by Rob Latham;
The vehement response of people of color to RaceFail got more people paying attention, both white and of color. It showed us people of color that we do have a certain strength of numbers, that there are more of us than the one or two visibly of color people you’ll usually see at a convention. People of color in this community have started publishing ventures together as a result of RaceFail. Some white people in the community began addressing the issue and began creating forums for discussion. Some of them held fast, even when they came under attack from all sides. A small handful of them had the guts to examine their own statements and actions, perceive where they had been racist, and admit it. Without saying that they were now afraid to go to conventions because of angry brown people (in my experience, the wrath of the white majority is much more dangerous), without name-calling, baiting, or (black!)listing, and without deleting their whole blog right after posting an apology on it.
Some of you will recognize yourselves or friends of yours, or, hell, friends of mine in the actions I’m describing. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I hate these people. Believe it or not, my default is towards friendliness. People make mistakes. People say things they haven’t thought through. People do things they later regret. People hurt other people. People propagate systemic inequities because they don’t understand or care how the system works. I know that I do all those things. I’m learning that it’s what you do after you make the mistake that counts. The people who took their courage into their own hands and apologized probably discovered that they didn’t die from it. In fact, maybe they felt a little better than before.
More positive change that came out of RaceFail: fans of color began daring to blog their experiences and their feelings about systemic racism in fantasy and science fiction (both in the literature and in the community) because they realized there was some backup. Fans of all stripes—and by that I mean “white people, too”—began challenging one another to read books by people of color and review and discuss them, and they are by heaven doing it. Can I just say that I love me some fandom? Fandom is not exempt from the kind of wrongheadedness that humans display every day. But when fans conspire to do a good thing, it is most well done indeed, with verve and enthusiasm.
The white fantasy and SF community has a culture of arrogance and entitlement that is infuriating. It became clear last year just how patronizing some of you could be, just how little you trusted us to have any insight into our own experience, an experience about which many of you are proud to say that you’re blind. If I’d ask one thing of you, it’d be to demonstrate your own impulses to equity and fairness—I know they’re there—by beginning from the assumption that people of color probably know whereof we speak on issues of race and racism.
It also became clear that many of the white people who are able to make that collegial leap of equality and respect are so mired in guilt and trying to take the fall for the rest of you that they are somewhat paralysed. That doesn’t help either, and I’m not sure what the solution is. I think you could stand to talk amongst yourselves about that one.
One of the things I really wanted to say from this podium: people of color in this community, I love allyou. I love allyou can’t done. I love how you stepped up to the plate in this past year; I kept feeling that love even when rage led to regrettable actions from some of you. I love how you looked out for each other; I love how you got energized. It’s bloody terrifying to be up on this podium right now, but you give me the courage to keep going, and for that, I thank you. When RaceFail first began to happen, I was dismayed. I didn’t think the Internet with its trolls and incendiaries was the place to have the discussion. I was wrong. Tempest Bradford, I was wrong, and I love you for holding strong, for keeping your sense of humor, and for speaking hard truths while being honest with and generous to pretty much everyone (by “everyone” I mean, “white folks, too”).
There are so many names to be named of people who did the right thing through all this. I cannot name them all. Because I’ll tell you, people, I tired. Oonuh, I tired to rass. I get seen as one of the go-to people when it comes to race in this community. I spent most of the last two years homeless and couch-surfing with my partner, recovering from illness and fighting a still ongoing struggle to get enough to eat from day to day. I simply didn’t have the energy to take RaceFail on the way I wanted to. And when I began to hear from some of the more arrogantly obstructive white people in the community who were all of a sudden being friendly to me without acknowledging their actions and the reasons for their overtures, I saw red. Allyou think I just come off the banana boat or what? That is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and my mother didn’t raise no stupid children. I am not your tame negress. I mean, I know I’m published by a mainstream house and have achieved some recognition. I know I’m in the house, people. But house negroes get a bad rap for being inherently complicit with Massa. There were and are freedom fighters among them, too. I know that a large part of the reason I’m up here has to do with the brave actions of people on the inside, of all colors, at the IAFA. And I thank you all profusely for it.
