship leads to community and resilience.

Mingus’s story also emphasizes kinship. In the second scene of “Hollow,” Mingus zooms in on a poignant exchange between three characters. Ona, Prolt, and Al Dwihn return from working in the garden, harvesting food to feed their community, and they check in with one another. Ona wipes the dirt and drool from Prolt’s hands and arms and adjusts his leg to relieve pain. They all discuss how a new tool may help to ease Ona’s soreness. The interaction comes across as casual camaraderie, a moment that’s been repeated hundreds of times before and will happen many more times in the future. I associate this scene with a term Mingus herself coined: “access intimacy”: “Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs” (“Access Intimacy”). These characters are relaxed around one another; caring for one another is normalized, nothing special or remarkable about it. Except, in the context of our present-day lived reality, it is remarkable.

Mainstream American society values independence. We denigrate anyone who relies on other people or systems to meet their needs, from disabled people who rely on care work to families who rely on SNAP or food pantries. Piepzna-Samarasinha offers the example of “emergency-response care webs that happen when someone able-bodied becomes temporarily or permanently disabled, and their able-bodied network of friends springs into action” (52). These types of care webs mobilize and burn out quickly when able-bodied friends expect the disabled friend to convalesce quickly and regain their independence. This approach to care hinges on a selective lens—a lens that filters out the connections and supports we all rely on. None of us thrive alone; we’re deeply interconnected and dependent on one another in different ways. All three stories discussed here magnify this truth and demonstrate that we’re better off when we embrace interdependence, whether it manifests as taking advantage of varied skill sets to meet a common goal, bonding emotionally through a shared experience, helping each other meet basic needs like nutrition and hygiene, or something else.

Readers may not expect to read science fiction and take away lessons about relationships, intimacy, and interdependence. Science fiction generally recalls feats of engineering, advancements in science and technology, relationships on the scale of galactic diplomacy, and war. In comparison, human relationships come off as mundane. But what if paying attention to and developing relationships in this way is what humans need to survive into the future? “What ableism hides, as does every other interconnected system of oppression, is that our survival as disabled people instills us with powerful wisdom that is necessary now more than ever for our human and planetary survival” (Skin, Tooth, and Bone 95). Disabled science fiction authors offer tools and skills for the continuation of our species.

Conclusion

In Disability Theory, Tobin Siebers observes that even though history has unfailingly shown us human beings are fragile and mortal, we’re convinced that we can achieve perfect health and immortality in the future (7). Western science fiction habitually reinforces this belief, portraying future societies capable of manipulating genes, eradicating disease and disability, and even super-enhancing ability. These visions of the future influence our behaviors in the present. They encourage us to selectively abort fetuses that may be born disabled, spend millions of dollars on researching cures rather than improving quality of life and making society more accessible, and engineer robotic exoskeletons so people with spinal injuries can “walk.” Disabled people don’t have to accept these futures. We can write our own.

Let’s envision vibrant crip futures until we can taste, hear, smell, feel, see, and intuit them. Let’s dream about disabled people thriving on Earth, in space, in fantasy worlds and alternate realities, and share those dreams with everyone. Disabled people deserve futurity; we won’t be eliminated.

WORKS CITED

Ben-Moshe, Liat. “Disabling Incarceration: Connecting Disability to Divergent Confinements in the U.S.” Critical Sociology, vol. 39, no. 3, 2013, pp. 385-403. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0896920511430864.

Berne, Patty. “Disability Justice – a working draft by Patty Berne.” Sins Invalid, 9 Jun. 2015. www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/disability-justice-a-working-draft-by-patty-berne.

brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press, 2017.

Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Duke University Press, 2017.

Dolmage, Jay Timothy. Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse University Press, 2014.

Eveleth, Rose. “It’s Time to Rethink Who’s Best Suited for Space Travel.” WIRED, 27 Jan. 2019. www.wired.com/story/its-time-to-rethink-whos-best-suited-for-space-travel/#:~:text=Ashton%20Graybiel%20to%20help%20test,11%20men%20through%20countless%20tests.

