Uriel B.

Rosenbloom

Dr. Yael Ben-zvi

Dehumanization and Posthumanism in Speculative Fiction

June 2, 2019.

Shaking the Ground of Empire: Heterotopias and Hegemony in N.K.

Jemisin's The Fifth Season

“A whole history remains to be written of spaces – which would at the same

time be the history of powers (both of these terms in the plural) – from the great

strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat” M. Foucault, ‘The Eye of

Power’

“hegemony exercises power through the constitution of a world, through

making experience of that world possible and thus creating some language games and

silencing others” E. Morera ‘Gramsci’s Critical Modernity’

N.K Jemisin's The Broken Earth trilogy depicts an imaginary world where

constant geological cataclysms occur in a cycle of so-called apocalyptic "Seasons". For

the people who inhabit this world this seemingly endless cycle is bypassed by a system

of hegemonic rules governed by an ever-present imperial dominion called the Sanze-

Empire. The narrative portrays the reciprocal relation between the Seasons and the

Empire as detrimental to a group of special humans called "Orogenes" who are abused

by the empire, and its hegemonic rule. The Orogenes’ ability to control seismic activity,
in turn, is fundamental to the inherent power of the Empire to transcend the catastrophic

inevitability of the Seasons’ destructive power .

The powers manifested by the Sanze-Empire are represented as intimately

connected to the geological reality of the world it inhabits, ironically called "the

stillness". This connection is strongly apparent in a form of laws called "stone-lore" that

serve as a hegemonic system intrinsic to Sanze rule. Nevertheless, the geological

instability of the stillness requires the Empire to create an illusion of geological

stability. This strong connection the novel makes between hegemony and geology

invites a reading influenced by the Foucauldian concept of "heterotopias" - spaces that

subvert hegemonic epistemology while sharing its spatial immanence. These spaces are

represented in the novel through several places that resist Empire’s rule, amongst which

are the pirate island of Meov and the underground community of Castrima. The way

the narrative represents Meov and Castrima as subversive spaces deconstructs the

hegemonic insistence of the Sanze-empire on stability and its relation to the geological

reality of “the stillness”. Nevertheless, I will argue, the novel also questions the

feasibility of heterotopias as more than a temporal deconstruction of hegemony and

thus adopts a more radical approach of spatial resistance to empire.

The novel starts with a description of the Empire’s heart. This description

stresses the globalizing power of the empire to create a façade of stability within the

inherent instability of the world it inhabits. Yumenes, the heart of the empire, is

represented as an affront to the stillness itself as “here alone have human beings dared

to build not for safety, not for comfort, not even for beauty, but for bravery” (6). In fact,

descriptions of Yumenes’ architectural tendencies are interwoven with Yumenes’

imperial dominion that not only stretches across the political but also the geological

with its desire to master the extremely unstable earth beneath it with the city having
“delicately arching bridges woven of glass and audacity, and architectural structures

called balconies that are so simple, yet so breathtakingly foolish” (ibid.). This display

of geological mastery encompasses all classes within this society as “[e]ven the shanties

of Yumenes are daring” (ibid.). This façade of stability is most strongly manifested by

the main political building within the city “a massive structure whose base is a star

pyramid of precision-carved obsidian brick. Pyramids are the most stable architectural

form, and this one is pyramids times five” (7). The narrator stresses that even though

“every part of the structure is channeled toward the sole purpose of supporting it. It

looks precarious; that is all that matters” (ibid.). This desire of maintaining a façade of

fragility that is nevertheless false shows how the empire cunningly uses spaces to

manifest its control over land and thus reasserts its ability to keep the “stillness” stable

which in turn necessitates its existence.

The Sanzean concept of asserting its hegemony through the manipulation of

spaces on par its façade of geological dominance is deconstructed by spaces within the

Empire whose mere spatial existence questions the possibility of geological control.

These spaces, in a way, resemble Foucauldian heterotopias. Foucault’s notion of spaces

as “sets of relations” resulted in his acknowledgment of places that defy hegemonic

power-creation as they are inherently contradictory and paradoxical spaces thus

subverting spatial hegemony by their mere existence. Foucault identifies several traits

of these spaces, while I address two of which for the purpose of this paper. The first is

that "heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several

sites that are in themselves incompatible" (Foucault, 25). The second is the temporal

instability of these spaces and the fact they "function at full capacity when men arrive

at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time" (26). The spatial and temporal

traits of a heterotopia blunder its hegemonical appropriation as a simple set of relation

that asserts Imperial rule. To translate this conception to the fictional world of the novel:

a space within “the stillness” that inhibits juxtaposition of several spaces in a single

place and also provides a break with traditional time thus deconstructing the function

of this place as a set-of-relations which asserts geological stability is a heterotopia. I

will now demonstrate how two spaces in the novel can be regarded as heterotopias

while later showing how the novel refuses to accept this passive functionality of

heterotopias instead offering a more active possibility for subversive spaces.

Meov is a pirate island just beyond the reach of the Sanzean Empire. The

geographical manifestation of the Empire’s hegemony places spaces within the

continent’s equatorial as the safest places on the stillness because they are relatively

geologically-stable. An island is therefore a very unstable space and as Cyanite, the

novel’s protagonist, finds out she is on an island she notes how “[i]slands are death

traps. The only worse places to live are atop fault lines and in dormant-but-not-extinct

volcano calderas” (205). Furthermore, Meov is also represented as agriculturally

useless with “no trees, no topsoil. An utterly useless place to live” (208). This

uselessness highlights Meov’s function as an antithesis for the Empire’s geological

control over the Earth as the Meovites cannot use the land for nourishment.

Unlike Yumenes’ extravagant architecture of dominance-over-Earth the

Meovites houses are “carved directly into the sheer cliff face” (Ibid.). Meov’s strange

architecture is juxtaposed by Cyanite to Yumenes’. Yet Meov’s tampering with nature

seems minute: “around each opening, someone has carved out the facade of a building:

elegant pillars, a beveled rectangle of a doorway, elaborate corbels of curled flowers

and cavorting animals” (Ibid.). This façade of a building stands in contrast to Cyanite’s

memory of living “in the shadow of the Black Star and the Imperial Palace that crowns

it, and in the Fulcrum with its walls of molded obsidian” (Ibid.). Yumenes’ massive
architecture that provides a façade of mastery over Earth is antithetical to that of Meov

which leaves the Earth as it is only creating a façade of a human dwelling-place in caves

“some of [which] natural and others carved by unknown means” (216) Unlike the

geological fear that drives Yumenes’ Imperial tendencies the Meovites rely on the Earth

to protect them from the Empire.

Works Cited

Foucault M. "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics 16:1, April 1986, pp. 22–27.
 Jemisin. N.K. The Fifth Season. Orbit Publishing, 2016.

Pala, Mauro. "From Hegemony to Heterotopias." The Globalization of Space,

Edited by Mariangella Palladino and John Miller, Routledge, 2016, pp. 13-32.