By the way, to the people in the community who have coined and are using the term “failfandom” to mock people of color who dare to call you on your racism, that’s using derision, minimizing, and discrediting as tactics of suppressing dissent. And we see you coming a mile away.
Sure I’m angry. I also love this community and this genre to pieces. This literature and some of the people in this community have kept me alive; in these past four years, sometimes literally so. That’s why, as much as I can, I keep fighting for and with the community to be the best it can be, to live up to its own visions of worlds in which no one is shut out. I’m very, very happy to be here, and happy to have been offered a podium from which to talk to this group of people on this topic. Any space created in this community for people of color, and any space we can make for ourselves makes it possible for more of us to find it easier to be ourselves, to speak up; makes it easier to write, or possible to write at all. That is true when we do it for any disenfranchized group of people within the larger fantasy and science fiction community: women, disabled people, queer people, poor and working class people, chronically ill people, old people. I’d lay odds that everyone in this room experiences at least one of those disenfranchizements. Making room makes room for all of us. It makes the possibility for even more great writing in a field where we are already blessed with so much of it. How wonderful would that be? And come right down to it, the writing is why we are all here, nah true?
Afterword
A postscript, if I may; a few minutes after I gave this address, an audience member approached me privately and asked whether I was a Marxist. Surprised I asked him why he thought I might be. He said it was because I had “reduced” the lofty subject of art to a mere question of labor. (Paraphrasing mine.)
To him I’d like to say, Mister, I am an artist who supports herself on the strength of her art and her ability to keep producing it. You’d be hard put to convince any artist that art isn’t work. And you can’t convince me that there’s no art to labor. You can’t convince me that art and the labor that creates it can be easily teased apart and considered as separate objects, and you sure as hell can’t convince me that the latter is somehow base and impoverished in comparison to the former.
And how sad is it that you apparently managed to ignore the main gist of my speech so profoundly that all you got from it were the few paragraphs I used to contextualize a much larger discussion of how fantasy and science fiction approach race?
Notes
1. By “(active) science fiction community” I mean the people who attend and organize science fiction and fantasy conventions, who identify as science fiction/fantasy fans, and who are conversant and current with much of the body of science fiction/fantasy literature, a genre of storytelling that can be found in text-based, time-based (films, television, etc.) and visual media.
2. You’ll notice that my “we” shifts accor
ding to context. In other words, when I say “we,” I don’t always mean the same group of people. Think Venn diagram.
3. I’m not asking people to do anything I haven’t done. I’ve wronged and probably will wrong enough people in my time that I’ve had ample opportunity to put myself through the process of apology, addressing/redressing and hopefully reconciliation. I know in my bones how badly it grates. But I also know that it works, and that the subsequent healing soothes away the grating feeling.
4. See Rydra Wong’s LiveJournal blog at http://rydra-wong.live-journal.com/146697.html.
5. Papa Legba, ouvre baye pou mwen, Ago eh! In African-derived religions of the Caribbean, the “horse” is a believer who, during a ceremony of worship, voluntarily consents to being temporarily inhabited by one of the deities. The worshipper then exhibits characteristics specific to that deity (sometimes in defiance of their own physical capabilities when not in trance state), and is said to have the deity riding on their head.
6. A video recording of the 2009 speech is available at the following address, courtesy of artist/writer David Findlay: http://nalohopkinson.com/2010/05/30/reluctant_ambassador_planet_midnight.html.
