Postcolonialism and Science Fiction

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Postcolonialism and
Science Fiction
Jessica Langer
10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

Postcolonialism and Science Fiction
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to McGill University - PalgraveConnect - 2012-07-31

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Postcolonialism and
Science Fiction
Jessica Langer

© Jessica Langer 2011
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For my parents
and
for Bob Menchhofer, my earliest mentor, to whom
I always promised to dedicate my first book.


Contents
Acknowledgements viii

Introduction: Elephant-Shaped Holes 1
1 A Question of History: Geographical/Historical Context 11
2 Diaspora and Locality 56
3 Race, Culture, Identity and Alien/Nation 81
4 Hybridity, Nativism and Transgression 107
5 Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science 127
Conclusion: Filling Holes, Breaking Boundaries 153
Notes 160
Bibliography 168
Index 181
vii

Acknowledgements
First and foremost, this project would not have been possible with-

out the advice, support, mentorship and friendship of Adam Roberts
at Royal Holloway, University of London, where I spent three years
completing my doctorate and laying the groundwork for this book.
His finely tuned ability to balance rigour and kindness is unmatched,
and his incredible generosity of time and spirit has helped sustain
both my enthusiasm and my faith in my work. Thank you, Adam,
for being the best mentor anyone could ever hope for.
Many others, both academics and “civilians”, have also con-
tributed to this project. Elizabeth Abbott has been a mentor to me
since my undergraduate days at the University of Toronto, and I trea-
sure her friendship and moral support. Elizabeth Maslen and Mpalive
Msiska, of the NILE MA program at the School of Advanced Study,
University of London, started me on this road; I cannot think of
a better place to develop a foundation in postcolonial studies. Pro-
fessor Ayako Saito of Meiji Gakuin University was instrumental in
helping me get to Japan during the summer of 2007 to conduct
research for Chapter 1 and in mentoring me through the process
of conducting the summer’s research, and Kazu Horiuchi was my
research assistant and flatmate extraordinaire. My trip was sponsored
entirely by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Summer
Program in partnership with the British Council, and I am end-
lessly grateful for the opportunities this trip afforded me. Jill Walker
Rettberg, Hilde Corneliussen and the rest of the contributors to Dig-
ital Culture, Play and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2008) were very helpful in the writing and polishing of
Chapter 3. Ria Cheyne and Michelle Reid, fellow SF fans and aca-
demics, were generous with their advice and their own work. Many
thanks go to Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James for delicious food,
good company and wise counsel. Elleke Boehmer helped quite a lot
in the early stages of this project and was a wonderful resource on
postcolonial theory. Lyman Tower Sargent was my British Library
coffee buddy. Paul Cornell, Caroline Symcox, Lou Anders, Stephen
Moffatt and John Picacio made Worldcon 2007 in Yokohama and
viii

Acknowledgements ix
its attendant parties a total blast. Lorna Toolis, Annette Mocek, Kim
Hull and Mary Cannings, the genius librarians at the Merrill Col-
lection of the Toronto Public Library, provided invaluable research
assistance and insight, along with a nice quiet place to plug in
my laptop and write. Noga Applebaum, Andy Purssell and Anthony
Carrigan provided camaraderie and levity on rainy days. Mark Bould’s

keen eye and excellent sense of humour were important in equal
measure, and Roger Luckhurst’s perceptive and helpful commentary
helped get this project where it needed to be. Dom Alessio is a good
friend and research collaborator and an all-round wonderful human
being; he and my other colleagues at Richmond, the American Inter-
national University in London, particularly Alex Seago, Katherine
Baxter and Michele Cohen, brightened up Kensington. Bruce Carson
at London Metropolitan University did the same with Holloway
Road. In Toronto, I am grateful to Joe Kertes and John Elias at Humber
College and to Kass Banning and Kay Armatage at the University
of Toronto for their friendship and kindness, and for giving me the
opportunity to teach while I completed this book.
It is to my family, however, that I owe my greatest debt. My parents,
Jack and Ferne, have provided me with love, support and encourage-
ment since forever (and watched the baby during the final push to get
this book done). My brothers, Ben and Alex, have grown into such
astonishing young men whom I am lucky to know. My grandpar-
ents and role models, Ruth, Husky, Ryna and Bernie, are inspirations
to me. My husband, Tim, is my best friend and partner in all things.
My daughter, Miranda, is the most wondrous child, born in the midst
of this project: “O brave new world/That has such people in’t!”
I could not have done this without any one of you. Thank you, all
of you, for everything.


Introduction: Elephant-Shaped
Holes

On 23 May 2005, I met writer Nalo Hopkinson in a Swiss Chalet
restaurant at Bathurst and Bloor in Toronto, Canada, the city where
I was born and where Hopkinson moved from Jamaica when she was
sixteen. She was kind enough to allow me to tape our conversation.
We chatted over chicken and chips about her books, my research, and
race and postcolonialism in general. Soon, the conversation moved
to the relative lack of voices of colour and postcolonial voices in sci-
ence fiction (SF). “It’s like the elephant in the room,” Hopkinson said.
“Actually, no; it’s like there should be an elephant, but instead, there’s
an elephant-shaped hole.”1
This image has provided a prevailing referent for me through-
out the process of writing this book. Often, where there might
be postcolonial science fiction, there is instead a real or perceived
silence. Sometimes this is because science fiction itself is seen as
aligned with colonialism and therefore anathema. Sometimes, as in
the cases of Japan and India, the volume of science fiction in a partic-
ular language available in English is merely a fraction of a larger body
of cultural production. Although this book is necessarily limited in
scope, it is important to remember that whilst science fiction written
in other languages and not translated into English often lacks a space
in English-language literary discourse, is subject to the “intense poli-
tics of selection and exclusion” put to all indigenous literatures in the
context of canonization (Raji 2008: 136) and may be marginalized
in the global market of the publishing industry, this does not mean
that it is outside the purview of worthwhile literature in general.

2 Postcolonialism and Science Fiction
Untranslated literature is not unread literature, and the modes of

anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial negation, production and
hybridity found in postcolonial science fiction are important to those
who are able to read them. In this case, there is not an elephant-
shaped hole; rather, the elephant is merely invisible to those who
cannot or choose not to see it.

Other times, perhaps more often, there are institutional barriers
to the publication of science fiction by postcolonial writers and/or
writers of colour. Sherryl Vint (2004) has questioned the relative
lack of black writers in science fiction, blaming this lack partially
on a perceived lack of readership. In 2007, a discussion on the
official Livejournal group blog for the Science Fiction Writers of
America (SFWA) concluded that the SFWA does not take part in
any activities specifically designed to “diversify” science fiction in
terms of writership.2 Many science fiction writers have embraced
the Internet as an alternative publishing tool, both for their sci-
ence fiction writing itself on websites like Strange Horizons and using
self-publishing tools like Lulu.com (Charles R. Saunders, in particu-
lar, published his book Dossouye [2008] on Lulu, demonstrating that
even more well-known authors are using these technologies), and
for their other writing on blogs, message boards and newsgroups
like the Carl Brandon Society, which provides a space for the pro-
motion of speculative fiction by writers of colour. Because of these
developments, it is unsurprising that so many science fiction writ-
ers and fans have been taking part in such heated, and necessary,
discussions about the state of the genre and its attitude towards
postcolonial science fiction of all kinds.3 It seems to me that the
Internet is essential, not only as a publishing tool but also as a
space in which to build alternate communities. The elephant-shaped
hole here is being filled, not by traditional publishing channels, but
through the Internet, new media and other novel methods of idea
transmission.
As well, there is the inherent instability of both categories, that
of the “postcolonial” and that of “science fiction”, which I address
throughout this book. The instability of science fiction is not a weak-
ness but rather a strength: it has shown itself capable of including
a wide variety of texts and voices, including those characterized
by hybridity in genre, in its purview. It has not been shaken but
rather has grown richer. Its instability does not put it in a position

Introduction 3
to topple and shatter. Rather, its edges have been blurred and
smudged, and it has shown itself flexible enough to include the
subversion, both generic and ideological, that postcolonial science
fiction represents. Postcolonialism, similarly, is best seen as a change-
able, flexible set of practices and discourses. This is not to turn it
into a vague “postcolonial aura” as Arif Dirlik (1996) warns; rather,

postcolonial criticism and theory can only be strengthened through
their application to new relevant contexts. This elephant-shaped
hole is being filled bit by bit in academia, in mainstream publish-
ing and through grassroots movements and technologies like the
Internet.
The Stranger and the Strange Land
Most readers will be familiar with the classic oppositional SF

tropes of the grotesque bug-eyed alien bent on Earthly domina-
tion and the beautiful but empty planet, ripe for colonization –
or, of course, the dangerous planet whose inhabitants dare to fight
back against the lantern-jawed colonial hero. Several studies have
addressed the parallelism between historical and science-fictional
“alien” encounters, the most comprehensive and recent being John
Rieder’s exploration of this period in SF and history, Colonialism
and the Emergence of SF (2008).4 The figure of the alien – extrater-
restrial, technological, human-hybrid or otherwise – and the figure
of the far-away planet ripe for the taking are deep and abid-
ing twin signifiers in science fiction, are perhaps even the central
myths of the genre. They are, to riff on the most famous work of
Robert A. Heinlein, one of science fiction’s most famous writers,
the Stranger and the Strange Land. Aliens, including humans – who
are, of course, alien to those aliens – and strange, foreign, other
planets – which includes, of course, our own Earth, from the perspec-
tive of the alien. What the alien signifies, of course, varies greatly,
as does the signification of the similarly central intergalactic terra
nullius.
These two signifiers are, in fact, the very same twin myths of
colonialism. The Stranger, or the Other, and the Strange Land –
whether actually empty or filled with those Others, savages whose
lives are considered forfeit and whose culture is seen as abbreviated
and misshapen but who are nevertheless compelling in their very

strangeness – are at the very heart of the colonial project, and their
dispelling is at the heart of the postcolonial one.
How, then, can a genre so steeped in, so built upon, the Stranger
and the Strange Land in its diegetic reality work to undo them in our
consensus reality, what Darko Suvin calls our “zero world”? Rather
than shying away from these colonial tropes, these twin giants of the

science fiction world, postcolonial science fiction hybridizes them,
parodies them and/or mimics them against the grain in a play of
Bhabhaian masquerade. The figure of the alien comes to signify all
kinds of otherness, and the image of the far-away land, whether the
undiscovered country or the imperial seat, comes to signify all kinds
of diaspora and movement, in all directions. Their very power, their
situation at the centre of the colonial imagination as simultaneous
desire and nightmare, is turned back in on itself.
Postcolonialism’s role
The definition of postcolonialism is notoriously problematic. Let

us begin with Robert Young, who provides a decent defini-
tion in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. He includes the
postcolonial in the colonial, suggesting that the term refers to what
happens after colonization begins rather than after it ends:
The postcolonial is a dialectical concept that marks the broad his-

torical facts of decolonisation and the determined achievement of
sovereignty – but also the realities of nations and peoples emerg-
ing into a new imperialistic context of economic and sometimes
political domination. (57)
Ato Quayson’s “possible working definition” echoes Young’s. Though

he calls the term a “critical practice that is highly eclectic and dif-
ficult to define” (1), he asserts that the term “is as much about
conditions under imperialism and colonialism proper as about con-
ditions coming after the historical end of colonialism” (2), though
there is disagreement as to whether there has yet been, or even can
be, a “historical end of colonialism”. According to Quayson, such
wording does not take into account the various methods of colo-
nization, the different timeframes of decolonization and the class

Introduction 5
distinctions within colonized societies which contribute to a tem-

poral gap, even within a single society, between the time when elites
can begin the process of decolonization and when the lower classes
can do so.5 Bart Moore-Gilbert provides a definition of postcolonial
criticism, specifically, that is somewhat broader, suggesting that dis-
course analysis which draws on postcolonial theory may have a

wider and more flexible purview than does “postcolonial theory”
itself:
In my view, postcolonial criticism can still be seen as a more or

less distinct set of reading practices, if it is understood as preoc-
cupied principally with analysis of cultural forms which mediate,
challenge or reflect upon the relations of domination and subor-
dination – economic, cultural and political – between (and often
within) nations, races or cultures, which characteristically have
their roots in the history of modern European colonialism and
imperialism and which, equally characteristically, continue to be
apparent in the present era of neo-colonialism. (1997: 12)
Often, however, in place of a definition of what the term is, theo-

rists offer long explanations as to what the term is not. Ella Shohat
asks, “When exactly, then, does the postcolonial begin?” (103), while
Stuart Hall asks the titular question, “When was the post-colonial?”
Critics as diverse as Ania Loomba, Ato Quayson, Arif Dirlik, Terry
Goldie, Mridula Nath Chakraborty and even John MacLeod, author
of an important introductory text on postcolonialism, have discussed
the term’s shortcomings and limitations. It is difficult, in fact, to
think of a postcolonial critic who does not in some way engage the
issues that destabilize the term.
There is also what Jeffress, McGonegal and Milz refer to as
the “materialist/discursive divide” in postcolonial studies: what
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto calls “the opposition between theory and his-
tory” (252). The conflict – which is wide-ranging and is a central
trouble in postcolonial studies – is between those, such as the the-
orist Homi Bhabha, who put forward broad-ranging psychoanalytic
theories of postcolonial subjectivity that elide cultural specificity
and those who put forward a different sort of schema – such as
Abdul JanMohamed’s “Manichean struggle” that is “not a fanciful

metaphoric caricature but an accurate representation of a profound

conflict” (60). Ato Quayson puts it most clearly:
. . . postcolonialism has to take account of two seemingly contra-

dictory emphases. On the one hand, there is the pull towards
discourse analysis. On the other, there is the need to attend

to the material, social and economic factors within which any
discourse is framed, and which, given the fraught nature of the
postcolonial referent in the real world, always require urgent
attention. (2000: 6)
Though it addresses history in a way that Bhabha’s pure theory does

not, the materialist approach risks denying the real power of narrative
and other discourse as catharsis and the real necessity of psychologi-
cal as well as physical decolonization. This is a disagreement between
metaphor and metonym: between the desire to narrativize the colo-
nial experience in order to come to terms with it and the need to
come to terms in actuality with the practical history of colonialism,
a history that does not always, or even often, match up with these
narratives.
Complicating the definitional problem further, decolonization,
often discussed in the context of the postcolonial, has often been
conflated with nativism: the systematic removal of all vestiges of
colonial power and influence and a reversion to a precolonial,
“Edenic” state. This is not, however, an accurate portrayal of decol-
onization, at least not decolonization as it has been possible or
workable in current historical circumstance. It is not an exorcism of
colonial influence through which a society reverts to a state identi-
cal to its precolonial state, but rather, as many postcolonial critics
have suggested, a process by which that society negotiates its identity
after it gains independence – political, economic or any other sort –
from its colonizer. Peter Hulme, an exemplar of this view, writes that
postcolonialism “refers to a process of disengagement from the whole
colonial syndrome . . . ” (Hulme 1995: 120, in Loomba 2005: 21).
Decolonization, along with postcolonialism in general, is also a pro-
cess. Such a consideration not only covers disengagement from the
“colonial syndrome” but also includes the building of a decolonized
society with a distinct identity.
The conceptualization of postcolonialism and decolonization as
processes rather than fixed states also enables one to situate them

