Race in American Science Fiction

5 Ethnoscapes

157 5 Ethnoscapes It could be that science fiction’s frequent assumption of a color-blind future—whether an unintentional or deliberate privileging of whiteness —has blinded critics to matters of race. This is a paradox that Richard Dyer makes note of, stating that “whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race” (3). Certainly, one solution to polarizing racial identities along a black/white binary would be to challenge the representational power of whiteness as the symbol of humanity per se. With this in mind, otherhood is helpful in illuminating the ways that sf typically and unthinkingly reproduces white privilege in its representations of technology and social interactions. Despite those visions of a color-blind future, race has always been a part of sf, or lent its markings to it, as Sheree R. Thomas’s Dark Matter anthologies indicate, even though decades of civil rights movements and racial consciousness in American culture have not produced a corresponding awareness of race in sf. Customarily, discussions of sf reflect on various aspects of setting and characterization, while practically ignoring the dialogue on race and ethnicity evoked by the incredible backdrops envisioned. Science fiction’s lack of this sort of dialogue is largely due to its lack of a critical vocabulary necessary to understand how race works within the genre. Historical overviews of the genre are still divided by racial assumptions, and sf story collections and histories by white writers and critics barely mention race as a category of interrogation or speculation . For example, of the sixty-seven stories collected in the Norton 158 · r ace in american science fiction Book of Science Fiction (1993), two are by African American writers (Delany and Butler), and one explicitly about race (Mike Resnick’s “Kirinyaga” [1988]).1 This deficiency is roughly analogous to the scant attention devoted to sf written by women or concerned with feminist issues before the 1970s and 1980s.2 Indeed, the history of sf looks vastly different, if not barren, to scholars interested in racial issues because of publishing customs such as those practiced by John W. Campbell Jr. while editing Astounding in the 1940s and 1950s. Although otherhood is an important map of this estranged territory, partly influenced by Campbell, it still requires an expanded critical vocabulary to explore the racial constructions of science fiction. Therefore, I propose a new use for the term “ethnoscape” as a fresh way to think about the various environments that sf describes, as well as a new way to think about characterization in sf. Social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai coined the term “ethnoscape ” in 1990 and defines it as “the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live” in relation to the cultural flow of social imagination across the globe (33). These persons include “tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers, and other moving groups and persons” and “constitute an essential feature of the world” as they “appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree” (33). Adapted to science fiction, an ethnoscape provides a symbolic transfer of meaning between racial/ ethnic politics and the shifting world of the sf text, resolving the contradictions of homogeneity and exposing the ways that sf unthinkingly reproduces white privilege. The writer constructs a socio-spatial environment in which to tell a story, but the reader can reconfigure those arrangements, draw out the assumptions and implications of the text to perceive its ethnoscape. Even if the fictional socio-spatial environment is constructed so as to foreground issues of race, it will nonetheless contain tensions, contradictions, and connotations beyond the author’s control and in which the reader can discern the text’s ethnoscape. The ideas and histories which the text uses, defines, discards, renovates, and invents define and situate the ethnoscape. The ethnoscape foregrounds the human landscapes of race and ethnicity as constituted by sf’s historical, social, scientific, and technological engagement with the present. It both fabricates and reconceptualizes racial difference, Ethnoscapes · 159 enabling us to unpack sf’s racial or ethnic environments and to think about human divergence in social behaviors. There are several well-known canonical sf works that do not seem to be about race but that are relevant to racial issues, as the words on their pages build a rich, dense space that produce traces of racial experience. Each of these widely discussed narratives can further benefit from recontextualizing their...