Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  With its trenchant critique of multinational capitalism and its attendant forms of labor and indigenous exploitation, borderlands science fiction produced after NAFTA represents, as I have suggested above, a critical incursion into classic cyberpunk, itself a politically charged sf subgenre that emerged in the 1980s, most notably with the publication of William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984), in direct response to multinational corporate capitalism and the computer technologies that facilitated it. The subgenre was immediately recognized as a quintessential literary reflection of the two “historic originalities” of late capitalism itself: “cybernetic technology” and “globalizing dynamics” (Jameson, Archaeologies 215). For Fredric Jameson, the primary conditions of postmodern life centered on issues of placelessness—more specifically, the postmodern subject’s inability to locate, situate, and organize herself and her relations to others within the intricate webs of the new, highly networked world order. Anchorless, adrift, and disoriented, the First World postmodern subject is incapable of mapping her relative position inside multinational capitalism. For this reason, the postmodern subject needs a type of cartographic proficiency, an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping,” which Jameson argues would “endow” it with a new “heightened sense of its place in the global system” (Postmodernism 54). Moreover, he cites cyberpunk as one possible aesthetic, going so far as to call it the “supreme literary expression, if not of postmodernism, then of late-capitalism itself” (Postmodernism 419n). While it is definitely worth noting that cyberpunk has also come under fire for privileging a white, masculinist, and imperialist cultural dominant, its predominant impulse was productive in questioning the ecological, economic, and existential implications of global multinational capitalism and its attendant information technologies.10 As Tom Foster has argued, cyberpunk of the late-1980s and early 1990s affords a “distinct set of critical resources, an archive” that postmodern technoculture still very much requires (xviii).

  In theorizing this marriage of borderlands literature and cyberpunk, it helps to turn to the critical work of Chicana feminist Chela Sandoval, who has convincingly argued for close affinities between the motifs of cyberpunk and the actual lived experiences of indigenous cultures of the Americas. Essentially revising Jameson’s concept of postmodernism as a schizophrenic response to globalization and emergent information technologies, Sandoval argues that these apparently new First World anxieties over place and subjectivity actually find their prototypes in the experiences of colonized peoples. For Sandoval, the schizophrenic postmodern condition is not new; it is anchored in the history of “conquered and colonized Westerners” (33). The first-world subject, that is, inhabits a “psychic terrain” that is “historically-decentered”: colonized subjects have learned to survive and negotiate for centuries (27). “Mere arms detached from intellect or political will,” migrant laborers from the Bracero Program to the maquiladora phenomenon are little more than “tractable” bodies that, forced to migrate far from home, must constantly negotiate a sense of self and place in a rapidly changing urbanized society (Schmidt Camacho 63). Adapting to these neocolonial conditions, indigenous subjects have learned to develop what Sandoval refers to as “cyborg skills,” oppositional and appropriative strategies that enable the colonized to contest, survive, and transform the experiences of cultural dislocation, labor exploitation, and diaspora (174-75). In the same way that Sandoval re-contextualizes the postmodern experience by locating it within the histories of Third World colonialism, so too do these borderlands sf texts embed the cognitive maps of cyberpunk within the lived experiences of millennial capitalism as they are endured by those most subject to its oppressive tendencies.

  In retooling cyberpunk to write both within and against multinational capitalism and its ideological underpinnings, borderlands science fiction is a type of postcolonial literature that transforms dominant culture through appropriation. It exemplifies Nalo Hopkinson’s definition of postcolonial sf as that which uses the “familiar memes of science fiction” to create “defended spaces where marginalized groups of people can discuss their own marginalization” (7-8). In similar fashion, these texts recast the dystopian cyberpunk gaze so that it focuses on the oppressive impacts of globalization from the perspective of indigenous communities along the borderlands. In doing this, they critically intervene in an sf sub-genre that has not always reflected the lived experiences of writers whose cultural histories have been intimately inscribed by the legacies of US imperialism and expansion. Borderlands sf practitioners such as Lavin, Rivera, and Sanchez and Pita demonstrate that cyberpunk need not be limited to serving as a mouthpiece for young white males with “biochips in their heads and chips on their shoulders” (Ross 138). As I have shown, these texts not only cast a critical light on the current and potential impacts of multinational capitalism, they also read these conditions as part of a history of indigenous exploitation, suggesting that what exists now and what looms ahead are to be viewed through the lens of deep colonial and racial memory. The persistence of the revolutionary past in Lavín’s near-future Reynosa; the insistence on a “future with a past” in Rivera’s Sleep Dealer; and, of course, the simultaneous reference to the history and potential future of US/Mexico labor practices in the terms “cybraceros” and “lunar braceros” attest equally to the ways in which borderlands science fiction embeds tales of futurity in deep-seated narratives of colonial history, labor exploitation, and racial violence, all of which continue to inform contemporary economic policy and labor practices within the region.

