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- Creators: Arizona State University
Description
Modern and contemporary African American writers employ science fiction in order to recast ideas on past, present, and future black culture. This dissertation examines Afrofuturism’s cultural aesthetics, which appropriate devices from science fiction and fantasy in order to revise, interrogate, and re-examine historical events insufficiently treated by literary realism. The dissertation includes treatments of George Schuyler, Ishmael Reed, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Nalo Hopkinson, and Chicana/ofuturism.
The original contribution of this research is to highlight how imagination of a posthuman world has made it possible for African American writers to envision how racial power can be re-configured and re-negotiated. Focusing on shifting racial dynamics caught up in the swirl of technological changes, this research illuminates a complex process of literary production in which black culture and identity have been continuously re-interpreted.
In the post-war and post-Civil Rights Movement eras African American writers began reflecting on shifting racial dynamics in light of technological changes. This shift in which black experience became mechanized and digitized explains how technology became a source of new African American fiction. The relationships between humans and their external conditions appear in such futuristic themes as trans-human anamorphosis, cyberspace, and digital souls. These thematic devices, which explore humanity outside its phenotypic boundaries, provide African American writers with tools to demystify deterministic views of race. Afrofuturism has responded to the conceptual transformation of humanity with a race-specific scope, locating the presence of black culture in a high-tech world.
Techno-scientific progress has provided important resources in contemporary theory, yet these theoretical foci too seldom have been drawn into critical race discourses. This discrepancy is due to techno-scientific progress having served as a tool for the legitimation of scientific racism under global capitalism for centuries. Responding to this critical lacuna, the dissertation highlights an under-explored field in which African American literature responds to techno-culture’s involvement in contemporary discussions of race. Rather than repeat nominal assumptions of Eurocentric modernity and its racist hegemony, this dissertation theorizes how modern techno-culture’s outcomes—such as information science, genetic engineering, and computer science—shape minority lives, and how minority groups appropriate these outcomes to enact their own liberation.
The original contribution of this research is to highlight how imagination of a posthuman world has made it possible for African American writers to envision how racial power can be re-configured and re-negotiated. Focusing on shifting racial dynamics caught up in the swirl of technological changes, this research illuminates a complex process of literary production in which black culture and identity have been continuously re-interpreted.
In the post-war and post-Civil Rights Movement eras African American writers began reflecting on shifting racial dynamics in light of technological changes. This shift in which black experience became mechanized and digitized explains how technology became a source of new African American fiction. The relationships between humans and their external conditions appear in such futuristic themes as trans-human anamorphosis, cyberspace, and digital souls. These thematic devices, which explore humanity outside its phenotypic boundaries, provide African American writers with tools to demystify deterministic views of race. Afrofuturism has responded to the conceptual transformation of humanity with a race-specific scope, locating the presence of black culture in a high-tech world.
Techno-scientific progress has provided important resources in contemporary theory, yet these theoretical foci too seldom have been drawn into critical race discourses. This discrepancy is due to techno-scientific progress having served as a tool for the legitimation of scientific racism under global capitalism for centuries. Responding to this critical lacuna, the dissertation highlights an under-explored field in which African American literature responds to techno-culture’s involvement in contemporary discussions of race. Rather than repeat nominal assumptions of Eurocentric modernity and its racist hegemony, this dissertation theorizes how modern techno-culture’s outcomes—such as information science, genetic engineering, and computer science—shape minority lives, and how minority groups appropriate these outcomes to enact their own liberation.
ContributorsKim, Myungsung (Author) / Lockard, Joe (Thesis advisor) / Lester, Neal (Committee member) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Some say that science fiction becomes science. If science fiction eventually becomes science and technology, then US-American science and technology surrounding robots are rooted in white supremacy. Scholarship has previously highlighted the way that films and stories about robots are exclusionary towards Black people and persons of color. These texts, while aptly making the connection between race, Blackness, and technology, do not sufficiently address the embedded design of anti-Blackness in cultural artifacts in the early twentieth century and the anti-Black logics that, to this day, continue to inform how stories about robots are told. Further, these analyses do not consider the connection between cultural artifacts and the material development of emerging technologies; how these embedded racist narratives drive and shape how the technologies are then constructed. In this dissertation, I aim to link how anti-Black scientific popular culture has informed academic scholarship and engineering related to robots in the United States. Stories are an inherently spatial project. Stories about robots are a spatial project intended to create “Cartographies of Subordination.” I contend from 1922 to 1942, US-American robots were mapped into and onto the world; in just twenty short years, I argue a Cartography of Subordination was established. I apply a spatial lens to critique the impact of embedding stories about robots with anti-Blackness. These stories would develop into narratives with material consequences and maintain lasting ties and allegiance to a world invested in white supremacy. I outline how popular culture and stories are transfigured into narratives that have a direct impact on how futures are built. I expose the loop between popular culture and scholarship to unmask how research and development in robotics are based on white-informed futures. My dissertation makes an original geographical contribution to the fields of Human and Cultural Geography by asserting that narrative and popular culture about robots serves to remake Cartographies of Subordination in both science fiction and science and technology broadly. If science fiction has the potential to become real scientific outcomes, I connect culture, geography, and legacies of power in an otherwise overlooked space.
ContributorsMayberry, Nicole K. (Author) / Maynard, Andrew (Thesis advisor) / Shabazz, Rashad (Thesis advisor) / Ore, Ersula (Committee member) / Richter, Jennifer (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022