Mixed Race Studies

Race in American Science Fiction

Indiana University Press
2011-01-06
paper 286 pages, 6 x 9
paper ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22259-6
cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-253-35553-9

Isiah Lavender, III, Assistant Professor of English
University of Central Arkansas

Blackness in a white genre

Noting that science fiction is characterized by an investment in the proliferation of racial difference, Isiah Lavender III argues that racial alterity is fundamental to the genre’s narrative strategy. Race in American Science Fiction offers a systematic classification of ways that race appears and how it is silenced in science fiction, while developing a critical vocabulary designed to focus attention on often-overlooked racial implications. These focused readings of science fiction contextualize race within the genre’s better-known master narratives and agendas. Authors discussed include Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and Ursula K. Le Guin, among many others.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Mapping the Blackground
1. Racing Science Fiction
2. Meta-slavery
3. Jim Crow Extrapolations
4. Ailments of Race [Read a description below.]
5. Ethnoscapes
6. Technologically Derived Ethnicities
Epilogue: Science Fictioning Race

Notes
Bibliography
Index

…Chapter 4 investigates ailments of race linked to the notion contagion as a race metaphor in science fiction. This chapter explores the idea of the one-drop rule and miscegenation. Sf [Science Fiction] narratives built around the threat or devastation of some form of contagion frequently manifest racial fears and assumptions. Whether the product of nature or technology, accident or design, contagion narratives depict change so swift and so drastic that it can underscore or undermine a wide range of cultural assumptions, including those about race. In every case, however, these narratives derive their power from fear of the ready and rapid transmission of a harmful disease or idea from person to person. And this fear shares many characteristics with the fear of race mixing. Consequently, many sf contagion narratives manifest protocols of racial discrimination and sometimes challenge racist assumptions. Discussion centers on texts by Creg Bear, Butler, John W. Campbell Jr., Tananarive Due, Walter Miller, and [Walter] Mosely….

From page 123

…Ailments or race exist in st to expose societal discomfort with racial difference in terms of social relations between blacks and whites. However, racism is made visible in contagion narratives involving the offense of miscegenation—race mixing—as a biological phenomenon as opposed to asocial one and the violent measures taken against such commingling. By constructing miscegenation as a biological phenomenon, sf writers question the one-drop rule as a social idea based on the racist belief that one drop of black blood in a family’s heritage marks them as forever black, granting them invisible membership in an oppressed race.  People of this mixed-race heritage may choose to identify with a different race, if they are light-skinned enough, as they pass from black to white and disappear across the color line to avoid discrimination and to seek a life without persecution. With contagion as a race metaphor, fear is imposed on such racial contacts, and the violent consequences of these inevitable encounters are envisioned through the lens of otherhood…