  The presence and importance of historical recovery notwithstanding, these narratives invite their readers to speculate about the future as well. Borderlands sf writers refuse to foreclose on the possibility of change: the desire for new oppositional tactics that are simultaneously grounded in a revolutionary past—the desire, that is, for a “future with a past”—motivates these texts, which value cultural recovery but also underscore the vitality of speculation. In this way they mirror the cultural work of contemporary Afrofuturism, or African diasporic science fiction, which aims to “extend the tradition [of countermemory] by reorienting” readers “towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective” (Eshun 289).11 For “power now operates predictively as much as retrospectively . . . through the envisioning, management, and delivery of reliable futures” (289). By participating directly in the construction and “management” of their future, borderlands sf writers not only articulate resistance to neoliberal forms of economic hegemony but also speak to the persistent validity of Darko Suvin’s early observation that contemporary sf has “moved into the sphere of anthropological and cosmological thought, becoming a diagnosis, a warning, a call to understanding and action and—most important—a mapping of possible alternatives” (12). Such potent fusions are possible when the political punch of sf merges with the imperatives of borderlands fiction.

  The works I have discussed function similarly to what Tom Moylan calls the “critical dystopia,” a cousin of dystopia that rejects the latter’s tendencies towards hopeless resignation by offering “a horizon of hope just beyond the page” (181). Moylan situates the emergence of critical dystopia in the “hard times of the 1980s and 1990s” when “betterment of humanity” was sacrificed to the “triumph of transnational capital and right-wing ideology” (184). Attuned to the difficulties of this time period, the critical dystopia articulated nightmare societies beleaguered by oppressive corporate-owned governments and harsh economic conditions, but it also exhibited a “scrappy utopian pessimism” with strong protagonists who endured the nightmare and sought alternatives to it (147). Octavia Butler’s Parable books (1993, 1998), for instance, imagine a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles decimated by a devastating war and rampant corporate greed, but it also sows seeds of hope, speculation, and optimism through the figure of Lauren Olamina, the strong black female protagonist whose dreams of space travel and an alternative social structure also inform the novel’s vision of the future. In other words, the critical
dystopia does not entirely abandon the future, even if that future appears bleak beyond imagining. The subgenre is apocalyptic, but it also imagines “alternative socio-political spaces that always already extrapolate from existing ones” and has the “formal potential to re-vision the world in ways that generate pleasurable, probing, and potentially subversive responses in its readers” (Moylan 43). As it pertains to borderlands science fiction, the critical dystopia is precisely the kind of “skeptically hopeful” work Subcomandante Marcos called for from post-NAFTA activists following the EZLN coup (Hayden 312).

  This subversive potential of these borderlands narratives is visible in their open endings, which resist closure and invite a prolonged consideration of the shape of things to come. The futures of their imaginary societies depend entirely on the thoughts and actions of a new, younger generation of borderlands cultures, both Chicano/a and fronterizo. At the end of “Reaching the Shore,” the young José Paul remains uncertain about whether he will succumb to his father’s addiction to the Dreamer. “I really have to think it over,” he says to himself at the story’s conclusion, “I’ll have to think it over” (234). The reader cannot help but hear Lavín himself demanding the same critical thinking of his post-NAFTA readers in 1994. In Sleep Dealer, one can reasonably assume that Memo and Luz—both intimately familiar with the cybernetic technologies that paradoxically oppress them—espouse (and perhaps eventually join) the anti-globalization EMLA, a not-so-subtle allusion to the Chiapas-based EZLN. Finally, the last entry in Lunar Braceros is written not by Lydia but by her eighteen-year-old son Pedro, for whom the entire narrative is in fact written. Pedro concludes the novel by announcing his readiness to join his parents’ indigenous resistance movement, which, “inspired by the Zapatista Movement in Chiapas many years before” (85), represented a “rejection of everything that is hegemonic and dominated by capital relations” (25). Now a new member of the “Anarcho Maquis,” Pedro voices the novel’s oppositional discourse that, in the spirit of the critical dystopia, conveys a sense of cautious optimism tempered by historical awareness. As his mother puts it in one of her letters to him: “Its time for a new strategy . . . for something else . . . for a new version of the old urban guerrilla tactics” of the twenty-first century (116).

