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Globalization, Utopia, and Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope

2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/utopianstudies.26.2.0409

2154-9648

Patricia Kerslake,

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

Early in this text, the author offers a truism from Irish writer Ian McDonald, who says, “The future comes to Kenya or Kolkata as surely as it comes to Kansas” (6). This might suggest that what is to follow could well be an undemanding though learned discussion of the translocation of postcolonial science fiction (SF) from the time and place of golden-age pulp fiction into less celebrated fields seen only beyond the horizon of the imperial project. To a certain point, this is true. However, this text is also very self-aware of its role as a guide intended to inform in a specific way, written to be read by others, again, in a specific way. Yes, yes, you say, but this is a book: Aren't all books written to be read by others? To inform? Perhaps, but this one is partly an exercise in Baudelairean comprehension, where the malignancies of the modern have been transmogrified from the backstreets of Verne's Paris to the cyberspace of the Afro-Antilles, and partly as a Socialist condemnation of the West, which insists, it seems, on turning out Eurocentric narratives where a “nostalgic attachment” to the genre's past causes a “strategic displacement of the future” (13). This, despite the fact that the age of empire is clearly behind us. Smith offers not merely a simple discourse of insight through which to enlighten and engage the reader but a sophisticated piece of writing loaded, almost frustratingly so, with deeply politicized criticism of First World complacency and enthusiastic mention of Fredric Jameson. This book was not written in the pure delight of layered and connected understanding, or with the happy observation at the new wave of writing beginning to crest, but evidences more nearly a desire to obtain the reader's concurrence in an act of social and geopolitical estrangement—an ambitious enterprise for a compact text of only 244 pages.Smith begins by allegorizing “fervid imperialist expansion” (1) with the rise of the science fiction genre through the elision of SF's tropes of estrangement, comparing the isolation of underdeveloped Third World nations. Introducing an amalgam of acknowledged perspectives and citing Suvin, Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Freedman, the author locates the genre of SF firmly within the bolus of the postmodern, positing that postcolonial SF has claims to the right of a genre all its own. Contemporary authors of postcolonial SF, argues Smith, “appropriate the meme of colonizing the natives and, from the experience of the colonizee, critique it, pervert it, fuck with it, with irony, with anger, with humor, and also with love and respect for the genre of science fiction that makes it possible to think about new ways of doing things” (5). Since this form of appropriation is precisely that of the SF genre itself, then Smith is saying nothing terribly new, although there is a feeling he's approaching, indirectly, coyly, a place where a volte-face might suddenly arrive.The six chapters of his monologue focus on a close reading of several well-known mainstream texts, several of which have been successfully translated to the large screen. Beginning with Rushdie's Grimus, Smith criticizes the fact of the narrative's critical neglect, describing it as a postcolonial text ab initio. Smith reframes the story not simply as a postcolonial piece of writing but as one that reads disconcertingly through the lens of globalization and perhaps even more so as a form of academic sophistry, where he quotes Rushdie's dilemma in looking at whiteness as a “horrifying sign of … absolute difference” (27). Difference of skin color is hardly a postcolonial issue in a genre where skin variance is often the least noticeable trait of a protagonist. When one is in the situation of counting a variable number of limbs, heads, brains, and visible internal organs (see Banks, MacLeod, virtually anything from the 1950s), or when one's sexuality is predicated not through biological accident but through gene alteration, economics, apocalyptical disaster, or even self-choice, seeing someone's whiteness (also read as greenness, blackness; see Butler, Dick, Le Guin) as “horrifying” seems both risible and misleading.Smith's discussion hits more productive ground in chapter 2 with an examination of Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber. Based on Afro-Caribbean mythology, Hopkinson's narrative looks at the eradication of conventional boundaries in SF but uses a contemporary dialectic with which to demolish conventional readerly tropes. This is an intriguing nexus of SF writing, embracing, as it does, not only the estranged vision of SF but also the postcolonial displacement of “accepted” representation. Vandana Singh's The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet looks not so much at the possibilities of SF in the external sense but more internally, with the telling observation that “you did not have to go to the stars to find aliens” (68). The most utopian of any text considered by Smith also provides us with his most intriguing postulation: that the transgressive nature of postcolonial SF has not yet begun to realize its potential. It is a little frustrating that the author does not explore this notion further, for it sings with possibilities of cultural and sexual discorporation, leading to the delicious question of the pointlessness of “a life lived small” (92).Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome and Padmanabhan's Gandhi-Toxin are considered next, where both are discussed in the light of peripeteia. In the former, new knowledge of a thing changes it into something completely different yet of global benefit, and in the latter, change causes changes of its own: ripples of positive divergence that fly directly in the face of current Western capitalist economics. Though both narratives share angles of a medical thriller, it is the latter that lies closer to postcolonial SF and, ironically, to utopian fiction. Gamma, a futuristic scientist, manages to infect himself with the cloned DNA of Mahatma Gandhi in the form of a virus. According to Padmanabhan, anyone infected by this virus immediately experiences “weapons-grade compassion” (a delightful transgression all of its own). The true interest of Smith's analysis of these works is that both narratives actively demand the presence of an imperialist existence, lest there be nothing upon which to action itself.I Am Legend by Richard Matheson and District 9 by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell are examined under the light of monstrous desocialization, a form Smith equates with the West's SF “othering” of developing nations. The protagonists of both narratives are, effectively, slum-dwellers, not unlike many of the characters of postcolonial SF, yet the slums described in I Am Legend and District 9 are unlike, say, the Caribbean in that both fall within First World nations: one in a bleakly postmodern angst, the other in a horrific reimagining of apartheid. Smith's observations here are practical as he correlates both texts with the phenomenon of interspecies transformation, the former with the film Avatar, where the transformation is from white man to Noble Savage, and the latter with the more mundane but no less terrifying transformation from white man to poor black man.Smith's final chapter looks at the transplantation of cyberpunk from First World excess into developing world necessity, where, though the archetypes of the genre may remain fairly unmolested, their raison d'être is completely rewritten by the reimagined circumstances of their lives. In the classic style of the marginalized and the alienated, Smith returns to the motif of confrontation and convergence, indicating that, while such a genre might have begun in the postindustrial dystopias of the West, the West can no longer claim such genres as its own.Smith writes an uneasy text that teeters on the brink of hard new thought in some areas yet retreats into the known and the acknowledged in others. To encompass a thorough and vigorous discussion of globalization, utopia, and science fiction in one moderate-sized volume is, perhaps, a sweeping project better suited to a larger work, where the polarized dichotomy between First World and Third World perspectives of emergent postcolonial SF could be discursively unpacked to the very end of the notion. The future has indeed arrived at Kenya and Kolkata, and while it may very well be a different future than that which visits Kansas, it will arrive with the same speed and demands the same respect. In this, Smith will receive no detraction.