Fritsch, Kelly. “Cripping Neoliberal Futurity: Marking the Elsewhere and Elsewhen of Desiring Otherwise.” feral feminisms, Issue 5: Untimely Bodies, Spring 2016. pp. 11-26.

Gattaca. Dir. Andrew Niccol. Sony Pictures, 1997.

Hammer, Karen. “A Scar is More than a Wound: Rethinking Community and Intimacy Through Queer and Disability Theory.” Rocky Mountain Review, vol. 68, no. 2, Fall 2014. pp. 159-176.

Hammerschmidt, Erika and John C. Ricker. Kea’s Flight. 25 Aug 2011.

In the Shadow of Fairview: full documentary. YouTube, uploaded by OPB, 11 Dec. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrlmlAJIV7c.

Mingus, Mia. “Access Intimacy: The Missing Link.” Leaving Evidence, 5 May 2011.

leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/.

—. “Hollow.” Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha, AK Press, 2015, pp. 109-121.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “Astronaut Selection and Training.” NASAfacts. www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/606877main_FS-2011-11-057-JSC-astro_trng.pdf.

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018.

Shawl, Nisi. “Deep End.” Shattering Ableist Narratives, edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft, vol. 7, Aqueduct Press, 2013, pp. 120-133. The WisCon Chronicles.

Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. The University of Michigan Press, 2008.

Sins Invalid. Skin, Tooth, and Bone—The Basis of Movement is Our People: A Disability Justice Primer, Second Edition. 2019.

Laura Alison Nash is a neurodivergent writer, artist, and freelance communications specialist living in Portland, Oregon. She recently graduated from the Pacific Northwest College of Art with an M.A. in critical studies and an M.F.A. in applied craft + design. Visit lauralisonash.com to learn about her ongoing projects.

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Living Beyond Stonelore: Suturing towards Multi-epistemic Literacy in N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth

Danny Steur

The Fifth Season (TFS), the first novel in N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth (TBE) trilogy (followed by The Obelisk Gate [TOG] and The Stone Sky [TSS]), opens with the imaginatively forceful promise to not succumb to dystopic pessimism: “Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things” (1). Dreaming up other possible worlds and otherworldly possibilities is, of course, central to speculative fiction: Jemisin’s trilogy envisions liberatory potentialities and contemplates today’s modern/colonial order, as it thematizes the intertwined oppression of racialized subjects and extractivist environmental relations. Other scholars have argued that TBE imagines a non-exploitative relationality to the environment (Miguel 471; Iles), notably through orogeny: the “ability to manipulate thermal, kinetic, and related forms of energy to address seismic events” (Jemisin, TFS 462). However, an expressly decolonial reading of Jemisin’s narrative remains absent, despite the coloniality of Jemisin’s storyworld, wherein orogenes (people with orogenic ability) are enslaved by the imperial power of Sanze. Therefore, I perform a decolonial reading of the series, addressing especially the ethico-politics of the non-imperial community Castrima, and argue that TBE unsettles the coloniality of being through the formation of a multi-epistemic literacy.

Below, I outline a decolonial, Black feminist framework to appraise the coloniality of Jemisin’s storyworld. Subsequently, I address how previous posthumanist readings of the series obscure the racialization central, to Jemisin’s narrative, using Afro-Indigenous critiques of posthumanism, which often employ Sylvia Wynter’s characterization of Eurocentric conceptions of humanity as a “liberal monohumanism” whose subject is “Man” (Wynter and McKittrick 11, 9). Following Wynter’s provincialization of Western humanity, I read orogenes as performing an alternative humanism—specifically Julietta Singh’s dehumanism, which unsettles Man’s rationality of mastery. I read the underground community of Castrima as enacting a dehumanist becoming, which allows it to initiate a multi-epistemic dialogue. It thus sutures the mode of being propagated by Sanze and its “stonelore” (rules that guide communities [Jemisin, TFS 4]), with a decolonial humanism, to form a multi-epistemic literacy that enables a responsible ethico-politics of entanglement.