Introduction 7
outside a strict temporal or historical limitation; rather than being

resigned to history, or identified exclusively with a particular time
period, decolonization may be defined as the ways in which a
society forms itself in the wake, however long ago, of coloniza-
tion. Postcolonialism, therefore, is similarly freed of temporal and
historical limitations. This conceptualization also allows for the

necessary distinctions between postcolonial societies: in defining
decolonization as a work in progress and removing the specificities
that tend to limit its usefulness as a conceptual term, those cultural
specificities that are important in each particular analytical case can
come to the fore.
It is also important to note that different societies’ processes of
decolonization have been influenced by each other. Elleke Boehmer
has suggested that the centre-periphery model of empire is flawed,
and that the reality is more complex: “Rather”, she writes, “the entire
imperial framework becomes from this perspective at once decentred
and multiply-centred, a network, one might say, of interrelating mar-
gins” (2002: 6). Boehmer cites the influence of the Anglo-Boer War
on the Irish nationalist movement, the “largely secret political part-
nership” between Bengali activist Margaret Noble/Sister Nivedita and
Bengali intellectual Aurobindo Ghose, and other interrelationships
and partnerships of those under colonial rule as examples symp-
tomatic of a wide, complex web of intercommunications far more
complicated than a centre-periphery model – which itself echoes
colonial discourse in its privileging of the colonizer–colonized rela-
tionship over any relationship between colonizer and colonized –
would allow.
A nuanced understanding of postcolonialism, then, requires cog-
nizance of the radically different methods by which societies have
become decolonized, the different timeframes in which decoloniza-
tion has happened and continues to happen, and the different
sorts of relationships not only between colonizer and colonized
but also between colonized societies. Loomba writes that “similarly
anti-colonial positions are imbedded in specific histories, and can-
not be collapsed into some pure oppositional essence” (2005: 19).
A balance is required: while it is useful to study anti-colonial and
postcolonial ideologies and cultures in terms of their similarities,
postcolonialism is not made up only of these distilled similarities.
A more complete postcolonialism must incorporate the concept of
anti-colonial ideologies and decolonizing processes that are both

similar and different, occurring in different postcolonial societies. It is

important to remember both similarities and differences: that vari-
ous anti-colonial struggles and postcolonial processes all share some
similarities, and also are not identical, or even very similar.
If decolonization is the process of disengaging from a colonizer,
then postcolonialism is the process by which a decolonizing society

negotiates its identity apart from that of its colonizer, and apart from
its identity as a colonized place or people, within the context of both
colonial history and decolonized future. It is a central argument of
this book that writers, film-makers and others involved in the produc-
tion of postcolonial science fiction participate uniquely in this process
of decolonization, utilizing the particular strengths and possibilities
contained in the science fiction genre to further the project of a world
not only politically but (variously) economically, culturally, intellec-
tually and/or creatively decolonized. It would be fair to say, therefore,
that this book – and, indeed, postcolonial science fiction in general –
comes down largely on, or at least honours, the “discursive” side of
the “materialist/discursive” divide.
Science fiction’s role
As with postcolonialism, there is a constant debate in the field of

science fiction as to its precise definition. Perhaps the most useful
is Ursula K. Le Guin’s: she suggests that the genres of fantasy and
science fiction, for instance, overlap to such an extent “as to ren-
der any effort at exclusive definition useless” (15). Famed SF critic
Darko Suvin (1979), though he asserts clear boundaries for the field
of science fiction, includes within his account of the genre “soft”
sciences, such as sociology and anthropology, along with the hard
sciences, pointing to Le Guin herself as an exemplar of social sci-
ence fiction. Others, such as Heinlein, are not so inclusive: he defines
the genre as “realistic speculation about possible future events, based
solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present,
and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of
the scientific method” – a definition which, as Mark Rose points
out, excludes some of Heinlein’s own work (Heinlein 1959: 22, in
Rose 1981: 4). Carl Freedman, concurring to a certain extent with
Heinlein, provides a very rigid definition of science fiction, one that
minimizes any connection with other non-realist genres. Drawing

Introduction 9
on Suvin’s concept of science fiction as “cognitive estrangement”,

he writes:
The science fictional world is not only one different in time or

place from our own, but one whose chief interest is precisely the
difference that such difference makes. It is also a world whose

difference is concretized within a cognitive continuum with the
actual . . . . (2000: xvi–xvii)
This claim, however, suggests that everything in science fiction fol-

lows or should be conceptualized through the lens of the Western
scientific rationalist paradigm. A central argument of this book is that
postcolonial science fiction utilizes these same generic conventions
in a radically different way: to explore the ways in which Western
scientific discourse, both in terms of technology and in terms of cul-
ture (both real cultural effects and effects on cultural production), has
interacted with colonialism and the cultural production of colonized
peoples. It also foregrounds the concept that indigenous and other
colonized systems of knowledge are not only valid but are, at times,
more scientifically sound than is Western scientific thought.
The descriptor “speculative fiction” has often been assigned to
works that are cross-genre in this way. However, the “science” part
of science fiction is essential in a discussion of postcolonial SF. The
conflict between Western scientific methods and discourse of scien-
tific progress and indigenous methods of knowledge production and
understanding of the world has been one of the most important in
postcolonial criticism.
Areas of focus
This book consists of five chapters, each of which represents both a

conflict inherent in the process of postcoloniality and an intersec-
tion/interaction between science fiction and postcolonialism. Each
chapter also engages with both the figure of the stranger, the Other,
and the figure of the strange land in its many guises. Chapter 1
explores historical continuity versus discontinuity through the geo-
graphical/historical contexts of Japan and Canada: the ways in which
public memory is produced, the problem with oppression/repression
of a colonial past, and the role of science fiction and its writers in

recuperating hidden, lost or otherwise repressed other(ed) narratives.

Chapter 2 focuses on problems of diaspora versus locality, of the
empty land that is not empty at all, and looks at science fiction’s
role in exploring diasporic identities: whether across planets, across
dimensions or by way of destroying a homeland entirely. Chapter 3
takes as its focus the concepts of race and culture – two of Robert

Young’s three legs or “mediating term[s]” of the colonial triangle
(1995: 97), the other being sexuality, which I do not address at
length in this book – and how they are (re)negotiated through science
fiction in general, and through online interactive play in particu-
lar. Chapter 4 investigates two conflicting impulses in postcolonial
culture: the drive towards nativism, the desire to recuperate pre-
cisely what was lost, versus the drive towards positive and productive
hybridity. The final chapter, which contains several examples of the
productive hybridity introduced in Chapter 4, looks at the conflict
between the Western scientific paradigm and what Grace L. Dillon
calls “indigenous scientific literacies” as borne out by postcolonial
science fiction, and how that conflict might be resolved.
At all times, there is flow between and among the chapters. Invoca-
tion of Japanese criticism and discussion of Japanese science fiction
are not limited to the chapter on Japan, for instance, and concepts of
hybridity, diaspora, history and others are explored throughout the
book as well as within their designated chapters. This is because all of
these concepts are interrelated; each flows from and affects the oth-
ers. History, diaspora, otherness and alienation, clashes of worldview
and hybridity: each is a space of conflict, and each is haunted by the
figure of the stranger and the spectre of the strange land. And, of
course, each represents a point of recuperation, of exit, of potential
synthesis.

1
A Question of History:
Geographical/Historical Context

Postcolonialism and history: Sites of trouble
The discourse of postcolonial theory, and therefore postcolonial

studies, has historically been subject to two major limitations. First,
there is the “materialist/discursive divide” that I set out in the
Introduction to this book – Yoshimoto’s “opposition between the-
ory and history” (1991: 252). This concept refers to the conflict
between the potential of historical focus to elide possible healing
and de/reconstruction through narratological decolonization, and
the potential of narrativization to elide the bitter horrors of what
JanMohamed refers to as the “Manichean struggle” or “profound
conflict” of colonialism’s historical reality (1985: 60).
Second, and more importantly for the purposes of this chapter,
postcolonialism as an area of study has been dominated by those
theories, and theorists, most relevant to nations formerly occupied
by Western colonizers (particularly French and British, as noted
by Jung-Bong Choi [2003]). These voices have therefore tended to
be privileged within postcolonial discourse. Postcolonial theory has
often been constructed largely as a dichotomy between East and
West, the Orient and the Occident, which is a construction that
fails utterly to take into account the diversity of postcolonial expe-
riences. In particular, it does not account for the participation of
non-European powers in colonial and imperial activities, and does
not properly include the experiences of the indigenous peoples of
settler societies.
Therefore, I have chosen in this chapter to break this domina-
tion and to focus primarily on Japanese and Canadian (in particular
11

Native Canadian) science fiction (SF), two countries that, in the con-
text of postcolonial discussion, are too often absent or marginalized.
Although not entirely absent, both countries – Japan in particular –
tend to be peripheral rather than primary foci in such debate.
There are two major reasons I have chosen these contexts rather
than others. First, Japan and Canada both have strong traditions of

science fiction in literature and film. Canada produces quite a lot of
science fiction in both English and French, its two official languages,
and much Canadian SF is translated both ways between the two lan-
guages; there is also an emerging body of Native Canadian SF work.
Japan’s SF tradition is similarly strong, and although a significant por-
tion of Japanese science fiction is not translated into other languages,
the sheer volume of Japanese SF – literary, cinematic and in new
media forms such as video games – is such that it is still one of the
most popular non-English-speaking producers of English-language
science fiction. There is also a strong “fansub” community for Japan’s
cinematic and new media offerings, the members of whom release
unofficial translations of films, television shows and video games.
Second, both countries have interesting and diverse (post)colonial
histories. Canada is one of what Anne McClintock calls the “break-
away settler colonies” (1992: 89); its indigenous populations, which
comprise dozens of distinct national, ethnic, linguistic and spiritual
cultures, continue to be colonized both in terms of stolen land and
in terms of cultural appropriation and negation. Like the other “set-
tler colonies” (America, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia),
Canada remains what Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua call a “col-
onized space”; these countries are in many ways neither post-settler
nor postcolonial. Canada, in particular, is also divided along linguis-
tic, geographical and cultural lines between English and French. This
division is often conceptualized – not least by Québécois nation-
alists – as one between Québec and the rest of Canada. However,
there are other Francophone populations, such as Acadian com-
munities in Cape Breton and elsewhere in the Maritimes, which
complicate the question of French-Canadian identity and its link
to geography.1 And, of course, Canada is a multicultural nation of
diasporic immigrants, therefore each of these hyphenated identi-
ties presents its own complex interaction with Canada’s colonial
and postcolonial legacy, both historical and present. “Canada” is
therefore a disrupted category, contested both geographically and

A Question of History 13
culturally, and “Canadianness” is similarly ambivalent. While this

fracturing of national identity is not unique to Canada, however,
Canadian fractures run along distinctive lines, and in exploring these
it is helpful to look at the ways in which postcolonialism as a
critical practice is sometimes useful, and sometimes fails to be use-
ful, in a Canadian context. As I argue throughout this book, the

genre of science fiction, in its concerns with alienness, marginal-
ity, utopian exclusion, and colonialism generally, is a useful site in
which to explore the concept of (post)coloniality in its various guises,
including the contexts of Canada and Japan.
Japan is an interesting and perhaps unique case. It may seem at first
glance unusual to include a discussion of Japan as a central tenet in
a study of postcolonial literature, as it is a country rarely discussed in
postcolonial studies. However, I argue that it ought to be included for
two reasons. First, simply, Japan has its own imperial legacy. A lack
of discussion of Japanese imperialism means that the experiences
of Japan’s former colonies under its imperial domination are thus
ignored.
Second, as I discuss in more detail below, Japan itself has been
subject to Western, particularly American, military, free-trade and
political imperialism – often euphemistically called the “opening” of
Japan – and therefore has a complex relationship with imperialism
and colonialism. As Ukai Satoshi has written, “the memories of war
and the memories of colonial rule are overlapped in a temporal and
spatial continuum. It is a structure that suppresses memories of the
war and concomitantly suppresses the memories of colonial rule” (45,
in Ching 2000: 767). As already mentioned, Jung-Bong Choi writes
of the absence of Asian colonialism in the context of postcolonial
studies, particularly French and British: “the signifier ‘postcolonial’
has been almost preempted by and structured around the concepts,
frameworks, and vocabularies that were based upon particular types
of colonial experiences” (2003: 325). Choi’s 2003 essay is perhaps
the most direct, but other scholars have addressed these concerns, as
well as the application in general of postcolonial theory to Japan’s
situation.2 In general, the concept of postcoloniality in terms of
Japan and its former colonies has been addressed significantly in
East Asian area studies, and this scholarship has utilized theories and
concepts from discourses of postcolonial studies. This same dynamic
does not seem to have flowed the other way from East Asian studies

to postcolonial studies, however, and many journals and other pub-

lications that designate themselves with the label “postcolonial”
are largely silent on Japan and on East Asian postcoloniality in
general.3 The separation between the fields of East Asian studies and
postcolonial studies – a separation that, Harry D. Harootunian argues,
is symptomatic of a wider problem of ghettoization in the “area

studies” paradigm in general (2002 [2000]: 26) – has given rise to
a disconnect between them. One goal of this chapter is to investigate
how this disconnect can be rectified, and how connections can be
drawn, through a postcolonial analysis of Japanese science fiction.
The rest of this chapter provides, first for Japan and then for
Canada, overviews of each country’s colonial history and modernity
in order to provide context for my discussions of both countries’
science fiction, along with abbreviated histories of Japanese and
Canadian SF. Each section then engages closely with several liter-
ary works: in Japan’s case the writing of Tsutsui Yasutaka,4 and in
Canada’s case the work of Native Canadian writer Eden Robinson.
Ultimately, my aim is to explore interactions between history and
cultural production and to look at the ways in which SF has been,
and is, a deeply political genre concerned not only with technological
process but also with socio-political change.
At times, I have utilized Japanese works that have not been pub-
lished in English.5 I have done this in order to deal with a sample
of texts more representative of Japanese science fiction production.
Though there has been an enormous amount of Japanese SF pro-
duced, only a tiny percentage has ever been translated into English;
this is particularly true for literature. What translations exist are often
meant primarily for the use of Japanese students of English, as with
the popular Kodansha English Library series of translations, of which
I have made use in this book. My use of texts unpublished in trans-
lation is an attempt to expand the frame of reference in English for
Japanese science fiction.
Japan and history
In the case of Japan, the distinction between imperialism and

colonialism is particularly important: Japan has, within the last 250
years, been both colonized country and imperial power.6 America’s
forced opening of Japan from more than 200 years of sakoku, or
the “closed country” policy (which was at the time called kaikin,

or “maritime restrictions”), through Commodore Matthew Perry’s

missions, ending with the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854, has been
described as “free trade imperialism” (Beasley 2000: 34). Townsend
Harris’s subsequent Treaty of Amity and Commerce, or “Harris
Treaty”, came bearing “warnings that Japan would do well to submit
voluntarily to what it could not hope to avoid by resistance” (Jansen