7. Tip o’ the nib to Sally Klages.
8. Tip o’ the nib to Winnie the Pooh and to A.A. Milne.
36
Future histories and cyborg labor: Reading borderlands science fiction after NAFTA
Lysa Rivera
For decades, writers of the US/Mexico borderlands have mined the icons and language of science fiction to articulate experiences not only of alienation, displacement, and marginalization but also those of survival, resistance, and resilience.1 During the rise of the Chicano Movement [el movimiento] in 1967, Chicano agitprop playwright Luis Valdez cleverly used the symbol of the “drone” to examine and mock Chicano/a stereotypes in California in his stage act (acto) “Los Vendidos” [The Sellouts]. In Oscar Zeta Acosta’s hallucinatory self-portrait, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1971), the brilliantly cynical “Oscar” aspires to write science fiction in a sudden fit of artistic rebellion during a creative-writing seminar. The post-movimiento 1990s saw a far more pronounced interest in science fiction—more specifically, the subgenre cyberpunk—in Chicano art and literature. Visual and performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes, and Rubén Ortiz Torres, for instance, militated against anti-immigration racism in the Southland area by creating sf narratives of resistance and parody. Whereas Gomez-Peña’s “ethno-cyborgs” dramatized the ways in which mass-media technologies simultaneously criminalize and police brown bodies (see Dangerous 45-57, 246-60), Ortiz Torres’s 1997 video installation Alien Toy spliced Hollywood images of alien encounters with footage of alleged UFO sightings around the US/Mexico border to comment on the “bizarre resonance of the official misnomer ‘illegal alien’” and the various ways the phrase “physically and ideologically patrol[s] US national borders” (Chavoya 157). In literature, Alejandro Morales’s Rag Doll Plagues (1991) and Ernest Hogan’s High-Aztech (1992)—both uncannily similar to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992)—depart from their Anglo counterparts by relocating the familiar cyberpunk cityscape to south of the border.
Chicana feminists Gloria Anzaldúa and Chela Sandoval have turned to science fiction as well to theorize Chicano/a subjectivity in the postmodern era. Whereas Anzaldúa describes mestiza subjectivity as “‘alien’ consciousness” that speaks to an otherworldly experience beyond the “confines of the ‘normal’” (25), Sandoval argues that “colonized peoples of the Americas” possess a type of “cyborg consciousness,” an oppositional consciousness that “can provide the guides for survival and resistance under First World transnational cultural conditions” (375). These examples point to the existence of an under-examined history of Chicano/a cultural practice that employs science-fictional metaphors to render experiences of marginalization visible and to imagine alternative scenarios that are at once critically informed and imaginative. They speak to what Catherine Ramirez has called the “concept of Chicanafuturism,” a cultural practice that “questions the promises of science, technology, and humanism for Chicanas, Chicanos, and other people of color” and “reflects colonial and postcolonial histories of indigenismo, mestizaje, hegemony, and survival” in the Americas (187). Chicanafuturism has become so pervasive that John Morán González, in his forecast of “Chican@ literary studies” in the “next fifty years,” has predicted that Chicano/a writers will continue to turn to science fiction to articulate their political and social concerns and to “outline the increasingly complicated relationship of Chican@s with digital technologies, corporate globalization, and the future of cyborg labor” (176).2
This essay wishes to extend these conversations by putting Chicano/a science fiction produced north of the border in conversation with science fiction from the other side [el otro lado]. Specifically, I look at Mexican writer Guillermo Lavín’s short-story “Reaching the Shore” (1994), the sf films of US filmmaker Alex Rivera, and Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita’s Chicanafuturistic novel Lunar Braceros (2009). Analyzing these texts together invites a transnational reading of science fiction from a specific geopolitical region (the US/Mexico border) and during a particular moment in contemporary history (the era of multinational capitalism). All three borderlands sf texts not only offer critical visions of globalization both today and in the near future but also insist on reading late capitalism as a troubling and enduring extension of colonial relations of power between the United States and Mexico.3 In so doing, they speak to Masao Miyoshi’s insistence that the new millennium is not an age of “postcolonialism, but of intensified colonialism, even though it is under an unfamiliar guise” (734; emphasis in original)—that guise being, above all, neoliberal economic hegemony.