Imagining ‘The Human’ beyond Man

Foundational decolonial scholar Aníbal Quijano contends that  “the model of power that is globally hegemonic today presupposes an element of coloniality” (533). Quijano formulates modernity and coloniality as coeval concepts, a binomial that Rolando Vázquez summarizes: “while ‘Modernity’ . . . enacts the dominant way of worlding the world, ‘Coloniality’ expresses the absenting of the other” (189). Decolonial critique therefore strives to humble modernity’s (purportedly universal) narratives and Eurocentric knowledge (with Eurocentrism comprising a particular rationality of knowledge [Quijano 549-550]), while fostering the opportunity to listen to suppressed knowledges (Vázquez 184). The central axis of modern/colonial power is race: a technology of domination that installs hierarchies within humanity (Quijano 533).

Black studies further develops race as a hierarchizing mechanism. Wynter  pointedly provincializes Eurocentric humanity: “our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, . . . overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself” (260)—though Man presents but one genre of humanity. Alexander Weheliye subsequently theorizes race as a hierarchizing mechanism with the notion of racializing assemblages, which “construes race . . . as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (Habeas Viscus 4). Because of the dehumanization affected by racializing assemblages, simply conscripting excluded subjects into Man cannot undo their subjugation: “to become human without qualification, you must already be Man in its idealized form, yet Man, understood simultaneously as an achievement and bio-ontology, implies whiteness and specifically nonblackness” (Jackson, Becoming Human 33).Therefore, the very definition of humanness requires rethinking (Wynter 268). Various authors develop alternative humanisms, such as Weheliye’s juridically-oriented notion of habeas viscus, which attends to the ways “the law pugnaciously adjudicates who is deserving of personhood and who is not” (Habeas Viscus 11). Man’s juridical systems cannot guarantee justice, because their selective functioning precisely facilitates the violence inflicted on those touched by racializing assemblages (124). Black speculative fiction presents fecund ground for articulating alternative humanisms, by complicating Western notions of personhood (Schalk 3), and its “stubborn epistemological logics of human domination” (Brown 7).

Decolonizing the Stillness

TBE unfolds on the acerbically named continent of the Stillness, whose lands move unceasingly. Its people therefore live “in a perpetual state of disaster preparedness” (Jemisin, TFS 8), under the threat of apocalyptic seismic activity that could trigger Fifth Seasons: winters that can last centuries and render the Stillness uninhabitable. The continent is sparsely populated by comms, “unit[s] generally corresponding to one city or town” (459). Though the Old Sanze empire has mostly withered, “in practice, most comms still follow Imperial systems of governance, finance, education, and more” (464). The coloniality of Sanze’s power thus persists, as does a coloniality of knowledge in stonelore: stories instructing comms on surviving Seasons, which advise comms to banish orogenes. Orogeny, the ability to perceive (to “sess” [465]) and redirect seismic activity, is an ostensibly useful ability considering the Earth’s continuous dynamism. However, orogenes (derogatorily called “roggas” [462]), are considered a non-human species. A Sanze council ruled that “though they bear some resemblance to we of good and wholesome lineage, any degree of orogenic ability must be assumed to negate its corresponding personhood” (TOG 258)—the Stillness’s juridical assemblages only selectively grant humanity. Orogenes are subjected to the Fulcrum, an institution that effectively enslaves them to control the Stillness’s ever-moving lands. While orogenic ability is distributed across abilities, genders and sexualities, the systemic marginalization of orogenes particularly echoes African-American experiences of racialization (Iles sec. 4.1). It is therefore fitting to read the exploitation of orogenes through the prism of Black feminist theory.

