Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction ed. by Isiah Lavender III (review)

Isiah Lavender’s 2011 monograph, Race in American Science Fiction, was one of the first to offer a sustained examination of the role race plays in the forms, histories and plots of American sf, and it remains by far the most comprehensive look at blackness in the genre. But, as many reviewers have pointed out, its exclusive focus on blackness belies the broader promise of the title – race in America is more than just a matter of black and white. Enter Black and Brown Planets. This essay collection, edited by Lavender and featuring both prominent figures and promising new voices working at the intersection of race theory and sf, extends the discussion ‘by tackling race from multifold viewpoints’ (10). The book is broken into two sections: the titular ‘Black Planets’ and ‘Brown Planets’. The former offers five essays on the role of blackness in sf, while the latter offers seven and a half essays broadly concerned with those voices subjected to US colonialism (the half is Edward James’s brief reflection on his reprinted essay, ‘Yellow, Black, Metal, and Tentacled: The Race Question In American Science Fiction’).

Both sections share an interest in the way race and technoculture intersect, as well as a distinctly American focus – Lavender notes in his introduction that ‘science fiction concerning the continents of Africa and Asia are beyond the scope of this collection’ (7). Perhaps more interesting, however, are the ways these two sections diverge. The essays in ‘Black Planets’ read very well together, almost like a short monograph on the subject, while the essays in ‘Brown Planets’ feel much more scattered – a pair on indigenous futurism here, a pair on Chicano/a sf there, a couple of one-offs and of course one famous reprint. This is hardly a criticism of the collection or its organisation; it is rather an interesting reflection of the state of race in sf criticism today. Like Lavender in his first book, much of the field has tended to implicitly conflate black–white race relations for all American race relations – and, indeed, it is difficult to overstate the importance of this apparent dichotomy in the American psyche. One side effect of this conflation seems to be a more coherent vision of what a black American sf looks like, what issues are most relevant to criticism and what texts count as foundational (critically and canonically). In contrast, critical discussions of sf and race beyond black and white are, if not uncharted territory, at least something of a field in formation, fraught with uncertainty but vital and various, at least to judge by the range of essays in this collection.

‘Black Planets’ opens with Lisa Yaszek’s essay on ‘Afrodiasporic versions of the Edisonade’, what she dubs ‘the Bannekerade’ after the eighteenth century free black inventor Benjamin Banneker (17). These heroes are usually young black men who use their technological genius to save the broader black community from some imperilling racial oppression. The figure is ambivalent and complex, sometimes using his power for good, liberating his people from oppression, while at other times being perverted into a madman by the injustices of his society (like the Edisonade protagonist, the Bannekerade figure is almost always male).

The next three essays in ‘Black Planets’ shift from Yaszek’s structural, formal critique to more traditional literary fare, each offering a close reading of (dare we say?) canonical black sf. De Witt Douglas Kilgore takes on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (US 1993–9), framing it as ‘[r]eform afrofuturism [that] seeks neither separation nor assimilation with a white-dominated cultural order but rather a settlement’ (32–3). His examination of racial politics across the series persuasively demonstrates the way DS9 reforms those Anglocentric visions of the future propagated by earlier (and later) iterations of the franchise. He pays special attention to the role of black actors, writers and directors (specifically Avery Brooks) in the ongoing process...