2000: 279). Following Perry’s mission, Japan was summarily forced
to grant similar concessions to other powers, such as Britain and
Russia, which had been attempting to open trade relations for years
but had always failed. It was not until America wielded the threat of
violence, and the implicit threat of colonialism (Britain’s seizure of
Hong Kong during the first Opium War in 1839), that Japan capitu-
lated. Therefore, although Japan was not made into a foreign colony
in the mould of other Western colonies in Asia such as Hong Kong or
the Philippines, it was nonetheless a victim of foreign imperialism.
Following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan began to seek out
colonies of its own, starting with the Bonin Islands and the conquest
of the Ainu in Hokkaido in the early Meiji period and moving on
to Taiwan and then Korea. Its motivation for these colonial projects
was complex. An explosively growing internationalized economy,
spurred by an initial wave of industrialization, led to a hunger for
resources, especially coal – resources in which Korea and Manchuria
were rich. The samurai class had also recently had their government
stipends withdrawn and, disenfranchised and impoverished, were
becoming restless; an imperial project, politicians thought, might
distract them from their troubles at home. Along with these prac-
tical concerns was a deep resentment against the West, which twisted
around and, to an extent, developed into a competitive drive. If the
Western powers that bested Japan could have empires, they believed,
there was no reason Japan shouldn’t as well. Therefore, a “war party”
formed, “seeking revenge for insult and an opportunity to demon-
strate that Japanese power, inconsiderable though it was in the face
of the West, was still enough to deal with recalcitrant neighbours”
(Beasley 2000: 141).
The historian Maruyama Masao has suggested that Japan felt
caught in the middle of an impossible situation: “conquer or be
conquered” (1963: 138, in Anderson 1983: 92). This argument
is oversimplified, especially considering that before the Pacific
War/WWII Japan was not subject to overt colonization by foreign
powers. However, the pro-colonial mindset was certainly haunted

by the trauma of Perry’s enforced end to sakoku, and this would

have been exacerbated by the West’s continued imperial conquests
in other parts of Asia and Africa – news to which all of Japan was
now privy. As Anderson writes, “as the parcellization of Africa at
the Congress of Berlin (1885) showed, great nations were global con-
querors” (1983: 92). The prejudice against Japan at Versailles in 1919,

and the attempts by Western powers to keep empire the privilege of
the West and to shut Japan out of global imperial contention, helped
to drive Japan into further defensiveness and nationalism. This sense
of threat, combined with successful early colonial forays, led to a state
ideology that placed the Japanese emperor as the divine centre of the
world, and a hunger for resources to create a state of being in which
the idea of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and then the
Great Empire of Japan, could be born.
Korean critic Kang Sang-jung argues that Japan’s “mapping out”
of its “imaginary geography of Asia” during the Russo- and Sino-
Japanese wars was intrinsically related to, and inflected and influ-
enced by, the West’s imperial Orientalism (2005: 85). He calls on
the case of postwar Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, the architect of
the America-centric Yoshida Doctrine, who considered the American
occupation of Japan as not a defeat but rather an achievement
of “cooperative imperialism” (2005: 86). Most importantly, Kang
identifies Japan, through Shiratori Kurakichi’s scholastic discourse
of Oriental history, as an Orientalizing power; Japan is Orientalist
because it distances itself from the Orient, and its identity oscil-
lates between Oriental and “Other to the Orient”, an oscillation that
echoes Homi Bhabha’s concept of the unstable nature of colonial sub-
jectivity. This constant swing of subjectivity between colonizer and
colonized has worked in practice as well as in theory: unlike Western
powers, Japan was subject to imperialism by the West before it began
its own imperial project, and its attempts to build its own empire
are informed by Western imperialism and colonialism, which acts as
both exemplar and perpetrator.
Other critics – including Bhabha, for instance in his introduction
to Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1986) – resolve this oscilla-
tion into a permanent, though unstable, between-space. Murakami
Fuminobu builds on Bhabha and Moore-Gilbert’s ideas about colonial
subjectivity, asserting that the site of otherness is neither colonizer
nor colonized but rather is the space between them. He objects to

Moore-Gilbert’s assertion that each party defines itself by the other –

in the case of Japan, he sees the relationship between Japan and
the West as one that is crookedly tilted to one side. Though Japan,
he suggests, has been “greatly affected” (107) by Western modes of
modernity, the West has not been affected equally by its position
relative to Japan.

This oscillation of competing impulses in Japan, which was at its
strongest in the Japanese imperial period but has persisted to an
extent to this day, has been theorized by critics such as Kang, and
Takeuchi Yoshimi, as the difference between Japan “escaping from”
Asia and “leading” it. Japanese modernity was tied up inextricably
with the paradoxical attempt to “become European” in an attempt to
liberate itself from Europe: “Japan’s becoming Europe, as European
as possible, was conceived of as the path of its emergence. That is to
say, Japan sought to emerge from slavery by becoming the master –
and this has given rise to every fantasy of liberation” (Takeuchi 2005:
43, in Ukai 2005: 265). Certainly, public discourse in Japan was
mostly centred on the latter concept: the idea of the Greater East-Asia
Co-Prosperity Sphere, in which Japan would lead a unified political,
social and economic coalition of East Asia – one that would therefore
be able to repel Western colonialism – was at the centre of prewar
public discourse. And the idea of “expelling the barbarians”, which
had been the rallying cry of Japanese nationalists since the post-Perry
civil unrest, held a certain appeal both to the Japanese and to the
other colonies. There was also an African-American-centred American
pro-Japanese movement, the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World,
which saw Japan as the saviour of black Americans, and “an adversary
of their own enemy. And for the black landless, a Japanese inva-
sion of the U.S. mainland also offered the promise of a redistribution
of southern farmland” (Allen, Jr. 1995: 43). Japan was seen, there-
fore, as the champion of all of those people subjugated by white
colonial domination, both in Japan and abroad. The problem was
that Japan had become the foreign, colonizing “barbarian” in its
colonies, and as it expanded its empire, it also expanded the scale
of colonial activities such as the establishment of exclusive colo-
nial towns, as well as “commercial expansion and profit” of mass
culture in Manchukuo (Young 1999: 56), and the implementation
of oppressive linguistic and religious education in Korea. Bhabha’s
conceptualization of the (post)colonial cultural paradox as “culture’s

in-between” seems apt here to describe Japan’s paradoxical position,

both cultural and political.
After the China Incident of 1937 (also called the Marco Polo Bridge
Incident), which led to the Second Sino-Japanese War, the idea that
Japan was operating in East Asia for altruistic reasons became less
sustainable. Soldiers were sent in to subdue the colonies, some of

which it captured from European powers that were too busy fight-
ing in Europe to defend them. Nationalism reached a boiling point
and the Kempei Tai, the military secret police, ensured that no one
spoke out publicly against the war. Strict censorship meant that, as
in any fascist country at war, very little was published, in film or lit-
erature, which did not espouse prevailing ideals. Many prewar and
wartime films were, in fact, either destroyed in bombings or melted
down for materials; the single prewar or wartime Japanese SF film
that has survived, Kaidenpa senritsu (1939), did so only because it was
in America at the time of the war, having most likely been imported
to a Japanese cinema in California before American involvement in
the war.7 As the war dragged on, and it became obvious that Japan
was simply stretched too thin and would likely lose, the establish-
ment became more desperate. By 1944, more than three-quarters of
Japan’s combined fleet had been sunk, and the desire to dominate
East Asia was beginning to succumb to the desire simply to avoid
military defeat. As became evident after 1945, the majority of people
were sick of war. Jay Rubin’s excellent study of immediate postwar
literature makes it plain that the “decadence” of this literature comes
not from the cultural influences of the occupation forces but rather
from the “liberation of writers” from the censorship of prewar and
wartime (1985: 72). I would take Rubin’s argument further, how-
ever, and distinguish even more between the utility of the end of
fascism, which allowed this “explosion” in expression, and the incep-
tion of the occupation, which, though better than the fascist wartime
government, continued to curtail and censor artistic expression. Cen-
sorship also affected Japanese SF literature, which, as we shall see, had
a long dormant period between the “irregular detective fiction” of the
1930s and the beginnings of postwar SF.
The bomb and the long postwar
The moment of the A-bomb is unique. It represents the collision

of two imperialisms, Japanese and American, and functions as both

metaphor and metonym for that collision.8 In a way, the bomb

itself can be said to have colonized Japan: the working through of
the literal and figurative fallout has been a process that bears many
similarities to other forms of decolonization. As formerly colonized
peoples embody the psychic, cultural and physical consequences of
colonization, so hibakusha (people affected by the nuclear bomb) and

their families carry with them the scars of the atom bomb and what
it represents. Though the nuclear fallout is long dissipated, hibakusha
have been decimated by cancer, and their families and descendants
have suffered from the loss of loved ones and from discrimination,
both overt and covert. Often they were considered unmarriageable,
as Ibuse Masuji’s novel Kuroi ame (Black Rain, 1965) illustrates, and
even today the descendants of hibakusha are looked upon with some
unease.
Because the moment of the A-bomb itself is unique, film and liter-
ature about the bomb have at times succumbed to the same idea as
have historians: that the bomb created a fundamental rift in history,
between before and after, and that everything changed completely
after 6 August 1945. Indeed, one of the charges that has been lev-
elled against Japan in its postwar history has been the fracturing of
its memory. That is, Japan has conceptualized its history as broken
cleanly into two parts, before surrender and after, what Kang Sang-
jung calls a “myth of absolute discontinuity” where “the postwar was
thus considered an ‘anti-past’ ” (2005: 74–75), in which the fascism
and militarism of the imperial period were inverted and replaced
precisely with their opposites: democracy and pacifism. However,
film historian Jerome Shapiro points out: “while the bomb itself was
indeed a startling event, it only seems to have cut our ties to the past
[italics mine]” (2002: 4). The danger of this inversion is that it sets up
a theoretical structure in which the prewar and postwar correspond
exactly, and are specific mirror images of each other, a structure that
sees in itself a particular event, the “opening” of Japan, repeating
itself over and over. In this vein, Kang goes on to suggest that the
differences between the several “openings” of the country (Perry’s
original incursion; the Meiji Restoration; and finally the conquered
postwar) have been elided, and they are now seen as simply repetition
of the same event. More specifically, I would add, the postwar Allied
occupation has been folded into the former two “openings”, leading
to a forgetting (in some senses deliberate, in some senses uninten-
tional) of the differences between these openings. In the first two

cases, Japan was a victim of the aggressive West, but in the third it
was a full-blown imperial power whose imperial project “could not
have operated for even one instant without mobilizing the nearly
one-third of the one hundred million ‘imperial subjects’ comprising
other colonised ethnic groups”, and whose “postwar national history
has barely maintained itself by excluding these alien ethnic groups

and forgetting the history of that exclusion” (2005: 77).
Kang proposes that a new historical narrative, one he calls “dena-
tionalized”, must be acknowledged, to take this forgetting into
account – to remember and address the experiences of those who
were marginalized by Japan’s colonial war and then again by their
exclusion from the national narrative in the postwar. American his-
torian Carol Gluck comes to a similar conclusion, by focusing closely
on the social mechanisms used to propagate what she calls “pub-
lic memory”, which exclude the lives and contributions of those
who are not included in the national “public” discourses. Draw-
ing on Anderson’s and Hobsbawm’s terminologies, Gluck writes:
“By imagining communities and inventing traditions, nations for-
mulate fables of national purpose and identity, then stamp them with
the imprimatur of history” (1997: 1).
What is in evidence here is Japan’s historical willingness to exclude
from its public memory not only its colonial subjects, but the very fact
that they were colonial subjects at all. Perhaps the most significant – and
famous – omissions have been in the cases of the Rape of Nanking
(1937) and the fact of the enslavement of thousands of Korean and
Chinese women as “comfort women”, or sex slaves, to the Japanese
army. The question of public-school history books is still a charged
political one in Japan; there is constant disagreement as to what
should be included and what should be excluded. And there is a
yearly struggle over the case of the Yasukuni Shrine, where many
of the most major Japanese war criminals, including wartime Prime
Minister Hideki Tōjō and some of those executed for their crimes,
are interred. Until the swearing-in of Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo in
September 2007, who vowed not to visit the Shrine, several former
prime ministers had visited every year on the anniversary of surren-
der. The visits never failed to stir up latent but powerful anger in
the people of Japan’s former colonies, who feel that their suffering is
being disrespected by the homage paid to those who perpetrated it.
Gluck writes that “without weaving the empire into the story of the

war, Japan could suffer no post-imperial loss or remorse” (1997: 9),

and suggests that this is at times exactly what Japan has done in con-
structing its national narrative. She suggests that the negative aspects
of the war were associated not with empire but with those same
constructed eternal stories of Japan and Japaneseness – namely, the
“feudal” remnants from the pre-Meiji period. “In common parlance”,