The Fulcrum is supervised by an order of Guardians, superhumanly strong persons implanted with pieces of Father Earth, making them obey his will: the Earth is alive and sentient, and wars with humanity because the ancient civilization of Syl Anagist exploited its resources. The Guardians are one of TBE’s various not-quite-human figures, with the most inhuman undoubtedly being Stone Eaters: a “sentient humanoid species whose flesh, hair, etc., resembles stone” (Jemisin, TSS 413). Through these different figures, TBE contests a simple notion of humanity. The series’s central narrative concerns Essun, an orogene who escaped the Fulcrum. She tries to find her kidnapped, orogenically gifted daughter Nassun, who, faced with the violence inflicted on orogenes, decides to end the world’s injustices by destroying the world. Essun instead strives to end the Seasons, repair the Earth and save her daughter. Thus, both hoping to overthrow the oppressive systems enslaving orogenes, mother and daughter eventually face each other. Ultimately, Essun sacrifices herself to save Nassun, making the estranged daughter decide against her destructive determination and instead fulfill her mother’s regenerative aims. The series, which describes the impending Fifth Season in a striking apocalyptic register, ends on a hopeful note, with the Fulcrum destroyed, the Guardians gone, and a truce made with Father Earth. What lies ahead for the Stillness is building the world anew—which requires decolonizing its modes of living and knowing.

Provincializing Posthumanism

Despite the persistent coloniality of the Stillness, previous authors have not engaged the series through an expressly decolonial perspective, even as they point out the colonial qualities of Jemisin’s storyworld. The Stillness’s coloniality is connected to its ecological cataclysms: María Ferrández San Miguel writes that TBE presents “the subjugation and exploitation of certain groups . . . and of nature” as coeval (474). For instance, Syl Anagist exploited a group of genetically engineered proto-orogenes, “to enslave the world itself” and harvest its resources (Jemisin, TSS 335). However, the Earth destroys Syl Anagist, initiating the Seasons to wipe out humanity. Both Alastair Iles and Miguel observe that TBE thus connects the exploitation of marginalized groups to that of Earth: what must follow from the series’s conclusion is a different relationality to both orogenes and Earth. Concretizing this relationality, Miguel argues that the series proposes the “possibility of regeneration in the figuration of the posthuman being and the promotion of a posthuman form of ethics” (474). Miguel thereto reads the series’s not-quite-human figures as posthuman configurations that “radically expose and threaten key dualisms of the Western philosophical tradition” (481), especially showing the entanglements between nature and culture.

Though I agree with Miguel’s reading in many respects, I contend that reading the series’s characters as posthuman obscures its focus on racialization. Though considering ‘the human’ a discriminatory term, Miguel’s reading of Jemisin’s characters as posthuman subjects suggests that within posthumanism the dehumanization suffered by orogenes (and their real-world counterparts historically and today) becomes irrelevant. Even as they are enslaved by their exclusion from Man’s humanity, posthumanism can incorporate these dehumanized peoples, and thereby it solves the problems plaguing pre-posthumanity. This reasoning then obscures the theme of racialization, and arguably undoes its critical potential. Miguel contends that Jemisin’s “figures of hybridity embody the liberatory potential of the posthuman” (481), but we do well to heed Zakiyyah Jackson’s cautioning “against a quixotic celebration of hybridity”; she demonstrates that:

the transgression and subversion of . . . boundaries is at least as central, if not more fundamental, to the production of [antiblackness] as the semblance of an absolute distinction. . . . Antiblackness does not require choosing one strategy—strict boundaries or hybridity—over the other. (Becoming Human 156)

Considering hybridization a liberatory means overlooks its weaponization within Man’s reservoir of antiblackness. Therefore, reading TBE’s dehumanized subjects as hybrid figures does not necessarily undo the subjugation effectuated by the racializing assemblages of the Stillness.

