by Rob Latham;
2. See Kang; Palumbo-Liu.
3. Lisa Nakamura succinctly describes this Orientalist phenomenon within cyberpunk: “While the genre of cyberpunk fiction has since expanded and been reiterated many times, one things seems constant: when cyberpunk writers construct the future, it looks Asian—specifically, in many cases, Japanese” (62).
4. The term “techno-Orientalism” seems to have a twofold origination. While Morley and Robins were the first to define it in print, Nakamura cites Greta Ai-Yu Niu’s paper presentation at Duke University in 1998 as her model for the definition. For other critical considerations of techno-Orientalism, see Bennett; Beynon; Pham; Roh, Huang, and Niu.
5. I use the term “Saidian Orientalism” to refer to the original conception of Orientalism as offered by Edward Said.
6. At the height of this unease between the United States and Asia in the mid 1980s, Kiyohiko Fukushima writes that “[t]rade tensions between the United States and Japan have recently reached the level at which they may endanger the most remarkable political achievement of the postwar era—the U.S.-Japanese political partnership” (22). But such economic growth was not limited to one country. Indeed, Saburo Okita recounts that “[t]he 1980s were a decade of growth for the Asia-Pacific countries as they steadily became more important in the world economy, their share of nominal world gross national product (GNP) increasing from 41 percent in 1980 to 52 percent in 1985” (26).
7. The route through which this recovery occurs, as Sato notes, appears through the proliferation of female cyborgs, a gendered phenomena that serves to trouble a feminist recovery of these hybrid figures who exist as protectors, shoring up the very instability at the core of Japanese identity.
8. See, e.g., Klein.
9. See, e.g., Lowe.
10. Perhaps problematically, Miyake states that “[u]nlike September 11, this enemy was immediately identifiable; the same economic foe, the same arch-enemy of the United States since December 7, 1941—Japan” (13). In this respect, the novel seems to posit that there was no visual racialization that occurred due to the events of September 11, which seems reductive. At the same time, the polemic here underscores the deterritorialized nature of terrorism itself—that it would not simply be linked to one country, or even one global region, as terrorist cells proliferate in numerous areas.
11. I employ the term as Foucault defines it.
12. In this respect, the novel is a prime example of what Prashad has defined as a polycultural historical approach.
13. This TV Guide interview was published in the May 5–11, 2002, issue.
14. For comparison of the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II and Muslim Americans/Arab Americans following the attacks on 9/11, please see Ahmad (101, 105); Bayoumi (272); Howell and Shryock (450); and Naber (225–27).
15. Hurd argues that the Star Trek franchise “still tends to reify a particularly loaded image from nineteenth-century psychology and anthropology in the United States: The Tragic Mulatto” (23). Joyrich also investigates the development of female characters within the Star Trek franchise.
16. The second installment, Dove Exiled, is scheduled to be published by Viking Books for Young Readers in February 2016.
Works cited
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Beynon, Davi. “From Techno-cute to Superflat: Robots and Asian Architectural Futures.” Mechademia 7 (2012): 129–48.
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Christensen, Peter. “The Political Appeal of Dr. Fu Manchu.” The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film. Ed. Stacy Gillis and Philippa Gates. Westport: Greenwood, 2002. 81–89.
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Cornea, Christine. “Techno-Orientalism and the Postmodern Subject.” Screen Methods: Comparative Readings in Film Studies. Ed. Jacqueline Furby and Karen Randell. London: Wallflower P, 2005. 72–81.
“Detained.” Writ. Gene Roddenberry. Perf. Scott Bakula, Jolene Blalock, John Billingsley, Dominic Keating, Anthony Montgomery, Linda Park, Connor Trinneer. Enterprise. UPN. KCOP, Los Angeles. 24 Apr. 2002.
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Author’s Note: The original, longer version of this article appeared as an introduction to a special issue of MELUS on the topic of “Alien/Asian” (2008).
35
Report from planet midnight
Nalo Hopkinson
In 2009 I was a Guest Author at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts, which takes place each spring in Florida, USA. The conference theme that year was “Race in the Literature of the Fantastic.” Other invited guests included Native American writer Owl Goingback, Chinese-American writer Laurence Yep, and Japanese science fiction scholar Takayuki Tatsumi. It was also the first year that more than a handful of the conference attendees were people of color.