Gluck writes, “the prewar past was militarist and feudal, not fascist”
(1997: 10). In this way, not only is the imperial past erased, but respon-
sibility for that past is reassigned from its actual protagonists – many
of whom, in fact, took up positions in the new postwar government –
to shadowy historical figures from an anti-romanticized far past who
are, after all, not there to answer the charges and therefore can be
safely blamed.
Japanese science fiction: An overview
The first science fiction published in Japan was not Japanese: rather,
it was French, a work by Jules Verne (Matthew 1). Le tour du monde
en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in 80 Days), which had first
appeared in France in 1873, was published in Japanese in 1878,
making it in fact one of the first Western novels of any sort to be
translated and published in Japan after the Meiji Restoration, though
interestingly it was largely taken as “a sort of annotated handbook
on foreign travel” (Beasley 2000: 89). This was followed quickly by
1865’s De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon), translated
in 1880, and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea) (1869), translated in 1884 (Matthew 1989: 1).
The first works of “indigenous” Japanese SF that could be called as
such were, according to Matthew, two “future novels” published in
1884 and 1886 by Ushiyama Ryosuke and Suehiro Tetchō, as well as
the series of seijishōsetsu (political novels) published subsequently by
Suehiro in 1889 and 1890. These seijishōsetsu had as their premise the
discovery in the far future of notebooks relating to political events set
in the early 1900s. As such, and as political commentaries, they seem
remarkably linked thematically to other contemporaneous “time-
capsule” novels such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–
1887 (1888), James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper
Cylinder (1888), and The Great Romance, published anonymously in
New Zealand in 1882 under the pseudonym “The Inhabitant”.9 The

focus of the seijishōsetsu, however, was on events of the future-past

rather than the future itself.
In 1920, the youth magazine Shinseinen began publication, spe-
cializing in detective fiction. Its editor, Koga Saburo, split this genre
into two types, honkaku or “standard” detective fiction, and henkaku
or “irregular” detective fiction, which included other generic ele-

ments or otherwise diverged from the standard model (Matthew
1989: 13). Science fiction in Japan, therefore, developed under the
generic umbrella of detective fiction, and a great many prewar stories
and novels, as well as the very first SF films, contained elements of
the detective genre. This particular variety of generic hybridity is one
of the things that make early Japanese SF unique.
Many of the most important prewar Japanese science fiction short
stories are collected in issue 34 of the journal Sekai SF zenshū (World
Science Fiction Anthology). Though, true to its name, it was mostly in
the business of collecting and translating “world” SF into Japanese,
it devoted a few issues in the 1970s to Japanese SF. Issue 34 collected
prewar SF of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and issue 35 contained sto-
ries from the 1950s and 1960s. The vast majority of the SF works
mentioned in Robert Matthew’s Japanese Science Fiction: A View of a
Changing Society, which is the only dedicated English-language book-
length study on Japanese SF literature published to date, are stories
collected in these volumes (this chapter will make reference to several
of these stories).
Although Gojira (1954) is widely considered in English-language
criticism to be the first Japanese science fiction film, and is described
in these terms in Clute and Nicholls’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction,
there were actually at least six prewar Japanese science fiction films,
although only one survives today, and that one in abbreviated form.
Kitajima Akihiro, in his recent encyclopedic work Sekai SF eiga zenshi
(2006), suggests that Sōjyuji Kimura’s film, Shichiji rei sanfun (7:03
Hours), released in late 1935, was the very first Japanese SF film.
It seems to be an adaptation of the short story of the same name by
Maki Itsuma, which was originally published in the September 1935
issue of the magazine Hinode (Sunrise) and republished in 1971 in
Sekai SF zenshū 34. The fact that the publication date of the story is
so close to the release date of the film may suggest that Maki was
involved with the making of the film, or that the story and the film
were perhaps produced together as a set; however, the script was

written by Kobayashi Masaru, so the film may have just been quickly
done. The story is of a man who is sold the next day’s newspaper by
a shady individual; at first he rejoices in the thought that he may be
able to make big money at the races, but soon realizes that the news-
paper tells of his own death at 7:03 p.m. the following day, and tries
in vain to prevent this destiny.

The second three were a series of silent films directed by Misao
Yoshimura, the first of which, Kaidenpa satsujin kōsen, which roughly
translates as Murderous Scary Radio Wave Ray, was released in 1936.
It concerns a scientist who creates a Ningen Tank (human-controlled
robot) and a Satsujin Kōsen, the radio-wave ray of the title, and the dis-
astrous results of the love triangle between his daughter and his two
assistants. The plot, which includes a mad but kindly scientist, his
Igor-like lab technician and his beautiful daughter, seems to be influ-
enced by the Western SF film tradition – particularly echoing James
Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein – and by Western film in general, and was
considered a variation on the action and chanbara (sword-fighting)
genre at the time. As was the case with many of these popular films,
critics dismissed the Kaidenpa satsujin kōsen films at the time as mere
pulp and “films for vulgar people” (Yamamoto 1936: 117, in Kitajima
2006: 54). However, iconography associated with the SF genre such
as robots and death rays had never before been included in Japanese
cinema, and therefore had the appeal and excitement of novelty.
These films were followed by a wartime two-part talkie remake,
Kaidenpa senritsu (1939), the only one of these films that survives
today, which reused the robot costume from Kaidenpa satsujin kōsen
and had a similar plot involving a love triangle, a kidnapping and two
dangerous scientific inventions.10 Considering the relative expense of
film-making at the time – along with the near-impossibility of getting
revolutionary political messages past the censors, and the limitations
of the medium – it would seem that SF cinema was used in the con-
text of prewar Japan as a novel generic addition to action/adventure
films rather than as a vehicle for social critique.11
Thematically, though much prewar SF was similar to detective fic-
tion, some of it looked quite closely and critically at political issues
of the time. Of particular note to this study is its engagement with
questions of war and authoritarianism. Unno Juza’s 1937 story “The
Music Bath at 18.00 Hours”, for instance, considers a regimented,
totalitarian society of the future in which all aspects of life, such as

work and reproduction, are tightly controlled by the government and

citizens are required to sit in contact with vibrating metal bars for
30 minutes every day at 18.00 hours; vibrations transmitted through
the metal will affect their subconscious and force them to work
harder. Matthew sees in this story both a comment on overwork and
a satirical response to the ubiquity of patriotic songs played con-

stantly at the time to encourage excitement about Japan’s imperial
projects (Matthew 1989: 24). I would go further and suggest that
the story engages with the destructiveness of the strict regimenta-
tion required by the growing fascist movement in the late 1930s.
At the end of the story, the “music bath” has been abused to the
point where humans can no longer function, and Earth is invaded
by Martians. In an interesting twist to the traumatic-invasion trope,
although one heroic man does succeed in saving the world, the
world he has saved does not go back to normal: we are left with an
exhausted, non-functioning populace. Not all stories are so critical
of Japan’s policies, however. Yumeno Kyusaku’s story “The Human
Record” presents Russia as a secretive, cruel power, one that drugs
its citizens with a special formula and sends them out on journeys
to secret destinations, unaware that they carry state secrets in their
brain. Matthew sees the story as explicitly anti-communist (1989,
26), portraying Russia and China as shadowy and evil, and more than
happy to murder their own citizens. However, the story can also be
read in relation to the Russo-Japanese and Sino-Japanese wars at the
turn of the twentieth century, during which Japan, in its imperial
ambitions, warred with both Russia and China. At the time the story
was written, Japan was clashing with Russia over mining rights in
parts of Chinese-controlled Manchuria, and within two years of the
story’s publication, Japan would annex Manchuria entirely. Japanese
SF, then, held a range of responses to the rising tide of imperialist
sentiment and action of the time.
Postwar
In a sense, the “split” between Japanese pre- and postwar science fic-
tion has been conceptualized as similar to the “split” between pre-
and postwar history: a clean break, with prewar SF being marginal,
non-existent or somehow indigenous, and postwar SF being mod-
elled entirely on American SF. Perhaps in a nod to Audre Lorde’s

oft-repeated maxim that one “cannot dismantle the master’s house

with the master’s tools”, early Japanese SF critic Yamano Kōichi
described postwar Japanese science fiction as having “mov[ed] into
a prefabricated house” (1994: 70), that house being the American SF
that flooded into the country through the soldiers stationed there.
This “house” was, of course, bolstered by the publishing mechanisms

of the 1950s, such as Hayakawa’s SF Magazine, which prioritized trans-
lations of American and Canadian SF – in its first issue it published
a short story by Canadian writer Judith Merril (presumably selected
over SF works submitted by Japanese writers). Yamano describes the
ways in which SF writers began to adapt the genre, making both
their stories and the genre itself more “Japanese”, but also the ways
in which they were limited by the paradox of clashing ideologies.
Phillip Holden describes a similar dynamic in post-independence
Singaporean literature, which can be applied here: he writes that
texts “operate within, and inevitably partially adhere to, the local
discursive conditions of their production and reception” (2006: 59).
That is, even texts that seek to question and interrogate the society in
which they are written – as postwar Japanese science fiction did – will
not be able fully to break the umbilical of their birth in that society,
and recursively will always bear the traces of their context. In the case
of the texts Holden analyses, this inability to escape context involves
unquestioned assumptions about race and class. Yamano’s evaluation
of two contemporaneous Japanese SF writers, Shin’ichi Hoshi and Ry
Mitsue, however, suggests a difference in the way the dynamic has
played out with them. He writes that Shin’ichi’s work became “less
ideologically comprehensive” (1994: 70) while Mitsue’s, in contrast,
became subsumed to the author’s own rigid ideology (1994: 71).
Both of these problems, however, I would argue after Yamano,
come from the same source: the idea that Japan’s SF had in essence
been colonized by American SF, which barged into Japan through
the instrumentality of the occupation and set up shop, as Yamano
writes, “regardless of whether there was a place for it” (1994: 70).
Yamano goes through a list of Japanese SF authors suggesting the
shortcomings of each, shortcomings that have, in his opinion, held
back their SF from being truly Japanese, or from being truly worth-
while. Japanese SF has, of course, developed to a great extent since
Yamano’s writing, but Yamano’s view speaks to the deep trauma of
the postwar occupation.

There is also the matter of the A-bomb described above, the event
that has had perhaps the single greatest influence on the devel-
opment of Japanese SF. In respect to this, another aspect of the
conceptual “split” between pre- and postwar Japanese SF has been
that prewar SF, while it dealt at times with the several wars and
smaller colonial projects in which Japan engaged from the late

1800s, was more varied in focus and developed organically along
its own lines, incorporating particularly Japanese elements such as
the double-suicide (shinjū) plotline. For postwar and post-occupation-
censorship Japanese SF, however, the A-bomb loomed like a shadow.
Giant monster (daikaiju) films such as Gojira (1954) were nightmares
of radiation and mutation, and films such as Uchūjin Tokyo ni arawaru
(An Alien Appears in Tokyo, 1956), released in America as Warning
from Space, had advanced aliens come to Earth to warn the earthlings
about the dangers of nuclear bombs. The reason that the Paira (the
aliens in this film) visit Japan specifically is because, as the alien says,
the Japanese are the only ones who can truly understand the dangers
of atomic bombs. The critic and novelist Komatsu Sakyō agrees with
this: in his 1963 essay “Haikei Ivan Efremov” (“Dear Ivan Efremov”),
he suggests that the context of Japanese SF combined with its content
is important. He uses Gojira (1954) as an example, and suggests that
“Gojira is superior . . . because Japan is the one and only country ever
to be attacked by the atomic bomb, so the Japanese have seen how
everything will be after the attack. Japan can show exactly what will
happen after an A-bomb attack through Gojira” (1995: 45). This read-
ing of Gojira as a metaphor for Hiroshima/Nagasaki has been often
repeated, and indeed has become something of a standard line in SF
criticism.
However, as with the conceptual break between pre- and postwar
history, the history of Japanese SF is not quite so simple. The “prewar”
period was hardly conflict free, and indeed was characterized by a ris-
ing tide of imperialist sentiment and nationalism. As well, as we shall
see, engagement with issues arising from the Pacific War – before,
during and after – were not limited to the A-bomb and, therefore,
to Japan’s victimization. Some authors, especially Tsutsui Yasutaka,
engaged with Japan’s role in the war, particularly the colonialism
and imperialism perpetrated by Japan, and included in their work
portrayals of those people marginalized first by Japanese colonialism
and then affected by the A-bomb and nuclear radiation. The Japanese

experience, therefore, rather than that of Japan’s former colonies,

is the subject of postwar SF. Tsutsui’s work, particularly the stories
“Betonamu kanko kōsha” (The Vietnam Sightseeing Agency) and
“Afurika no Bakudan” (The African Bomb) were exceptions to this
trend, and engaged with issues of Japanese colonialism.

Japanese SF in context: Tsutsui Yasutaka’s postcolonial
wars
Tsutsui Yasutaka is one of Japanese science fiction’s more prolific

writers, with a career spanning more than 40 years, but is nearly
unknown outside of Japan as his works have seen few translations.
Though some stories are available in English translation on the
author’s website, other translations of his work are limited to the
out-of-print Kodansha English Library edition of The African Bomb
and Other Stories (1986), translated by David Lewis; the out-of-print
translation What the Maid Saw (1990), translated by Adam Kabat;
a new book of short stories called Salmonella Men on Planet Porno
(2006), translated by Andrew Driver; and single-story translations
scattered in journals, anthologies and class assignments, such as
Daniel Bradshaw’s 2006 translation of “Earthward Bound” as part
of his honours thesis at Ohio State University.12 As of this writing,
Tsutsui’s 1967 short story “Betonamu kanko kōsha”, or “The Vietnam
Tourism Agency”, has not been published in English. “Afurika no
Bakudan” (“The African Bomb”) was published in English in the
Kodansha English Library series in 1986. Both stories, written from
the first-person perspective of narrators who are clearly products of
the societies in which they live, use cynicism and dark humour to
lampoon the concerns of the day, and both stories deal with issues of
colonialism, tourism, authenticity, globalization, feminism and the
pervasiveness of the mass media, amongst other things.
“Betonamu kanko kōsha”: Exotic desire and the

feminized colonial body
“Betonamu kanko kōsha” can be read as a conflation and indictment

of several of Japan’s major postwar issues: the ultimate pointless-
ness and vanity of war, the trauma of nuclear damage and the
Orientalism – both Western and Japanese − that were not defeated

with the Japanese Empire. The story sets up the binary, oppositional
structure of Japan’s relationship with the rest of Asia as the Japanese
imperialists had (here signified in Vietnam) the simultaneous desire
to “escape” from Asia, rejecting it as Oriental and other, and to com-
mit itself to Asia as a firm but loving leader. These dual impulses are
mirrored in the story for satirical effect. It is the story of a man who,

after accidentally fastening himself (literally) to the employee of a
travel agency, abandons his fiancée at the airport to try to find some-
thing “interesting” in the world. His search takes him to Africa and
then to Vietnam, where there is a constant war going on for the pur-
poses of tourist spectatorship. When his tour bus is hit, he crawls
through the mud for shelter and meets an old, heavy, dark-skinned
Vietnamese woman with whom he instantly falls in love; in the end,
he joins the “Viet Cong”.
Yamano Kōichi suggests that the story has “merely a secondary
significance for the war in reality” (1994: 73). However, it seems
to me that he is dismissing the story unduly. Whilst the war in
the story may bear only a passing resemblance to the Vietnam
War, which was going on at the time, or to historical mechanisms
of the Pacific War as played out in Japan’s colonies, its function
is not accurately to represent these wars, but rather to represent
and critique “war” more generally. Most importantly, it is meant
to represent the links between colonialism and war, especially where
they interact with the growing, and increasingly globalized, mass
entertainment culture in which richer (and Western/Westernized)
nations have the ability to force people in smaller, poorer, subaltern
nations or class contexts to do humiliating or dangerous things
in order to survive. The story takes this dynamic to one extreme
conclusion and envisions a society in which participating in a con-
stant, deadly war for the purposes of entertaining wealthy tourists
is necessary for the continued survival of that country’s worst-off
people.
Robert Matthew also addresses the story, and although his read-
ing is mostly explanatory rather than analytical, he suggests that its
theme is “the growing desire for the exotic among holiday-makers”
(1989: 51). The “desire for the exotic”, in this case, is extremely
complicated and, I would argue, ranges far beyond a critique of the
tastes of vacationers. It suggests the intersection of tourism and the
mechanics of colonial desire, described at length by scholars such
as Robert J. C. Young, Homi Bhabha, Christopher Balme, Anthony