Moreover, various Afro-Indigenous critiques demonstrate the epistemic limits of posthumanism, contending that it remains predicated on whiteness and liberal humanism. As Laura Forlano summarizes, these critiques find it unproductive “to speak of the posthuman when so many people . . . have not been historically included in the category of the human in the first place” (28)—which is why Weheliye urges posthumanists to consider other humanisms rather than entirely discarding the human or equating it with Man (“‘Feenin’” 40). Jackson finds that posthumanism “continues to equate humanism with Enlightenment rationality”—but “is it possible that the very subjects central to posthumanist inquiry . . . find their relief outside the epistemological locus of the West?” (“Animal” 673). Indigenous feminist Zoe Todd answers this question affirmatively, while identifying a tension between Indigenous thought either “not being acknowledged at all,” or it being distorted and misrepresented by appropriation into Eurocentric frameworks (9). To work responsibly, I therefore acknowledge my embeddedness within Eurocentric frameworks. Though I do not employ Afro-Indigenous knowledges directly but rather secondary sources dialoguing with such knowledges, I nonetheless treat the strands of thought I engage carefully and with accountability, to “take responsibility for the epistemological and ontological worlds we enact” (Sundberg 40). 

Orogenes Beyond Man

Thus, departing from posthumanism’s limits, to return to the question of humanness. Rather than reading TBE’s differentially humanized figures as posthuman, I read them as performing a humanism beyond Man. The subjugation of orogenes reflects the racializing assemblages that hierarchize humanity: Stills represent Man, and through racializing assemblages they exclude orogenes, Guardians (both not-quite-humans), and Stone Eaters (nonhumans) from their professedly universal humanity. Regardless, many dehumanized figures proclaim their humanity. For instance, Hoa, a Stone Eater accompanying Essun, forcefully returns the question when Essun doubts his humanity:

“Are you human?”
At this, [Essun] cannot help but laugh once. “Officially? No.”
“Never mind what others think. What do you feel yourself to be?”
“Human.”
“Then so am I.” . . .
“Uh, not anymore.”
“Should I take your word for that? Or listen to what I feel myself to be?” (Jemisin, TOG 281-282)

Hoa again stakes out an alternative humanism when he makes amends with a rival Stone Eater, who could not reconcile his humanity with his immortality: “Stubborn fool. There is the despair of ages on his face, all because he refuses to admit that there’s more than one way to be human” (TSS 391). TBE thus opens up different ways of being human, and contests the immutability of notions of ‘the human.’

To concretize the humanism of Jemisin’s characters, I turn to Julietta Singh’s definition of dehumanism, which aims to unsettle the modern/colonial rationality of mastery. Singh considers mastery a pervasive dimension “in the fabric of modern thought, subjectivity, and politics” (2), an impetus that “relentlessly reaches toward the indiscriminate control over something—whether human or inhuman, animate or inanimate” (10). Dehumanism instantiates a mode of non-masterful, vulnerable relationality: “a practice of recuperation, of stripping away the violent foundations (always structural and ideological) of colonial and neocolonial mastery that continue to render some beings more human than others” (4). Because dehumanism multi-directionally extends into non-masterful entanglements (145), I follow two relations in TBE, specifically in non-imperial comm Castrima: their environmental submersion, and their relational, decolonial governance.

Environmental Immersion and Relational Becoming

Led by orogene headwoman Ykka, Castrima is a comm (community) where orogenes and stills live together without enslaving orogenes. Notably, it remains non-imperial through its relationality to its environments: it is located underground. Rather than the ecological mastery of domination (Singh 12), they thus establish a relation of immersion. Macarena Gómez-Barris critiques modern/colonial extractivist mode of ecological domination (5), and describes a non-masterful alternative in Afro-Indigenous cosmologies that “live alongside and within intangible geographies by cultivating rather than domesticating them” (38). To escape Sanze’s reach, Castrima resides in an underground geode: conventional comms would not inhabit this space because of the dangers posed by Earth’s non-stop motions, but when it is inhabited by orogenes, the geode protects Castrima—orogeny powers the geode to perform tasks like filtering air and water. Castrima thus enacts a non-masterful, submerged relationality to the environment instead of ransacking their environment, refusing an extractivist relation that “reduces, eliminates, and destroys [the environment’s] heterogeneity” (Gómez-Barris 108).