  The past few years have witnessed an explosion of literary collections that have expanded the global sf archive by documenting decades of contributions by writers of color both within and beyond the so-called First World. Collections such as Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan’s So Long Been Dreaming: Post-Colonial Science Fiction (2004), Andrea Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán’s Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain (2004), and Sheree Thomas’s two-volume anthology Dark Matter (2001, 2004) have drawn much deserved attention to the sf of Latin America and the African diaspora. In some cases, these collections invite new ways of reading texts not originally conceived of as speculative or science fiction, as evidenced by the inclusion of works by W.E.B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, and Amiri Baraka in Dark Matter. In other cases, they aim to spotlight a doubly underrepresented literary corpus—people of color and science fiction writers—to vocalize and legitimize culturally specific reactions to universal matters that are unique to sf, including not only technological innovation but also new forms of social relations that have emerged because of these innovations—including, in this case, troubling relations of power under the so-called New World Order. In an attempt to expand these new critical projects, I have examined the science fiction of the borderlands, which puts the defamiliarizing narrative strategies of the genre in the service of both revisiting colonial history and peering into the uncertain future of the US/Mexico border region. Writing about the future from the bottom up or from the margin to the center, is itself an act of agency and will, I believe, become increasingly more appealing to and visible within the broader Chicano/a literary community of the twenty-first century. After all, if the primary task of Chicano narrative is “to deflect, deform, and thus transform reality” by “opting for open over closed forms, for conflict over resolution and synthesis” (Saldívar 6), then it is clear why so many borderlands writers have been drawn to science fiction, a genre that renders the familiar strange and imagines alternatives to the political status quo.

  Notes

  1. For the purposes of this essay, the term “borderlands” refers specifically to the local communities and cultures, both rural and urban, that straddle, fuel, and shape the US/Mexico border. In this sense, I use the term somewhat capaciously to refer to both US citizens and Mexican nationals who, though linguistically, culturally, and racially heterogeneous, occupy the same physical, natural, and geopolitical space, a space unique to the most frequently crossed international border on the planet. To differentiate between Mexican nationals living on the border and Mexican-Americans in the US, I opt for the more eloquent fronterizo and Chicano/a, respectively. A “fronterizo” is a person who lives in the borderlands regions, including the southernmost regions of the US Southwest and the northern Mexican cities of Tijuana, Cuidad Juaréz, and Reynosa. Historically, the fronterizo regions were seen as extremely isolated communities, cut off from the densely populated urban centers of both Mexico and the United States.

  2. One figure I have not included in this list is performer/writer Ricardo Dominguez, who has collaborated with filmmaker Alex Rivera, and who co-founded the Electronic Disturbance Theater, a band of performance activists who use computer technologies to protest military dominance through non-violent acts of “cyber” activism.

  3. Two important speculative borderlands novels—Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991) and Alejandro Morales’s Rag Doll Plagues (1992)—anticipate twenty-first century borderlands science fiction and, as such, warrant brief discussion. Although not pure science fiction (if there even is such a thing), both Almanac and Plagues combine history and speculation, narratives of the past and future, to rewrite the “alien invasion” of Mexico from the perspective of the colonized and to imagine oppositional tactics of resistance to neo-liberal economic hegemony (Silko 577). Spanning over 500 years of Anglo-European colonialism and indigenous resistance, both novels merge history with speculation; both articulate troubling connections between the colonial past, the neocolonial present, and the possible future awaiting both.

  4. Lavín’s depiction of Christmas Eve recalls the vignette “And All Through The House” in Tomás Rivera’s classic borderlands novel, . . .And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971), which recounts a harrowing Christmas Eve story from the perspective of a poor migrant family for whom the sounds and sights of rampant consumerism bring nothing but dread, desire, and anxiety.

  5. One also hears the whistle in the everyday life of Mazie, a young miner, in Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio, written in the 1930s but published in 1974, during el movimiento.

  6. For an extremely insightful reading of the persistence of nationalisms in cyberpunk, a genre known for its transnational settings, see Foster’s discussion of “franchise nationalisms” (203-28).

  7. For an overview of Marxist ideological impulses in Latin American sf more generally, see Bell and Molina-Gavilán (13-15).

  8. Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN [The Zapatista Army of National Liberation] is a revolutionary leftist group based in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico. They are the non-violent voice of an anti-globalization movement that seeks to equalize and defend the human rights and land privileges of the indigenous populations of Mexico’s interior.

  9. Pita’s and Sanchez’s “NIO” recalls Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s “Great Transition” in Friendly Cannibals, a 1997 cyberpunk novella that addresses, among other things, the disappearance of national borders after NAFTA.

  10. For trenchant and convincing critiques of racial tension and anxiety in cyberpunk, see Ross (137-69) and Lowe (84-86).

  11. As Catherine Ramirez has already pointed out, Chicanafuturism and Afrofuturism are indeed “fictive kin.” This point
is immediately brought to bear toward the end of Lunar Braceros during one of Lydia’s many “history lessons.” In it, she explains to Pedro the astronomical phenomenon known as “dark matter,” energy that is “not directly visible,” but knowable “because of its gravitational pull” (110). This reference is not insignificant or incidental: it is, I think, a very clear allusion to Sheree Thomas’s Dark Matter, an anthology of African diasporic speculative fiction, published in 2000.

  Works cited

  Acosta, Oscar Zeta. Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. 1971. New York: Vintage, 1989.

  Anaya, Rudolfo. Heart of Aztlán. 1976. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1988.

  Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 1987. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2007.

  Bell, Andrea, and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán, eds. “Introduction.” Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003. 7-15.