Carrigan and Anne McClintock, among others. The trope of this

desire encapsulates in itself the desire to view the spectacle of the
oppression of those made subaltern. The conflation of war and the
eventual marriage of the protagonist to a conventionally unattrac-
tive Vietnamese woman speaks to a specific desire to own, and
alternately to obliterate and to couple with, the Other, a dynamic

that is central to postcolonial-feminist conceptualizations of the rela-
tionship between colonizer and colonized. The ending of the story,
in which the protagonist rejects his traditional-minded, submissive
Japanese fiancée in favour of a dark-skinned woman whose physical
features represent the exotic – and in this exoticism, the convention-
ally unattractive – rather than mainstream attractiveness, seems on
one level to subvert the paradigm of desire for the conventionally
attractive. However, this device in fact merely inverts the dynamic,
replacing the conventionally acceptable with the exotic in the same
patriarchal paradigm of colonial desire, and providing a subtle cri-
tique of the entire colonial value system in which the female body
is both the site of otherness and the conduit by which the colonizer
can control the Other.
Also interesting is the fact that though the protagonist is from
Japan, it is not Japan that is the colonizer in this story. Japan itself
occupies, as it did in history, a liminal space between colonizer and
colonized, acting at times within the story as one and at times as
the other. For example, one aspect of war in the story speaks not to
the Vietnam War so much as to Japan’s own trauma after the Sec-
ond World War. This trauma and fear of nuclear war and nuclear
fallout is merged both with the beauty ideal of white skin and with
mass-media advertising and entertainment culture – in a television
advertisement for skin-whitening cream that the protagonist remem-
bers as he watches the news on the jet to Vietnam, where he travels in
order to find “something interesting in the world” (179). The char-
acters in the commercial are named “Shiroko-san” (Ms White) and
“Kuroko-san” (Ms Black), and they have an interesting dialogue with
each other:
Shiroko-san! Lately, your skin’s been looking so white and shiny!

You must be using some really nice cosmetics.
Oh, Kuroko-san, your skin is as black as ever. If you want whiter

skin, there are many different creams, but you have to choose

based on your skin quality. How did you get so black, anyhow?
You look like a charred corpse, hahaha!
It’s because of the radiation from the atomic fuel pipes – I couldn’t
even see it, it happened without my realizing.
Oh, dear, that happens all the time! Well . . . . (181–182)

Shiroko-san’s comparison of Kuroko-san’s appearance to that of a
“charred corpse” brings to mind both the Buddhist crematory ritual
common at Japanese funerals and the spectacle of charred bodies in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bomb blasts. Kuroko-san’s
skin, like that of the A-bomb victims, has also become black because
of radiation, but the significance has shifted: in being used to sell
ineffectual whitening creams, the tragedy of radiation-blackened skin
has become shallow – characterizing the tragedy of lost female beauty
rather than enormous loss of life. This signifies the way in which the
consequences of war have become removed from reality and made
into entertainment, just as the story’s version of the Vietnam War has
been.13 Skin blackened by radiation is, in Tsutsui’s story, no longer
a large-scale tragedy, but rather an annoyance to be remedied with
skin cream that will make one’s skin closer to the colour of the col-
onizers. The commercial, we are told, has been running for over a
hundred years, and so the ideal of whiteness as beauty, articulated
both in traditional, patriarchal Japanese society and by white West-
erners through economic and media globalization, has been deeply
ingrained in this society for a long time – the protagonist muses that
Kuroko-san has been asking the exact same question for a hundred
years or more, and yet has never changed her colour (182). The expec-
tations put on women by both patriarchy and colonizer are conflated
here, and the impossibility of ever meeting them is exemplified.
As well, the nuclear anxiety is shown to persist far into the future.
Rather than fear of a nuclear attack, it has become a fear of the
more subtle effects of radiation, the effects that were, and are, felt
by hibakusha – people affected by the atomic bombs – long after the
bombings of 1945. These effects are not only physical but also social
and emotional: as Ibuse shows in his novel Kuroi ame, hibakusha and
their descendants pay a social penalty, sometimes a grave one, for
having been exposed to the radiation of the bomb. In the story,

the perception of the damage done to DNA by radiation is that it

can echo down the generations. It is irreversible, and significantly, it
is invisible; it can lie dormant until it chooses to show itself. The
Japanese term used in the story to mean “without my realizing”,
razushirazu, more literally means “unconsciously”, which symbolizes
fears about the long-term effects of radiation: that they may change

a person without him or her even being conscious of it.
War is also a commodity in “Betonamu kanko kōsha”, in the form
of a tourist spectacle. After visiting the head of a travel agency in
Africa, where the “big game hunting” actually consists of clockwork
faux-animals in a carnival-like shooting gallery with cigarettes for
prizes, the story’s protagonist decides to go to Vietnam, where tourists
are able to see close up a real-life war in what amounts to “a war
safari”. The protagonist’s motivation for undertaking this tour is that
there are few interesting things left in the world; subconsciously,
he seems to be seeking a site of authenticity, one that is difficult to
find in a world where even the results of nuclear fallout have been
commodified, packaged and softened by filtering them through a
mass-media complex in which everything, even the news, is “con-
stantly transformed into TV drama” (181). When asked by tourists
why the war in Vietnam started and why it persists, the tour guide,
Merry, says: “Nowadays, I don’t think there’s anybody who remem-
bers why they started fighting.” She points out that the war is the
area’s “special local cultural heritage” (183), and draws attention to
where a film crew is taping the fighting outside the window of the
bus. The war is performative, aimed externally at the spectator rather
than internally between the two sides. It seems an extreme version of
the postcolonial performance put on by native islanders in Samoa for
tourists, one that Christopher Balme describes as a performance that,
like the war in Tsutsui’s Vietnam, “draws upon the expectation of
authenticity that the PCC [Polynesian Cultural Centre] promulgates
and that the tourists in the main deploy” (2007: 181).
The fighting is between the South Vietnamese army, made up
of black American soldiers who have come to fight and make
money, and the Viet Cong (“betokon”), made up of Vietnamese and
white American soldiers. This divide is significant in that it enfolds
American history into the schema of the story, perhaps signifying sar-
donically that while America portrayed itself as the bringer of peace
and democracy to Japan after the Pacific War, its own history of

racism and colonialism cannot be ignored and continues to erupt

into the present. As well as these soldiers, American Indian, Ainu
and Eskimo (more properly known as Inuit) soldiers appear as “spe-
cial guests”. When asked the origin of the name “Viet Cong”, Merry
(the tour guide) tells the bus: “No one really remembers . . . but the
Viet Cong are the ones whose idea it was to spread the word about

Vietnam and develop its tourism industry. That’s why they’re known
as Vietnam Constructers” (184). Again, this represents an ironic
departure from the signification of the war in reality – but what
Yamano dismisses as “only a passing resemblance” can better be
read as an ironic comment on the ways in which ideas of exoticism
and spectacle might combine with war to create an inversion of the
conventional wisdom of the Vietnam War.
At the end of the story, the protagonist’s tour bus crashes, and all of
the tourist-passengers are forced to flee into the fighting. They gather
together while hawkers, in the middle of the war zone, offer sex
and Cokes for sale to the men, a further demonstration of the inter-
penetration of commerce and war. The protagonist sees a Viet Cong
woman shooting from a trench, and when she sees him, she says:
“You should shoot as well. There is a rifle.” She glanced at me while

she spoke.
She had breasts so big she couldn’t button up her uniform, massive
hips and swarthy black skin. One of her front teeth was broken and
yellow and she was around forty-six, maybe forty-seven years old.
I was attracted to her immediately. I felt as if we were finally back
together after a long separation. (192)
The irony of this passage is in the second part, which seems incon-
gruous with the first, but makes perfect sense under the logic of
colonial desire. The feminine colonial body is marked as “disgust-
ing” by a combination of colonial and sexual markers, these markers
themselves being somewhat, but not entirely, predicated on Western
influence. In both American and Japanese cultural idioms of the time,
darker skin was seen as less attractive than paler skin (the incongruity
is exacerbated by the fact that the woman, Suni, is described using
the term asaguroi hifu – which means “dirty/black” skin and is a com-
mon pejorative term used in Japan at the time for Southeast Asian

peoples).14 As well, fat bodies, particularly those with large breasts

and hips, have long been considered unfashionable in Japanese cul-
ture, with the perfect cylindrical shape of a woman in kimono being
the ideal. That this dark-skinned, fat-bodied woman is the object of
simultaneous love and scorn follows the mechanics of colonial desire.
As the story closes, the protagonist is absorbed fully into the war:

after a visit from his Japanese fiancée, who ends their relationship,
he decides to become a full member of the Viet Cong. The story
closes with him fighting, surrounded by Suni (who is giving him
instructions and who he wants to marry), a Native American who
introduces himself to the protagonist by saying “How”, and an Ainu
fighter with a bear. Here, as well, the signification is complex. On the
surface he has chosen to fight for Vietnam, indeed, for the side com-
prised of exotic peoples, but his ultimate motivation for staying is
to marry Suni, “who is gallant, and has a maternal aura; there are
no women like her in any Japanese megalopolis”, and to “enjoy this
wonderful thrilling life, and then die” (192). His choice, therefore,
is predicated on his ultimate desire for the exotic, which is predi-
cated on and actualized through his choice of the female body of
Suni. Her body may be read as representational of Vietnam itself, of
the exoticism associated with the colonized country and with the
state of colonization itself. Ultimately, it is significant that although
the protagonist expresses in his thoughts the desire to be with Suni,
there is no discussion of a marriage: he has assumed that she wants
to be with him. Suni herself is silent. Despite her obvious toughness,
she, like the colony itself, is ultimately an object, or a prize.
“Afurika no Bakudan”: Nuclear slapstick
“Afurika no Bakudan” (“The African Bomb”, 1968) is the story of a

small village in the Congo that declares itself a nation, and decides
to buy a nuclear bomb with which to prosecute an ongoing tribal
feud with a neighbouring village, also an independent nation. Yasuo,
the “ambassador” to the village, who narrates the story and whose
name we find out only second hand near the end, is a Japanese
salesman for an electronics company, Pony Co, who is sent there to
ensure the villagers pay for the radio and television the company
sold to them. He has become “something like the village’s financial
advisor”, and is “treated like a jewel” (11). He is clearly a product of

Tsutsui’s future Japanese society, one obsessed with money, the mass
media and the exotic, to the exclusion of critical thinking or polit-
ical awareness. His perspective can perhaps be best exemplified by
the way in which he describes the crisis of widely available nuclear
weapons, a passage that is also an example of Tsutsui’s characteristi-
cally dry humour: “Long, long ago, there was a famous fashion model

named Kennedy. Her first husband, a guy who’d also worked as Pres-
ident, once compared nuclear weapons to the Sword of Damocles”
(1986: 13). Later, when confronted with a wild lion on the savan-
nah, he identifies it as the “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion” (1986: 43).
The story is ostensibly an outsider’s perspective on a colonized cul-
ture – in that sense not unlike, say, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902).
It is also a metaphor for the Japanese experience both as colonizer,
in its send-up of the ignorant Japanese salary man and of Japanese
economic domination overseas, and victim of American imperialism,
shown in Yasuo’s points of cultural reference being American mass
culture and in its attention to the fear of nuclear destruction. This
middle ground, or “in-between”, to adapt Bhabha’s term, is mirrored
by Yasuo’s ambivalent relationship to the village.
However, Yasuo is a more complex character than it would at first
seem. He evinces an interesting combination of education and igno-
rance, of glimmers of cross-cultural understanding combined with
deep colonial conditioning. Perhaps for this reason, Tsutsui invokes
the writer André Gide, whose colonial travel narrative Voyage au
Congo (1927), for instance, charts the “demise” of his “primitivist
fantasy” (Clark 1997: 56) and is full of similar juxtapositions. When
the narrator asks the village chief why a particular lieutenant is so
uptight, the chief answers:
“When they first come to Africa, everyone looks down on the

black man,” the Chief started to explain. “But then one day they
realize that the black man is no fool, and that there are lots of
us who are smarter than they are. Then they all turn like that
in reaction. It’s especially common with Englishmen. But then
there are some who go on thinking to the last that black men are
stupid. A great man called Andre Gide put it this way long ago –
‘the lower the intellectual level of the white man, the stupider the
black man looks in his eyes.’ This is especially common amongst
Americans.” (23)