Castrima’s non-exploitative relationality to orogenes additionally indicates a non-masterful entanglement enacted throughout the series: a practice of relational becoming. This is reflected, firstly, in the novels’ narrative form. The Fifth Season switches between three characters: Damaya, Syenite, and Essun, though the former two are revealed to be earlier phases in Essun’s life. However, The Fifth Season relates the stories of Damaya, Syen, and Essun not chronologically but in parallel: a narrative form that reflects how her enslavement has fractured Essun’s identity, as “often occurs when identities are—through a combination of violence, historical precedent, and social constructs—determined for a marginalized people” (Wickham 392). TBE’s unconventional second-person narration reiterates this fracturing: Jemisin denotes Essun as ‘you,’ which simultaneously addresses the reader and establishes an intimacy with Essun (Wickham 396). Damaya’s and Syen’s stories are instead narrated in third-person perspective, further distancing Essun from her previous lives. Additionally, the formal emulation of Essun’s fractured identity “problematize[s] the sovereign ‘I’, [by putting] the liberal humanist Self at risk” (Jackson, Becoming Human 81). By fragmenting Essun’s story and addressing her and the reader as ‘you,’ Jemisin upends the liberal sovereign ‘I,’ unsettling the presuppositions of Man’s subjecthood and its sovereignty—a form of mastery and “a dangerous ideal as it stands in opposition to the recognition of relationality” (Becoming Human 146).

By upending the liberal sovereign Self, TBE enables a dehumanist relationality that is also enacted through its dynamic narration. Singh describes dynamic narration as:

upturning and reshaping those narratives that have cast us as particular kinds of subjects[:] dynamic narration moves us [towards] a politics of entanglement from which other world relations can begin to flourish. Dynamic narration is therefore a gesture toward dehumanism—an act of narratively inhabiting the gaps and fissures of our own subjective constructions [to] refuse the violence of splitting ourselves off from the less agreeable aspects of our being. (120)

TFS inhabits the interstices of Essun’s fractured subjectivity, forcing her and the reader to reconcile the different aspects of her identity, such as when she meets talented orogene Alabaster again after many years. Alabaster has only known her as Syenite, and so her past returns: “he returns his attention to you. (To her, Syenite.) To you, Essun. Rust it, you’ll be glad when you finally figure out who you really are” (Jemisin, TFS 446). In truth, Essun is all of her identities and dynamic relations, as TOG beautifully illustrates: “After all, a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one’s being. I am me, and you” (TOG 1). Essun is herself, Damaya, and Syen, as well as those she encounters. Such fundamental relationality, then, can only engender an ethico-politics of individual, collective and ecological care and responsibility.

Castrima’s Suturing toward Multi-Epistemic Literacy

The notion of responsibility finally brings me to multi-epistemic literacy. Gayatri Spivak, writing on human rights discourses, proposes to view not rights as a remedy to global wrongs, but rather responsibility. Nikita Dhawan summarizes: “We need to move from ‘rights-based cultures’ to ‘responsibility-based cultures,’ wherein instead of responsibility for the other, we are responsible to the other” (501). Whereas (juridical) responsibility forthe other reinforces hierarchical relations, a responsibility to the other enables listening to the “call of the other” (Spivak 152). Singh advocates vulnerable listening as a practice to “produce new forms of engaged entanglement with and beyond ourselves” (139), which productively aligns with practicing a multi-epistemic (Kuokkanen 155), or, in Spivak’s terminology, transnational literacy that aims to counter discontinuities between elites and the subalternized (Dhawan 499). Within this practice, Spivak proposes the concept-metaphor of suturing: weaving together different epistemic positionalities and practices to “undo the weaving of centuries old patterns of oppression” (Macdonald 48). Castrima illustrates listening and “learn[ing] to learn from below” (Spivak 170): unconventionally, its leadership mostly consists of orogenes, and even a Stone Eater is asked as council (Jemisin, TOG 22). Castrima thereby breaks with Sanze’s coloniality of power/being/knowing.

