Race in American Science Fiction

Notes

233 Notes Introduction 1. Most of the geographic and historic details in the following paragraphs are found in the United States Department of the Interior pamphlet Little Rock Central High School. 2. For further information, see Sandra Gordy’s 2009 study Finding the Lost Year: What Happened When Little Rock Closed Its Public Schools? 3. Whedon is clearly referencing the flesh robots of Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1920). 4. The episode title refers to T. S. Eliot’s major poem “The Hollow Men” (1925). Boyd Langton could be ironically viewed as a black Mr. Kurtz in relation to Joseph Conrad’s famous character in Heart of Darkness (1899). 5. Vitiligo is a skin disorder characterized by smooth white spots on various parts of the body that occurs in all human populations. Dr. Crookman states that vitiligo “is naturally more conspicuous on blacks than whites” (Schuyler, Black No More, 26). 6. Andrea Hairston’s Mindscape (2006) presents a similar idea, where citizens can become “ethnic throwbacks” by paying “gene artists” to make them white “transracials” who practice “culture” instead of “identity politics” (121–22). 7. Stacy Morgan reiterates and expands on this point: “Schuyler unmasks the perceived threat of miscegenation as a ludicrous anxiety over something which is already, fait accompli, a reality of American identity” (347). 8. As Sharon DeGraw points out, “A key aspect of Schuyler’s scientific deconstructions of race is the extensive racial intermingling taking place in the United States from the beginning of its history” (57). 9. To get an idea of the recent surge in race scholarship addressing sf, see Sandra Grayson’s Visions of the Third Millennium: Black Science Fiction Novelists Write the Future (2003), Jeffrey Tucker’s A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference (2004), Sierra Adare’s “Indian” Stereotypes in TV Science Fiction: First Nations’ Voices Speak Out (2005), Thomas Foster’s The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory (2005), A. Timothy Spaulding’s 234 · notes to pages 11–36 Re-Forming the Past: History, The Fantastic, and the Postmodern Slave Narrative (2005), Sharon DeGraw’s The Subject of Race in American Science Fiction (2007), and Marleen Barr’s anthology Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory (2008). 10. Anthologies such as Beth Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert Rodman’s Race in Cyberspace (2000), Alicia Hines, Alondra Nelson, and Thuy Linh Tu’s Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001), and Bruce Sinclair’s Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study (2004) have opened many avenues of exploration concerning the conflation of race and technology. 11. See Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1914) and its twenty-three sequels, Michael Crichton’s Congo (1980), A. M. Lightner’s Day of the Drones (1969), Paul McAuley’s White Devils (2005), and Mack Reynolds’s North Africa series: Black Man’s Burden (1972), Border, Breed, nor Birth (1972), and The Best Ye Breed (1978). 12. See Steven Barnes’s series Great Sky Woman (2006) and Shadow Valley (2009), David Durham’s Acacia (2007) and The Other Lands (2009), Carole McDonnell ’s Wind Follower (2007), Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu’s Zahrah the Windseeker (2005) and The Shadow Speaker (2007), Nisi Shawl’s Filter House (2009), and Gregory Walker’s Shades of Memnon (1999). 13. See Charles Saunders’s The Quest for Cush (1984) and The Trail of Bohu (1985) as well as his new picaresque novel Dossouye (2008) in addition to Tobias Buckell’s Crystal Rain (2006), Ragamuffin (2007), and Sly Mongoose (2008), Bill Campbell’s Sunshine Patriots (2004), and Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000) or The New Moon’s Arms (2007). 1. Racing Science Fiction 1. Space is the form where a nonhuman encounter happens when human beings penetrate the unknown or vice versa. Time is the form where the nonhuman encounter is a process that unfolds in time, meaning that humanity changes because of some event in time. In terms of the machine, the nonhuman encounter is often brought about by the human production of the nonhuman form, such as the robot or computer. The monster is the form of the alien encounter symbolic of the nonhuman within humanity itself as well as outside of it. 2. Brian Stableford describes this conceptual breakthrough as a “gestalt shift,” where “an ambiguous drawing can suddenly shift in the mind of the observer from one of its appearances to the other...