Over the next several pages, the Chief provides a short history
of Western colonialism in the Congo, and of the indigenous
resistance movements. As well, he asserts that “real village society
was destroyed”, and that the village that the narrator and the tourists
see is instead a “Gesellschaft” (24) – a term coined in the late 1800s
by German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies to describe a business asso-

ciation in which all of the component people are there for their own
self-interest.15 Gesellschaeften are described by Tönnies in opposition
to Gemeinschaeften, associations in which the primary relationships
are based on community rather than business interests. Consider-
ing the precolonial tribal structure of much of Congolese society, the
Chief’s description of the village as a Gesellschaft is even more loaded,
acknowledging that colonialism functions largely as an agent of cap-
italism and, in a colonized society, supplants even the most basic of
social ties with capital-interested ones. This would have been par-
ticularly meaningful in 1960s Japan, which was in the midst of the
“Economic Miracle”, a phenomenon that had much the same effect
upon Japanese society.
Here, we can also see the ironic difference between the sophisti-
cated knowledge of the Chief and the relative lack of education of
Yasuo: the narrator barely knows who John F. Kennedy was, while
the Chief can quote Gide freely. This dynamic is clinched by the nar-
rator’s aside after the Chief’s speech about Gide; rather than address
the complex dynamics of colonial racism described by the Chief, the
narrator’s response is shallow and addresses only the final part of the
Chief’s speech, and the focus is as always on money: “Apparently
he didn’t like Americans, even if they were his best customers” (23).
There is a clear dichotomy being set up between the narrator, an
agent of colonialism, and the Chief, who alternately uses the colo-
nizing powers to his advantage and then speaks against them. This
dynamic may also be a nod to the late Tokugawa-era supporters of
trade with the West after Perry’s nineteenth-century mission, many
of whom sought to use Western military and technological expertise
eventually as a mode of anti-imperial resistance to expel those same
Westerners from Japanese shores.
Another common theme of “The African Bomb” and “Betonamu
kanko kōsha” is that of authenticity and exoticism, and how they
are bound up with tourism in a postcolonial world. In “The African
Bomb”, the people of the village, when they hear that a tour group

is coming, run frantically around, hiding their televisions and other

signs of a Westernized, technologized lifestyle. “This village is a
tourist state that relies on tourism for almost all its revenue,” the
narrator tells the reader. “It would be a disaster if anyone ever found
out they lived a civilized life on the sly. The aborigines in that village
aren’t the least bit aboriginal, the tourists would say, and then every-

one would stop coming” (14). This dynamic is an interesting twist on
the mutual suggestions by Bhabha and Fanon that the subjectivity of
the colonized native becomes performative; rather, it adds another
layer, suggesting that the performance of the native is not only his
subjectivity but rather can also be pure self-conscious performance.
Balme also discusses this phenomenon, that of self-conscious indi-
geneity as tourist spectacle. Even the former colonizer’s postcolonial
nostalgia for the precolonial native state of its former colonies is
satirized here: the villagers’ performance of precolonial nativism is
portrayed as a colonial desire for spectacle rather than an indigenous
desire for authenticity, and the result is that the Congolese natives
in this story are portrayed as in a sense powerful, their embrace of
Western technologies an active choice rather than a passive require-
ment. Perhaps the ultimate demonstration of the tourist fetish for
authenticity is described in the fact that some tourists, in a quest for
the ultimate authentic experience, actually go to be circumcized by
the village circumcizer:
occasionally some fool tourists would see the sign and actually
think they wanted to pay that much [$20 for men, $30 for women]
to get circumcised. Almost always they were middle-aged or older
men and women from the American countryside . . . it doesn’t have
any effect at all, except for having to thrash about on your bed
every night for the two or three weeks it takes the wound to heal.
(15–16)
The desire of the colonial power – in this story, America is portrayed

as a colonial power in terms of its role in relation to the villagers – to
co-opt entirely the lifestyle and subjectivity of the colonized results,
ironically, in an intimate and pointless wound.
As in “Betonamu kanko kōsha”, though to a more marked extent
in this story, anxieties about nuclear proliferation are a major theme.
When asked by an American tourist – who has just crashed his car to

avoid the natives carrying the bomb across the road – how he could
leave the bomb in the hands of the “ignorant natives”, Yasuo replies:
“Ignorant natives, you say? . . . . Ignorant human race, you mean! The
human race!” (43). There is a deep ambivalence in the story, marked
by a particular complexity in the character of the narrator, about the
utility of nuclear weapons. The fear of nuclear destruction haunts

both narratives. It is not the spectre of “ignorant natives” having
access to nuclear weapons that is fearsome (in fact, in the story, those
natives are often wiser and more responsible than the people from
“civilized” countries). After all, it is implied that almost all African
“nations” at the time of “The African Bomb” – in the story, there are
147 declared “nations” in the Congo alone – own nuclear weapons
strong enough to demolish the world. However, the Africans have at
least not detonated these weapons; the United States, having dropped
two nuclear bombs on to Japan, cannot boast as much. Rather it
is the fear of nuclear weaponry more than the weapons themselves
that is the determining factor. It should be noted that at no time
in the story is it suggested that any village will use nuclear weapons
against another; they are seen as a defensive rather than an offen-
sive measure. Instead it is the possibility of an accident – from too
much jostling (33), from the stripped warhead screws (39), a stray
lion (44), a shot and dying gorilla (48–49), or other unfortunate inci-
dents – that strikes fear into those close to the missile. The final third
of the story is taken up almost entirely by a hilarious slapstick catch-
the-missile routine involving the gorilla, a tree, a rope bridge, more
than one Tarzan, and members of another tribe. The fear, then, has
become in Tsutsui’s story a many-layered farce: “The African Bomb”
is not only a send-up of the arms race of nuclear proliferation, but is
also a comment on the ineffectiveness of an underfunded world gov-
ernment in a world where some nations are colonizers and some are
colonized; the effects of trade imperialism and globalization of cap-
ital on colonized and postcolonial societies; and the concept of the
nation itself. The notion of the nation as “imagined community”, in
Benedict Anderson’s celebrated phrase, is turned against colonialism
here: since modern African nation states and their borders have been
largely the product of the imaginations of the colonizers, rather than
of the community itself, Tsutsui demarcates the difference between
nation and nation state, and restores the idea of “nation” to the
community itself.

The final moment of satire comes at the end of the story, when
the bomb is safely returned to the village. Yasuo’s mother has come
to the village as a tourist, and Yasuo, incredulous at her arrival, is
busy burying his face in his mother’s obi like a small child whilst the
tour group, having been told by Yasuo that the missile is actually a
native totem, demands that the village hold a festival for it. There

is some discussion as to which traditional dance they can do to fool
the tour group; in the end, fittingly, they decide on the funeral dance,
because they have already performed the wedding and war dances for
the tourists. As Yasuo watches the bonfires and the dancing, with the
missile in the centre, he remembers the doomed child he fathered
with a female employee back in Japan, and considers the Freudian
significance of the missile:
The missile, glowing red in the light of the bonfires, was like an
enormous, erect penis ready even now to ejaculate towards the
stars in the night sky. It stood there grandly, its glans glittering
reddish black, looking down on the humans joining madly in the
dance of death at its feet. Again the face of the baby swam before
my eyes.
I’m not sure why, but the baby was furious. (61–62)
The missile, in the end, is capable of destroying everything: coloniz-

ers, colonized, adults and children. It began as a folly of war and has
become a folly of humanity, the key to our destruction. Colonized
and colonizer are together engaged in a prophetic funereal dance for
us all.
Returning to Holden’s suggestion that stories are never without
ideological residue from the cultures in which they originate, the
residue in the case of “The African Bomb” is not in the story itself
but rather in the story’s cover illustration. The unfortunate cover of
the Kodansha English Library edition, in which caricatured African
stick figures carry a large torpedo-shaped bomb – a cover unlikely
to have been chosen either by Tsutsui or by Lewis – suggests an ele-
ment of the same prejudice, though subconscious, as portrayed in
the character of the narrator. Tsutsui’s clever irony in the portrayal
of his African characters rides the knife-blade between mimicry as
resistance and mimicry as mockery, and it seems his publishers have
mistaken one for the other.

Canada and history
Like the other “breakaway settler” nations, Canada remains in

some sense colonized and its indigenous people marginalized, likely
permanently. As already mentioned, Canada is in many ways neither
post-settler nor postcolonial. However, to echo Japan’s oscillation
between colonized and colonizer, my argument is that Canada is both

colonial and postcolonial. Like Japan, it exists at Bhabha’s “culture’s
in-between”, the liminal space that is “at once the impossibility of
culture’s containedness and the boundary between” (54).
In some ways, Canadian identity is constructed in opposition to
colonialism: in terms of First Nations opposition to British and
French colonialism beginning in the late 1500s; in terms of the
drive for Canadian independence from Britain, culminating in the
Canada Act of 1982, which finally vested all parliamentary power
in Canada itself; and in terms of contemporary Canadian opposi-
tion to American free trade imperialism and cultural colonialism,
actualized among other ways in Canada’s refusal to participate in
America’s operations in Iraq.16 However, Canada is also a perpetrator
of colonialism, both historically and currently: it is majority white
and English-speaking, and its aboriginal First Nations and Inuit peo-
ples, like the aboriginal peoples of other settler nations, have had
their land seized, their culture fragmented and their people sub-
jected to what many theorists term a genocide. There is also the
matter of Canada’s current involvement in neocolonial projects such
as Afghanistan, and the matter of the internal strife over the lin-
guistic and cultural status of Francophone Canadians. Therefore,
in the anthology Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Liter-
ature (2003), there are nearly as many answers – and definitions
of “postcolonial” – as there are chapters, with Terry Goldie ulti-
mately declaring the question “most likely unanswerable” (308).
This chapter makes significant use of the aforementioned anthology,
along with other recent Canadian criticism of postcolonialism more
generally and of Canadian SF in a postcolonial context. The negotia-
tion of identity – colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial – in Canada
is a many-faceted project, and any study of Canadian literature must
take into account this profound complexity. Canada’s divisions func-
tion uniquely among post-settler societies to create a fracturing of
national identity. This “fracturing” should not, however, be read as
a breaking down of a formerly whole entity. Rather, it represents

divisions inherent in Canadian identity, and produces a positive

multiplicity of identities both potential and claimed.
Indigenous peoples in settler states, including First Nations peo-
ples in Canada, are in a sense more disadvantaged than any other
colonized group. While decolonization is a process, and the shape
of a decolonized society will never resemble entirely the precolo-

nial society, indigenous peoples in post-settler societies have in many
ways not even been able to begin the process: they have, more
than any other group, been forced not only to learn to live with
the psychic residue of the colonizer but also to live with his con-
stant, unending physical presence and with the well-founded fear
that the colonizer will never leave. As Terry Goldie writes, even the
term “postcolonial” has been at times conflated with the similarly
problematic term “visible minority” and disassociated from the speci-
ficities of indigeneity and the physical, cultural, historical, economic
and spiritual connection to the land that First Nations − including
Inuit – groups hold. Therefore, Goldie writes: “Indigenous peo-
ples in Canada, Australia and New Zealand maintain that the term
‘postcolonial’ is depressingly laughable without Native sovereignty”
(2003: 301). Judith Leggatt reports that her own certainties as to
the postcoloniality of Native Canadian literature were unsettled
by her Native students, who insist that the term “postcolonial”
did not describe them and their literatures, that it is rather “neo-
colonial and repressive” in a Canada where they remain colonized
(2003: 111).
The discourse of postcolonial theory has also been problematic in
terms of describing or asserting Native identities: as Joe Sawchuk
explains, concepts of indigeneity have been constructed according
to or in direct and therefore linked opposition to dominant colonial
ideologies, a dynamic that has been “exacerbated by academics” who
have labelled such identity formation as “invention”. The problem
with this, Sawchuk suggests, is “the apparent equation of invention
with a lack of authenticity” (2001: 73, italics mine). Bonita Lawrence
comes to a similar conclusion: “The blurring and shifting of cul-
tural boundaries that can occur in white-dominated contexts when
Nativeness is theorized not as an authentic essence but as something
negotiated and continuously evolving can have dangerous reper-
cussions for Native people in terms of asserting Aboriginal rights”
(2005: 22).

Many theorists, such as Lawrence, Andrea Smith and Kyung-Won

Lee, have referred to the British colonial encounter with native peo-
ples of North America as “genocide” or “obliteration”. This label
is both material and cultural. Lee, drawing on texts such as Sir
Percival Griffiths’s Empire into Commonwealth (1969) and Vincent
T. Harlow’s The Founding of the Second Empire (1952), asserts a dis-

tinction between the “First” and “Second” British Empires, writing
that “during the First Empire, Britain’s overseas expansion was more
heavily dependent upon material practices, because its main policy
was the conquest and obliteration of the natives rather than their
acculturation or exploitation, as illustrated by the British encounters
with North American and Caribbean Indians” (99). Later, the descen-
dants of the British- and French-Canadian dominant classes imposed
aspects of “acculturation” on those First Nations peoples who were
not destroyed by British and French imperialism or by the indirect
results of that imperialism, such as the French and Iroquois wars,
fought between two federated groups of tribes over dominance of
the colonial fur trade. Lawrence provides a concise and devastating
account of the deliberate, institutionalized fracturing of First Nations
political and geographical identity, among other forms of identity, in
Canada. She draws on Ania Loomba’s work and sees governmentally
constructed “Indianness” as a discourse in the Foucauldian sense,
as a set of official rules that bind and shape the concept of Indian
identity and construct it in a specific way, which is then prolifer-
ated through the mechanisms of the state. In doing so, Canada has
radically disenfranchized and dispossessed thousands of its Native
inhabitants:
For over a century, the Indian Act has controlled Canadian Native
identity by creating a legal category, that of the “status Indian,”
which is the only category of Native person to whom a historic
nation-to-nation relationship between Canada and the Indige-
nous peoples is recognized. With this legal category set into place,
until recently the only individuals who could consider themselves
Indian were those who could prove they were related, through the
male line, to individuals who were already status Indians.
A crucial issue to understand here is that without Indian status,
and the band membership that goes along with it, Native people

are not allowed to live on any land part of an Indian reserve in

Canada (unless it is leased to them as an “outsider”). They can-
not take part in the life of their own community unless they
have Indian status and hence band membership in that commu-
nity. We can see, then, that the colonial act of establishing legal
definitions of Indianness, which excluded vast numbers of Native

people from obtaining Indian status, has enabled the Canadian
government to remove a significant sector of Native people from
the land. By 1985 there were twice as many nonstatus Indians and
Metis [mixed-race] as status Indians in Canada (Holmes 1987, 13).
In essence, by 1985, legislation ensconced in the Indian Act had
rendered two-thirds of all Native people in Canada landless. (6)
Lawrence goes on to describe in detail the ways in which the

Canadian government has constructed Indian identity as “a cate-
gory that could be granted or withheld, according to the needs of
the settler society” (7). Rather than being allowed to decide and
define Indian identity on an individual and/or collective basis – each
of these types of identity interacting with each other – it has been
decided for Native communities based on the colonial logic of con-
trol. Therefore, the genocide of Native communities in Canada was
carried out not only through mass deaths due to deliberate intro-
duction of diseases and alcohol addiction in Native communities
(Lawrence 7), but also due to the systematic cutting off of Native
people from their land, communities, cultures and histories. This has
been conducted through the governmental policies that Lawrence
describes as well as by the introduction of mandatory “residential
schools” for Native children, run by Church groups, which func-
tioned as a method for eradication of Native languages as well as
cultural traditions: to “get rid of the Indians by assimilating them
into Canadian society” (Llewellyn 256). The 1895 Annual Report of
the Department of Indian Affairs contained the hope that, if a gener-
ation of children would be made English-speaking and “accustomed
to the ways of civilized life”, they might become the “dominant
body among themselves” and “the Indian problem would have been
solved” (xxvii, in Llewellyn 257).
As I mention above, Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua assert that
Canada is a “colonized space” and that postcolonial studies and anti-
racist action, in Canada and elsewhere, have not done enough to

address the colonized status of the Native communities in Canada.