Borrowing from David Harvey, I understand neoliberal economic hegemony to refer to specific social and economic conditions, including “the commodification and privatization of land” and labor power, “the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption,” and “neocolonial and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources),” all in the service of multinational corporate capitalism (159). Since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), borderlands writers and visual artists have increasingly turned to the metaphors and motifs of science fiction to articulate concerns over the problems of the so-called “Fourth World,” which ostensibly declares the utopian elimination of national borders but actually promotes the “multiplication of frontiers and the smashing apart of nations” and indigenous communities (Hayden 280). More specifically, these writers and artists enlist the dystopian motifs and sentiments of cyberpunk, a subgenre of sf that emerged in the 1980s as a speculative response to late capitalism and information technologies, to militate against global capitalism’s starvation of the indigenous to fatten the capitalists, thereby suggesting a timely reconsideration of the subgenre’s hallmark ethos to “live fast, die young, and leave a highly augmented corpse” (Foster xiv).
Speculative or not, borderlands labor narratives are always tales of migration and movement, departures and arrivals, of reaching and sometimes crossing the river’s shore. Works such as Tómas Rivera’s . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971), Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy (1971), and Helena Marìa Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1996) wrestle with the physical and psychological experiences of displacement that attend the itinerant and often unstable lives of migrants whose labor makes possible the affordability of bourgeois US consumerism. Yet within these narratives, “movement” also signifies the process of collective engagement in social and political issues that have been central to shaping a distinct borderlands literary history. The emergence of borderlands narratives are, then, the formal result of very specific political and historical conditions: the annexation of northern Mexico, the subsequent and steady industrialization of the borderlands, and within that, the creation of a vast working class, now the “long-suffering ‘disposabl
es’ of neoliberalism” (Hayden 271). Ramon Saldívar’s pioneering work on Chicano narrative offers important insight into the relationship between borderlands history and Chicano/a literature specifically: “History,” he argues, “cannot be conceived as the mere ‘background’ or ‘context’ for [Chicano] literature; rather, history turns out to be the decisive determinant of the form” itself (6). Just as the US annexation of northern Mexico in 1848 gave rise to a borderlands vernacular (the border ballad, specifically), so have contemporary neoliberal hegemonic conditions after NAFTA given rise to an increase in borderlands science fiction—which, as I will show, repeatedly interrogates iniquitous labor practices (as we will see, a type of “cyborg labor,” to recall González) in this economically depressed region. Post-NAFTA borderlands science fiction, in other words, is the formal articulation of a specific historical narrative: namely the history of US/Mexico capitalist labor relations in the region and militant fights for an alternative framework.
Representatives of cultural communities not normally associated with this First World genre, borderlands sf writers defamiliarize borderlands topographies, both social and political, to provoke a prolonged and deeper consideration of the devastating human and environmental tolls of neoliberal economic hegemony, the communications technologies that accelerate it, and the impoverished border communities that are forced to live under its so-called invisible hands. In doing so, they demonstrate Carl Freedman’s point, building on Darko Suvin, that “science fiction is determined by the dialectic between estrangement and cognition” (16). Here, “estrangement” refers to the construction of an “alternative fictional world that, by refusing to take our mundane environment for granted, implicitly or explicitly performs an estranging critical interrogation of the latter” (17; emphasis in original). The critical edge of the genre is made possible by the process of cognition, which “enables the science-fictional text to account rationally for its imagined world and for the connections as well as the disconnections of the latter to our own empirical world” (17). By inviting readers to rationalize the eerily familiar futures confronting them, science fiction thus raises an incisive question: what have we as a society done to get here? What in our collective history and our current historical moment has caused this strange, troubling, and uncannily familiar future to take shape? Readers of borderlands science fiction confront not only near and distant futures, but also how the histories of US/Mexico colonial and neo-colonial relations of power have provided and continue to provide the material conditions for this future.