Essun’s experiences with Ykka further illustrate epistemic exchange through listening. Though Essun is trained by the Fulcrum, Ykka, an orogene without formal training, practices orogeny in ways Essun cannot: “She’s a feral. . . . And yet there is a solidity to her, [an] implication of strength . . . which makes you doubt your Fulcrum-ish assessment of her” (355-356). Essun’s framework cannot grasp Ykka’s abilities, a different realm of orogenic sensibility. Essun realizes that “orogeny isn’t about rank” (28), and consequently humbles her perspective:  “Maybe [Ykka] couldn’t shift a pebble because who . . . needs to shift pebbles? That’s the Fulcrum’s way of testing precision. . . . Maybe she failed your tests because they were the wrong tests” (359). Humbling her framework then enables Essun to learn from Ykka to sensibilize herself to magic, which Essun previously failed to do: “Alabaster failed to teach it to you because he was like you—Fulcrum-trained and Fulcrum-limited. . . . Ykka, feral that she is, with nothing to unlearn, was the key all along. If you hadn’t been so arrogant. . .” (363). Essun demonstrates Dhawan’s assertions about decolonizing philosophy: beyond integrating marginalized knowledges, what is needed is “a reorientation of our normative commitments, wherein instead of familiarizing ourselves with the unfamiliar, we face up to the greater challenge of defamiliarizing the familiar” (Dhawan 501). Essun’s recognition of the Fulcrum’s epistemic limits illustrates how recognizing “the limits of our power to know opens up possibilities of other practices of decoding ethics” (501). Humbling hegemonic perspectives and working towards multi-epistemic literacy enables new ways of being and knowing—and only through this multi-epistemic practice can Essun save the world. TBE thus dramatizes the process of suturing towards multi-epistemic literacies: Essun establishes a reciprocal practice, as she not just broadcasts the Fulcrum’s ways but learns to listen, thereby displacing Sanze’s coloniality of being and knowing.

Conclusion

Recognizing the coloniality undergirding the storyworld of N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, I offered a decolonial reading of the series. Whereas posthumanist approaches inadvertently obscure the racialization central to Jemisin’s narrative, and furthermore remain predicated on the liberal humanism and Eurocentrism that TBE precisely unsettles, I read Jemisin’s variously dehumanized figures as performing a humanism beyond Man. Reading TBE through a dehumanist lens illustrates how the series upends the logics of mastery and instead works towards a relational, decolonial ethico-politics. The non-imperial comm Castrima especially highlights vulnerable entanglements with both the environment and dehumanized others, and I have subsequently read its practices as enacting the formation of multi-epistemic literacy. To unsettle the coloniality of being and knowing, a reciprocal multi-epistemic practice is necessary, which entails responsibility and listening to the call of the other—and, crucially, humbling one’s own epistemic positionality. TBE shows the imperial knowledge of the Fulcrum to be but one modality of practicing orogeny, not a universal understanding of this ability. Paralleling the series’s illustration of multi-epistemic practices, throughout this article I attempted to demonstrate not only how different conceptual frameworks produce different readings, but also how we may in academic practice traverse multi-epistemic challenges responsibly and accountably, without erasing Afro-Indigenous knowledges. In this particular instance, this entails not so much incorporating subjugated knowledges but rather defamiliarizing established, Eurocentric frameworks and their institutional privileges through decolonial critique.

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Danny Steur is a graduate student in the Media, Arts and Performance Studies Research Master’s program at Utrecht University. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts in media and cultural studies cum laude and presently pursues his interests in contemporary cultural theory, post- and decoloniality, and the imaginative criticality of speculative fictions. 

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