They claim that Canada does not recognize them because it sees
them as relegated to the past: “consigned to the dustbin of his-
tory”, as they quote Gayatri Spivak. David Newhouse finds a similar
phenomenon, when he asks his introductory Native Studies class
at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, to find information

about the Native communities that originally lived in the students’
home communities; after a few tries at finding material, the students
“report that Indians are there but just at the start of their commu-
nities. They then disappear from historical and contemporary sight”
(47). Unlike the far colonies to which Anne McClintock’s assertion
that “geographical difference across space is figured as a historical
difference across time” applies (40), Native communities in Canada
are instead rendered invisible in the present, and sometimes even
celebrated as “history” without recognition that they remain in exis-
tence. (McClintock [1994] addresses this dynamic as well, in terms
of the failure of the term “postcolonialism” to account for the con-
tinued colonization of Native lands by the non-Native inhabitants of
the settler nation states.)
Canadian science fiction: An overview
Clute and Nichols, in their Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, argue that

James De Mille’s “utopian satire” A Strange Manuscript Found in a Cop-
per Cylinder (1888) is the “first serious Canadian SF work” (Clute
and Nichols 1999). Amy Ransom, a scholar of French-Canadian SF,
writes that in Québec, “works of proto-sf appeared at the end of the
nineteenth century and through the first half of the twentieth”, iden-
tifying “Québec’s first novel, Phillippe Aubert de Gaspé’s L’Influence
d’un livre (The Influence of a Book, 1937) as fantastic because the
influential volume mentioned in its title is an alchemical manual
[itself a tool of proto-science] and because it incorporates the telling
of several fantastic Québécois legends” (294). Ransom also identifies
Jules-Paul Tarvidel’s book Pour la Patrie (1895, trans. For My Coun-
try, 1975), published just seven years after De Mille’s book, as one
of the earliest works of Québécois proto-sf. The designating term
“Canadian science fiction” is, however, far from settled. It has always
been diverse in terms of nationality, and has included expatriates
from Canada, expatriates to Canada and writers who have sojourned

in Canada for a long while (Bell 3). One of the more interesting and
unique features of Canadian SF is that many Canadian literary figures
famous for their non-SF work have also written excellent and signifi-
cant SF. The most prominent of these is Margaret Atwood, author of
the feminist dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which has
been adapted to both film and stage (as a play and as a musical) and

is commonly assigned on class syllabi around the world, along with
the more recent Oryx and Crake (2003).17 Canada also has its own
group of writers who focus primarily on SF, counting among them
cyberpunk pioneer and Neuromancer (1984) author William Gibson,
who has lived in Canada since he immigrated to escape the American
draft in the 1960s; Phyllis Gotlieb, Canadian by birth, who is not
only a lauded SF novelist but also a major SF poet; Robert J. Sawyer,
who melds a hard SF methodology with existential and spiritual
questions in books such as Flash Forward (1999) and Calculating God
(2000); Judith Merrill, the naturalized Canadian SF writer and activist
for whom the Toronto Public Library’s Merrill Collection is named,
and who also helped to bring Japanese SF to English-language audi-
ences by helping in the translation of several stories, some of which
are collected in The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories (1997); and
émigré Michael G. Coney, who is considered “one of Canada’s best
creators of truly alien aliens” (Weiss 9). David Cronenberg is proba-
bly Canada’s most famous SF film director, although, like Margaret
Atwood, his work includes non-SF films, such as Spider (2002). He
often straddles generic boundaries, particularly between SF and hor-
ror, in films such as eXistenZ (1999). Also prominent is Vincenzo
Natali, the director of the SF horror film Cube (1997), in which a
group of people wake to find they have been imprisoned in a maze
of hundreds of booby-trapped rooms inside a huge cube.
As can be seen in this short account of some of the best-known
figures in Canadian SF, the term “Canadian” in Canadian SF is, like
Canadian identity itself, diverse and contingent. However, even these
inclusive accountings of significant Canadian SF writers tend to rein-
scribe the colonial order of domination by white, English-speaking
Canadians – and, by association, the stricter definition of SF and its
concerns that white, English-speaking writers tend to adhere to. One
of the goals of this chapter is to include, and argue for the constant
inclusion of, the other voices of SF within Canadian science fiction as
a whole, not as adjunct or marginal voices but as equal participants

in the production of the genre. Though this chapter focuses specif-

ically on Native Canadian SF, readings of diasporic Canadian SF are
also included throughout this book.
The critic Curtis Marez relates Native people’s relative absence from
science fiction to their relative absence from mainstream Canadian
discouse in general, using the term Indian to describe Native peoples

throughout North America: “science fiction imaginatively removes
Indian people from speculation about the future. Along with other
imperialist discourses, it suggests that there is no future in being
Indian” (336). Not only has Canada left no space for its indige-
nous people in the present, but it has also erased them from its
possible futures. Though there are a few representations of Native
people in science fiction, they are few in number and often either
relatively inconsequential or stereotypical, such as the frankly racist
and sexist depiction of the tongueless Inuit woman, Silence, in Dan
Simmons’s novel The Terror (2007).18 Where Native Canadians are
represented, I argue that they have often functioned as a source of
“multicultural aura”, in the same vague sense as Arif Dirlik criticizes
the “postcolonial aura”. This “aura” of multiculturalism, which has
at its base a philosophy of diversity based more on visual/textual
signifiers of racial diversity than on substantive cultural, religious
or political markers or customs, seems to show up in quite a lot
of science fiction. As I maintain throughout this book, SF is not
an inherently imperialist discourse or writing practice; rather, it has
been adopted for imperialist and racist ends, sometimes deliberately
and sometimes through ignorance. However, some Canadian First
Nations writers have recuperated a future through science fiction, by
projecting themselves into the future on their own terms.
In SF, and in studies of SF, Native people have more commonly
been discussed in terms of representation of rather than representa-
tion by. That is, they are conceived of as those who are represented,
rather than those who produce representation. This is a microcosm of
a larger trend of leaving First Nations people and concerns out of the
discourses of postcolonialism: relegating them in the lost or distant
past, figuring them as already-lost nations and refusing to see them as
participants in postcolonial discourses. This tendency is particularly
true in cinema and television. Sierra S. Adare’s book Indian Stereotypes
in TV Science Fiction: First Nations’ Voices Speak Out (2005) is a study
of two survey groups, one made up of First Nations viewers and the

other of non-First Nations viewers, and looks at SF television in terms

of each group’s responses to representations of First Nations peoples.
The text includes First Nations opinion and resulting complication
of the common dynamic of dominant group as gazer and subaltern
group as gazed-upon. However, as reviewer Nicolas G. Rosenthal
points out, there is no discussion of SF production by First Nations

people.
This issue is not only one of representation, however; there is little
to no Native Canadian science fiction cinema in existence. The theme
of the conflict between Native culture and identity and colonial dom-
inance has been central to Native Canadian film-making, from the
first Native film The Ballad of Crowfoot (1968) to the release in 2001
of the first Inuit-made film Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner). So powerful
was the latter film that Iglulik viewers said: “Wow, we just got one of
our stories back” (A1, in Nicholson 93). However, Native film-makers
seem not to have considered science fiction an apt generic medium
for their film-making – a phenomenon that may have as its basis their
relative lack of representation in SF at all.
In literature, on the other hand, First Nations writers are beginning
to develop a presence, though a small one thus far. Eden Robinson
has written mostly realist fiction and speculative fiction grounded in
Haisla tradition and orature (her 2001 novel Monkey Beach). Daniel
David Moses’s play Kyotopolis, about, among other things, the first
Native Canadian in space – the play actually has little to do with
Japan and seems to use the name of the Japanese city as a signifier
of traumatically unfettered technological progress, a choice that is
significantly problematic in light of the Japanese science fiction and
history discussed in this chapter – is his only science fiction work,
and “explores in an original fashion the ways in which the past is
pursued and redemption made possible by a proper relationship with
it” (Appleford 200). Curve Lake Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor’s
Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock (1990) explores Native identity through
a teenage boy’s conversations with his ancestors 400 years in the
past and his descendants 400 years in the future; Taylor is also the
author of the Gothic teen vampire novel The Night Wanderer (2007).
Celu Amberstone and Robinson published their first SF stories in the
postcolonial SF anthology So Long Been Dreaming (2004). As in cin-
ema and television, the majority of representation of First Nations
peoples in Canadian science fiction – and in non-Canadian science

fiction – is in SF written by non-Natives; as far as I have been able

to find out, Robinson’s and Amberstone’s short stories and Moses’s
and Taylors’s plays are the only Native Canadian science fiction yet
published. This is not to say that it is inherently a problem for non-
Native writers to write about Native characters. However, it seems
significant that these representations have almost entirely supplanted

any Native representations of their own people.
Despite this, Native themes are quite prevalent in Canadian sci-
ence fiction, and in Canadian speculative fiction more generally.
Christie Harris, who like many other Canadian SF writers also wrote
non-SF work, published Sky Man on the Totem Pole? (1975), which
makes use of the “ancient astronaut” SF trope found in stories such
as Tetsu Yano’s “The Legend of the Paper Spaceship” (1987). In Sky
Man on the Totem Pole?, pre-conquest First Nations people on the west
coast of Canada teach aliens how to lead an ecologically balanced
lifestyle. John Robert Colombo, whose Other Canadas (1979) was the
first anthology of Canadian science fiction and fantasy, also edited
a collection of anthropological, historical and creative writing called
Windigo: An Anthology of Fact and Fantastic Fiction (1982), which has
as its titular topic the spectre of the Algonquin monster windigo (also
spelled wendigo or weendigo), “both a creature of legend and a liv-
ing reality” (1), a description that places this particular Native belief
outside of myth or fantasy and into the contested space of contempo-
rary spiritual belief. (Three of the contributors are Native, including
the famous Canadian artist Norval Morrisseau.) Edo van Belkom’s
Wyrm Wolf (1995), from the role-playing game publisher White
Wolf, is about a First Nations werewolf, and Native themes, char-
acters and artefacts are essential to the work of Canadian fantasists
Charles DeLint and Welwyn Winton Katz. There have also been many
retellings of Native legends collected and published, mostly by non-
Natives such as James Houston and G. E. Laidlaw. Vancouver writer
Lisa Smedman writes Native characters both within the Shadowrun
universe, as in The Forever Drug, which is the “only book with a futur-
istic Mi-Kmac [sic] culture”, and in her 2004 alternate-universe novel
The Apparition Trail.19
My discussion makes significant use of some of the questions raised
in the First Nations cultural context provided by Grace L. Dillon’s
2007 article “Miindiwag and Indigenous Diaspora: Eden Robinson’s
and Celu Amberstone’s Forays into ‘Postcolonial’ Science Fiction and

Fantasy” in the science fiction journal Extrapolation. Dillon’s readings

of these stories provides an excellent study of the specific cultural,
linguistic and historical context of each story; my readings build on
Dillon’s work and link the stories themselves to wider postcolonial
and science-fictional critical practices. As well, it is important to note
that the signifier “First Nations” encompasses many different nations

and tribes from different geographical areas, many of whom have
historical conflicts with each other and/or have very different reli-
gious, cultural and political systems. Therefore, I attempt to refer
to specific tribal customs and beliefs wherever possible and to avoid
conceptualizing First Nations as a monolithic group.
Canadian science fiction in context: Eden Robinson’s

resistance in punishment
Eden Robinson belongs to the Haisla Nation, whose homeland is in

British Columbia. Her first novel, Monkey Beach, includes speculative
and folkloric generic elements and in 2001 was nominated for the
Sunburst Award, which is awarded to one Canadian work of specula-
tive fiction per year (incidentally 2001 is the same year that Nalo
Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber was also nominated, though neither
book won). In the short introduction to her story “Terminal Avenue”,
in So Long Been Dreaming, Robinson explains that the story was writ-
ten over a period of two months during the third anniversary of
the Oka Uprising – a series of violent clashes between the Mohawk
Nation and the government of the town of Oka, Québec, which was
attempting to build a golf course on a Mohawk burial ground. She
also links the story thematically to the fact that “the ‘salmon wars’
were just heating up” (62), referring to government surveillance by
helicopter of Native fisher-people “illegally” (Robinson puts the word
in quotation marks, sardonically) fishing in their native river waters
in competition with large-scale commercial fisheries that would pre-
fer a monopoly on the fish stocks. The story is, therefore, expressly
political.
Dillon proposes “Terminal Avenue” as being in many ways simul-
taneously historical and futuristic: “Are the severe clampdowns on
potlatches and the police brutality against inner-city Indians really
set in the future?” she asks, listing several instances of the Canadian

government’s historical banning of various forms of Native cul-

tural identity and public expression (2007b: 222). She also identifies
Robinson’s “gothic, brutal” language and style as belonging within
a Native tradition of w’daeb-a wae, or “telling the truth” in the
Anishinaubae language, in which it is necessary to express “situ-
ated” experiences and truths as belonging specifically to a historical

moment rather than being generalizable or universal – the type of
universality and diluted generality, she suggests, that weakens the
multiculturalism and diversity of Star Trek to a nice but unrealizable
idea (2007b: 223). Therefore, the suggestion is that the futurism of
the story is a narrative device that represents the continuation of his-
torical and contemporary oppression rather than its genesis at some
point in the future; in other words, the novum20 of the story is not
the fact of violence and oppression but rather the particular method.
The story is also an invocation of the irony of situating native
cultures in the past, in history, and in mythology rather than con-
temporary reality, and of Foucault’s situation of public punishment
and spectacle in the past as well. Foucault claims that one of the
most significant changes in the meting out of criminal punishment
in the Western world in the late 1700s and early 1800s was the
“disappearance of torture as a public spectacle” (7) due to legisla-
tive modernity. However, this has not applied to colonized peoples,
whose bodies have often been sites of abuse and torture in the
name of actualizing, consolidating and maintaining colonial power.
In an inversion of McClintock’s suggestion that the Western colo-
nial administration sees its far colonies as belonging to a distant-past
time as well as a distant place, “Terminal Avenue” combines a futur-
istic aesthetic and technological backdrop with a punitive system of
public bodily torture and spectacle that situates itself in the Western
pre-Enlightenment past.
Dillon characterizes the moment of contact between Natives and
colonists, historically and in the story, as an “event horizon”,
linking this scientific term to the temporal and cultural disjunc-
tion/conjunction between pre- and post-contact reality and the tra-
ditional Heiltsuk belief that “different cultures and historical eras can
appear as possible other worlds” (2007b: 225, emphasis in Dillon). It is
somewhat surprising, however, considering this willingness to link
contemporary scientific theory both with the story itself and with
Native beliefs, that Dillon does not link these traditional beliefs with

the contemporary scientific theory of multiple universes. I would also

take Dillon’s metaphor of the event horizon further, as does Robinson
in her story: not only is there no escape from the event horizon of a
black hole, but any object that goes past that boundary will even-
tually be deformed, stretched beyond all recognition and utterly,
irreversibly changed before it is reduced to “nothing . . . but X-rays”

(Robinson 63). Thus, this metaphor is both pessimistic and accu-
rate, albeit imperfect, as far as the effects of colonialism on Native
Canadian communities are concerned.
Chronologically, “Terminal Avenue” takes place within a few
moments of Wil Wilson’s life, a few moments that may be his
last, as he is about to be beaten by the Peace Officers, the military
police of this future-dystopian Canada. In the story, public abuse
of the “body of the condemned”, in this case the Native body, is
accepted; the Native body is condemned not because of what it
has done but rather because of what it is: the body of a colonized
person. In Robinson’s future Vancouver, such spectacles are part of
the official system of governmental – and colonial – control. One
of the main flashbacks in the story is that of Wil’s experience with
his lover, in the nightclub Terminal Avenue, where he takes part in
sadomasochistic play with a white lover. He is beaten by the bounc-
ers for the voyeuristic pleasure of other men who are watching the
spectacle. The space of the punishment-voyeurs may therefore func-
tion as a type of abject but necessary space by which some freedom
might be attained, outside of the structure of this future society in
which the rule of law is extremely strict. This association and ironic
juxtaposition of punishment with freedom continues through the
narrative.
Along with the aesthetic of pain as punishment is one of pain
as pleasure. At first, Wil is hesitant; after the first time, when he is
distraught, they have this exchange:
My poor virgin. It’s not pain so much as it is a cleansing.

