Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction by Mark Jerng (review)

Though its resonances echo well beyond sf and reach through the larger field of popular fiction, Mark Jerng's Racial Worldmaking will become a classic in sf studies of race, no doubt to be measured alongside texts like De Witt Douglas Kilgore's Astrofuturism (2005), John Rieder's Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) and Isiah Lavender III's Race in American Science Fiction (2011). This is not only due to the new way of thinking sf that it authorises but also because Jerng's readings are truly innovative. Casting a broad net over popular fiction, Jerng looks at specific articulations of genre within the nineteenth- and twentieth-century mass culture genre system in the US, offering multiple chapters each on yellow peril fiction, the plantation romance, sword-and-sorcery and alternate history. Jerng's approach is to view genre as a worldmaking practice, and he pays particular attention to the title concept, 'racial worldmaking', or 'narrative and interpretive strategies that shape how readers notice race so as to build, anticipate, and organize the world' (1–2). As such, as Jerng reads it, racial worldmaking is a way of writing fiction, of reading it, and of interacting with the world outside of fiction on the basis of the knowledges that an encounter with fiction makes possible. Jerng emphasises race as an always-being-constructed system of knowledge and thus sees popular fiction – and, we can easily extrapolate, all popular media – as central to circulating ideas about race and power that affect how people interact with the world. A complex book that interweaves new directions in critical race theory with inventive readings of popular fiction as well as cultural structures (such as the legal rhetoric of 'counterfactuals' in the American courtroom), Jerng's central argument can nonetheless be easily summarised: in their encounter, genre (as worldmaking practice, as a modal imagination, as mass culture market form) and race (as a form of knowledge, as a speculative technology, as a hierarchy of difference) produce one another, creating both racist narratives and liberatory ones, but more than that, genre teaches how race gets seen. Genre makes race 'salient'.

Jerng's dense argument spans eight chapters divided into four sections, with two chapters per section, framed by an introduction and conclusion. The introduction provides an overview of the conceptual terrain that comprises 'racial worldmaking' in the mass culture genres, drawing on a complex mixture of Derridean, Bourdieusian and Marxist understandings of genre and the market in which popular fiction circulates, and offers a glimpse at the histories of 'scientific' and other modes of racialisation. Jerng teaches us not to look for race or racism in popular fiction, per se, but to instead track how the text instructs us to notice race and, thereby, what knowledges the text shares with us about the function of race in the text's world and in our own. Each section that follows deals with one of the four genres – subgenres, really, of sf, historical fiction and the romance – noted above. For the most part, the first chapter of each section does the introductory footwork necessary to historicise and contextualise the stakes of the genre discussed, typically turning toward a reading of a text that offers paradigmatic evidence of the ways in which that genre, in conversation with particular historical moments for race in the US, made race visible or 'salient', triggering and helping to shape certain popular understandings of the meanings of blackness, whiteness and Asianness (particularly Japaneseness). The second chapter of each section by and large deepens and problematises the readings of the first, complicating the genre's structuring of knowledge about race and also demonstrating how the genre is analogous to other key structures in American political, economic, legal and social orders that also craft knowledge about race and subsequently make that knowledge salient for participants in (or victims of) structures of power.

While each section is exemplary, the section on sword-and-sorcery provides a...