I’d known since 2008 that I was going to be a Guest Author, and that I would have to speak to the conference theme during one the luncheons. And I’d been dreading it. Talking about difference and marginalization in active science fiction community is rarely easy.1 Although some of us are people of color and some of us non-Western, the community is dominated by white, middle-class people from the more “developed” nations of the Western world. Many of us are of an egalitarian bent, at least in principle. We are an intelligent, opinionated, and outspoken bunch. Many of us are geeks. We know too much about too many things that other people don’t care about. Many of us are socially awkward observers who often don’t quite get the hang of mainstream status signalling vis-à-vis dress codes, slanguage, mating rituals, and material possessions. We are often ridiculed by people who do understand those complex codes. We have created an active, passionate community centred on our love for science fiction and fantasy and devoted to the principle that no one should be singled out for being “different.”
But principled does not de facto mean politicized. In practice, people in our community who try to talk about marginalization are often seen as fomenting divisiveness. We become the problem. In this community, many of us will firmly call bullshit when we see it. But that doesn’t mean that our analysis is always informed, rigorous, or honest. Many of us come from backgrounds of relative privilege that we don’t perceive, and are ignorant of what daily life is like for those with less of that privilege (even keeping in mind that relative privilege is always contextual). Many of us don’t think beyond simplistic analyses of power that ignore systemic power imbalances in order to lay the blame on the victim. Just as much as the mainstream world, we are hierarchical. We can be dazzled by fame. Some of us are the cool kids and some are not.
I’m told that when I originally gave this speech, some of the academics in the audience were offended that I used my time at the podium to discuss what they saw as an issue from the “fans” and therefore beneath them. In 2009, one of the most far-reaching, paradigm-shifting (I fervently hope) community debates was burning up communications networks right beneath their noses, and they were proud of having been ignorant of it, and indignant that I would lump them in with fans.
Active fannish community not only constitutes a significant and enthusiastic portion of our audience for science fiction and fantasy in all media, it is the community that organizes, for love of the genre, the many annual conventions throughout the SF/F world which bring together artists and audiences to celebrate, share, debate, and critique the narratives of social and technological evolution in science fiction and fantasy stories.
I love the science fiction community fiercely and I will call you to task if you ridicule it or dismiss it lightly. I have found friends, allies, and fellow travellers here, of many racial, class, and cultural backgrounds. I have found stories that entertained me, made me marvel, made me hopeful. But it is not a haven for the perfect meeting of like minds (thank heaven, because how dull would that be? Not to mention impossible). I speak not to belittle my community but to participate in it.
It is common for science fiction and fantasy writers, most of whom are white, to say that they don’t write about people of color because they don’t know anything about us; or don’t know what it’s like to live as a racialized person; or, perhaps more honestly, because they don’t want to piss us off. It is common for science fiction and fantasy writers to say that they set their stories in imaginary worlds among imaginary beings because that allows them to deal with fraught issues such as power and marginalization divorced from the real-world effects of such issues. But there are also many writers who see it differently.
In 2009, white science fiction writer Elizabeth Bear published a blog post in which she challenged her fellow authors to include racialized and otherwise marginalized people in their stories. That post ignited an Internet firestorm of discussion and argument about race, racism, and representation in science fiction/fantasy literature and community. Fans, major editors and writers in the field, and emerging writers took part. Some people of color expressed their frustration, pain, and rage at
the field’s ongoing racism. Some white people engaged thoughtfully, with understanding and respect. But many others responded quite negatively. They were indignant that we dared express rage in rageful ways.2 Some of them loudly denied the existence of racism in the field, in ways that demonstrated their lack of understanding of how systemic racism operates. For a time, some of them appeared to be policing the Internet posts of politicized black women writers in the genre and attempting to verbally intimidate, berate, and belittle us. A couple of the major editors in the field, perhaps understandably upset at how some of the rage was being expressed, made statements of the ilk that they would never again allow communication from any of those they considered guilty of offence.
Among the angry people of color were unpublished and barely published writers. Our field is quite small. There’s only a handful of large professional houses. They currently only publish a handful of people of color. To their credit, many of them want to publish more of us. But from my perspective, when key representatives of one of the most powerful houses in our genre say that they never again want to hear from people who could be the future SF/F writers, editors, illustrators, and publicists of color, and who are the current SF/F readers of color, that’s a pretty clear expression of both the power and the will to actively keep the genre as white as possible.
I do not believe I overstate. I do believe that is not how they meant it; they are well-meaning people. But that is how it would have been heard by those who have been implicitly and explicitly, through ignorance or wilfulness, largely rendered invisible for decades. When you’re historically the one with the power relative to another, if you really want to correct the imbalance, you have to be willing to hear pent-up rage and not retaliate. You have to be willing to acknowledge your actions that make you complicit. You have to be willing to apologize and then take visible, effective steps towards righting the imbalance.3
