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7. On Mars and Other Heterotopias: A Conclusion The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations where it is lacking, dreams dry up, adventure is replaced by espionage, and privateers by the police. —Michel Foucault1 If the interventions of interlopers such as George Takei, Homer Hickam, and Michelle Nichols recover the emancipatory and Utopian motivations of the space future, their presence in the actual and fictional places of space exploration holds astrofuturism accountable to its promise of a frontier that will free all of humankind . Indeed, the development of twentieth-century astrofuturism is the story of America's response to the claims of marginalized peoples. I have focused on the scientific utopianism at the heart of astrofuturism in order to interrogate the alternative societies that it can imagine. American culture persistently projects itself onto other times and different landscapes; this habit strikes me as a move that combines Utopian longing with the fantasy of almost unlimited power. For much of the twentieth century, American dreams of space conquest reflected what Raymond Williams calls "the mood of a rising class, which knows down to detail, that it can replace the existing order."2 That mood is an index of the technical and political power that the United States enjoyed following the Second World War. But the posture of confidence assumed by the United States in the international arena was accompanied, and perhaps in part occasioned, by the nation's internal crisis of confidence. Even as it rose to global prominence as the bulwark of freedom, America harbored a political culture that mandated the unequal distribution of civil rights. The contradiction between rhetoric and practice was (and continues to be) an open ON MARS AND OTHER HETEROTOPIAS 223 secret that undermined the nation's credibility as it sought moral and political high ground in its ideological war with Soviet Russia. In the gap between promises made and then betrayed, we find the discontents that make a rising class or nation suspect its good fortune. Its members may believe they have no rival and yet fear catastrophic failure or experience the pain of soured expectations . In this nervous condition, they "create a new heaven because [their] Earth is a hell."3 Insofar as it has been the expression of a particular class, the spaceflight movement has always demonstrated vulnerability to social anxiety, alienation, and betrayal. In this project, I have used the motif of race to track a majority project's attempts to resolve contradictions between the rhetoric and practice of the American dream, predominantly by expelling all sources of conflict and homogenizing all evidence of alterity. Given its ideological debts, I have asked whether astrofuturism has the resources and the flexibility to serve as an instrument of aspiration and accomplishment for those it has traditionally excluded . Certainly the cold war astrofuturism that promised to extend American ascendancy in perpetuity exemplifies what George Lipsitz has called America's "possessive investment in whiteness." Lipsitz argues that nothing that has been gained or lost by the political and economic struggles of the past century can be understood without reference to the rewards and privileges our society reserves for whiteness. Read through this lens, astrofuturism becomes part of a cover deflecting attention from America's treatment of its racialized minorities and safeguarding the white nation's status as inheritor of Europe's colonial mantle and its standing as the vanguard of technological modernity. The exclusion of women and racial minorities from the pioneering astronauts corps of the 1950s and 1960s was a deliberate gesture whose significance was readily apparent: the segregations of contemporary American life were to be extended into the space future as part of what Lipsitz identifies as "the rewards and privileges of whiteness."4 The antiseptic interiors and routinized characters of Stanley Kubrick's 2007: A Space Odyssey (1968) are an ironic portrayal of the heroic white males valorized by the 1960s space program. The mystical transcendence and evolutionary leap offered in the film's final scene takes "the absolute value of whiteness in U.S. politics, economics, and culture" to its logical conclusion on the space frontier.5 And yet people of color continue to turn to science in general and to astrofuturism in particular to express their political aspirations and personal longings . Despite its troubling history and unwelcoming practices, this discourse somehow invites the affiliation of those seeking alternatives to a racialized status quo. Consider the example of Neil de Grasse Tyson, astrophysicist and [3.147.205.154] Project MUSE...

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