Is it, he asked her, one of those whiteguilt things?
She laughed, kissed him. Rocked him and forgave him, on the
evening he discovered that it wasn’t just easy to do terrible things
to another person: it could give pleasure. It could give power. (65)

This dynamic between the two can be seen as linked to the

aforementioned Foucauldian linkage between public control and
punishment of the body with political and social control. This is con-
nected not only to a subversive impulse within the colonizer – “one
of those whiteguilt things” – but also to the sexualization and exoti-
cization of the Other that is usually inherent in colonial interaction

with colonized peoples. Wil’s lover sets up for herself a scene in which
the dynamic of the Peace Officers and Natives is almost precisely
reversed: she puts on a Peace Officer’s helmet and makes Wil use a
painstick, presumably an implement of terror used by Peace Officers,
on her body. Before that, however, she gets her bouncers to drag Wil
to the centre of the room by his hair; she won’t allow him to cut it
because “she likes the way it veils his face when he’s kneeling” (65).
Later, he describes himself as a “novelty item, a real living Indian:
that is why his prices are so inflated” (67). In the former context, he
becomes to her not a person but a representation, not a who but a
what, and she becomes the same inside her Peace Officer helmet; in
the latter, he becomes a commodity. Commodification of indigenous
people, and their images, itself has a long history.21 The interaction
is therefore both doubled and paradoxical: Wil and his lover are both
characters and representations, and the colonizer-colonized power
relationship that their sexualized interaction represents is therefore
both reiterated and inverted: in either case, it is complicated by both
who and what they are.
The Foucaldian link is further strengthened as the club is referred
to as a “temple of discipline”, linking an aesthetic of specifically
non-Native spirituality with the political tool of violence. This may
also be a response to the residential schools mentioned above, which
were mostly run by Christian religious groups and subjected Native
children to disciplinary measures intended to mould them into the
cultural shapes of Canadians.
In a sense, Robinson uses Western social theory against itself here,
and shows where it might trip over itself or in what ways it might
be escaped. If, as Foucault claims, “the ‘man’ . . . has also become a
‘man-measure’; not of things but of power” (74) – if the punish-
ment and discipline of the condemned body, whether by torture or
by more modern means, is actually an exertion of both legal and
social power – then the strategies used by the characters in “Terminal
Avenue” seek to upset and diverge from this power structure. Wil’s

lover takes on the power of punishment for herself, and demands

that Wil do the same; Wil learns to turn his own punishment, first
consensual and then non-consensual, into a space of freedom for
himself, first by consenting and therefore upsetting the balance of
power, taking some for himself, and then by removing himself men-
tally from what is being done to him by the Peace Officers. Perhaps

there is a link here to what Benita Parry calls the “production of
consent” (6), the way in which colonial power produces a hegemony
that in turn produces a kind of enforced or artificial consent that
nevertheless seems genuine. Wil’s deep ambivalence to his treatment
by his lover and his activities at the club may correspond with the
unstable nature of this kind of consent, itself corresponding to the
Bhabhaian view of the ambivalence of the colonized subject him- or
herself.
There is a constant ambivalence in this story, between pain as
cleansing and/or freeing and pain as destruction, between achieve-
ment in mainstream society as necessary and as betrayal. This
ambivalence is actualized in the conflict between the brothers, Wil
and Kevin, as to the most effective way to appropriate and wield
power. This conflict echoes the postcolonial conflict between the
“collaborators”, who take on the colonizer’s language and customs
and are rewarded for doing so by the colonial administration, and
those who attempt to drive the colonizers out and who refuse to
allow the colonizers to usurp the power of the natives – or die try-
ing. Dillon reads Kevin’s donning of the Peace Officer uniform after
his defeat at Oka as “signifying betrayal to the family” (2007b: 224),
but I would expand this reading and suggest that Kevin and Wil
stand on opposite sides of the dilemma of the colonized. That they
are brothers, related but different, may be a nod to the Bhabhaian
concept of the slippage and ambivalence of the colonized subject.
In any case, the disagreement between the brothers represents the
one between those who, like the rulers of post-Meiji Japan, seek colo-
nial power for themselves – to “have the power to change things
now” (64), as Kevin hopes – and those who fight the colonizers to
the end. It may also be inflected by the complexities of postcolonial
societies, in which power elites have taken advantage of the systems
of knowledge and control imposed by colonial powers in order to
impose similar controls on the populace. This dynamic can be seen
in the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and in Robert Mugabe’s

reign in Zimbabwe, abetted by furtive assistance or blind looks from

former colonial powers.
Space, in “Terminal Avenue”, carries a double meaning: space being
the slippage of the temporal spatiality of the events as well as the vast
reach of outer space, to which Wil has always wanted to escape. The
trope of outer space as escape route for those who feel themselves

alien on Earth is common in science fiction. For instance, the protag-
onist of Gattaca (Niccol, 1998), a genetically haphazard individual in
a eugenic world, sees his ascent into space as an escape from a world
in which he does not belong, in which he is quite literally consid-
ered “Invalid”. As well, Sun Ra’s Space is the Place (1972) ends with
the black people of the world being rescued by Ra and taken into
outer space, and therefore saved from the explosion of the planet
Earth. Paul Youngquist suggests that “the relationship between space
and race” dovetails with the relationship between the image of outer
space in black science fiction and “the material space of social life”:
“it’s the space of this world, and not of the galaxy, that needs a
change” (333). At the risk of losing some of the specificity of the
strategies of black SF, particularly the centralization of music as essen-
tial and even material element of activism, I would suggest that space,
or rather the image and imagination of space, performs a similar
materialist function in this story.
In “Terminal Avenue”, however, space is unreachable and impossi-
ble, and the trappings, discourses and iconography of space travel are
not available to Wil or to Native Canadians. Rather, they have been
co-opted and kept by the ruling class, and they cannot be used to
escape. Near the beginning of the story, as a group of Peace Officers
approach Wil, he watches them come: “In full body-armour, the five
Peace Officers are sexless and anonymous. With their visors down,
they look like old-fashioned astronauts. The landscape they move
across is the rapid transit line, the Surreycentral Skytrain station, but
if they remove their body-armour, it might as well be the moon” (63).
Instead of being a place to which Wil can escape, even the reaches
of outer space have been symbolically colonized by the military force
and therefore the power of the colonizer. Their native land colonized,
their escape forbidden or impossible, the insurmountable obstacle of
travel into space stands for the insurmountable hemming-in of First
Nations peoples into an impossible quandary, in which no space is
available to them and they cannot exist freely anywhere.

Conclusions
Science fiction, both in the form of generic tradition and conven-

tion and in the subversion of those conventions, has been a useful
and widely used tool for Japanese writers and film-makers to con-
ceptualize problems of Japanese imperialism, postcolonialism and
identity. This chapter by no means contains an exhaustive survey

of such material. Perhaps its most significant absences are the issues
of technology and virtuality in contemporary Japanese SF, a subject
that many critics, such as Takayuki Tatsumi, Sharalyn Orbaugh, Susan
Napier, Mark Bould, Mark Gilson and others have analysed. However,
one purpose of this chapter has been to take a look at Japanese SF that
has as its specific subject colonialism, empire and diaspora, SF that
is linked tightly both to Japanese history and to possible Japanese
futures.
Like Japan’s, Canada’s legacy is a complex one. There are sev-
eral layers of colonialism and cultural extermination, of immigration
by many disparate groups, and of race both as ambiguous, contin-
gent signifier and as cultural and status determinant. However, the
Native Canadian SF discussed in this chapter, along with other con-
temporary Canadian SF, is helping to tease out the tangled skein of
Canadian history, and to bring to the forefront the complex prob-
lem of Canadian identity and its discontents as well as problems
of postcoloniality more generally. The genre of science fiction has
been both used and subverted – in its combination with orature,
folktale and other traditional modes of narrative – to express many
aspects of Canadian colonial and postcolonial identity and to agitate
for social justice. The common thread linking the diverse forms of
Canadian postcolonial SF and SF-inflected work is that it subverts SF
convention, melding such tropes as space travel, futuristic dystopia
and technological advancement with narrative and formal elements
specific to each writer’s cultural heritage. For this reason, I would
argue that Canada is developing a multiplicity of science fictions, mir-
roring its growing diversity of ethnicity and culture as well as its
status as colonized space, and the individual experiences inherent
therein. In doing so, it is expanding and multiplying the genre of SF
itself.
Science fiction has always been a politically active form of litera-
ture, and these Japanese and Canadian writers have been, and are,

using that particular capacity to its fullest potential. In doing so,

they have begun to broaden the genre of science fiction, pulling it
away from its roots and transforming it, helping science fiction to
become a force for anti/postcolonial resistance and change. As Nalo
Hopkinson, another Canadian SF writer, says in her foreword to the
anthology So Long Been Dreaming: “In my hands, massa’s tools don’t

dismantle massa’s house – and in fact, I don’t want to destroy it so
much as I want to undertake massive renovations – they build me a
house of my own” (2004: 8).

2
Diaspora and Locality

Inherent in the historical fact of colonialism has been the fact
of diaspora. The human migration resulting from colonialism has
flowed in all directions. People have fled from civil wars (pre- and
post-independence), become internally or externally displaced due
to violence or unjust laws, been ousted from their homelands for
various reasons, and have sought out the wealthier imperial seat to
escape the poverty and violence caused in the first place by colonial
plundering of resources and rending of indigenous societies.
The word diaspora, originally used to describe the Jewish dis-
placement from Israel in the third century and subsequent status
as the constant stranger in a great number of strange lands, has
been expanded at times to include any movement of a group of
people from any place to any other place. Jana Evans Braziel and
Anita Mannur caution against using the term too broadly, lest it
include such things as simple vacation travel or the easy inter-
national jet-setting of the privileged class: they define diaspora as
“discordant movements” (3) that result in an “exilic or nostalgic dis-
placement from homeland” (4). Further, they suggest a theorization
of diaspora: that is, a call to explore and engage with the contesta-
tions of the term itself and with the difficult, tangled ambiguities of
various historical and contemporary diasporic movements and peo-
ples. Although Braziel and Mannur assert that recent theorizations of
diaspora “speak to different communities than postcolonies” (6), it
is impossible to conceptualize postcolonialism without recognition
56

Diaspora and Locality 57
and analysis of the diasporic movements that have been inherent to

colonization.
Like postcolonialism itself, diaspora suffers from a materialist/
discursive divide. In general, diaspora is clearly both a physical,
geographical and often economic displacement, while also a men-
tal, emotional and spiritual one. Different historical contexts vary in

their distribution of these and other elements, but most or all are
present in every case. It does not make sense, for instance, to talk
about movement of peoples across physical space without discussing
the emotional effects of displacement’s discord, nor is it sensible to
address the spiritual difficulties of the refugee without attention to
his or her likely destitution. The extent to which theorization of
diaspora engages with each side of this divide is varied, but much of
the most effective critical exploration balances the two in some way.
For Vijay Mishra, inherent in diaspora is some sense of loss, a con-
stant dissonance, a permanent wound or scar that disfigures in some
way the experience of a diasporic people. “All diasporas are imagi-
nary”, he quips, riffing on the opening of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina,
“but every diaspora is unhappy in its own way” (1996: 189). The
word “discordant”, as used by Braziel and Mannur, is therefore in this
view particularly resonant: diaspora here refers to movements that
are the result of conflict or discord at home or abroad – conflicts that
are difficult and bring about trauma, requiring a coming to terms.
In The Literature of the Indian Disapora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imag-
inary (2007), Mishra specifies that the loss inherent in disapora is an
“impossible mourning” (9). It is a longing for a pure, unhyphenated
identity, a desire for concord between where one is from and where
one is. The “diasporic imaginary”, a term coined by Mishra, refers to
“any ethnic enclave in a nation-state that defines itself . . . as a group
that lives in displacement” (14). The “imaginary” here functions
like, but in opposition to, Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communi-
ties”. Like Anderson’s nation state, diasporic communities self-define
along cultural poles: landmarks, symbols of public history and mem-
ory, and the vernacular. They are imagined in this way, and thus
come to be. However, they also define themselves specifically in
opposition to the nation state in which they live against the grain,
creating turbulations in the fabric of the nation that are both of
the nation and not of it, simultaneously foreign and native in both
directions.

Diaspora and the settler colonies
Inherent in the identity of a settler colony – Canada, America,

Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – is the fact of diaspora.
Nearly all citizens of these settler colonies are either internally or
externally diasporic, whether they or their ancestors arrived from
elsewhere or whether they were expelled from tribal lands and, as

Bonita Lawrence describes, forced either onto or off of federally
created reservations.
Diaspora becomes more complex in a “breakaway settler colony”.
Even white settlers start out diasporic, and many still trace their
ancestries back to their European roots. As Myrna Kotash writes in a
Canadian context, “ ‘colour’ is a historical and social variable”, and,
“as many hyphenated Canadians know, whiteness is provisional”
(135). However, these white settlers who have taken on the pragmatic
aspects of a settler-colony identity – whiteness being contingent, and
certain groups having “become” white as time has gone on – possess
a measure of privilege conferred upon them both by the historical
fact of white colonialism and by the continuing global domina-
tion of capital by whites. Therefore, although the postcolonialisms
of the settler colonies are different from that of a nation that itself
engaged in imperial and colonial projects – being as they are a result
rather than a progenitor of colonialism − the structure of power in
these societies according to colonial privilege bears similarities to that
of historically colonial societies such as England. Therefore, those
groups that Elleke Boehmer calls “colonised and creole” (1995: 139)
remain marginalized in these countries.
Mridula Nath Chakraborty writes of the problems inherent in
classifying postcolonial diasporic literatures as “emergent” and as
contingent upon the attention and benefit of the dominant major-
ity in a structure of representation and consumption that reinscribes
a capitalist globalizing impulse. She refers to an interview in which
Indian-Canadian writer Anita Rau Badami’s work is called “valuable”,
and thus comments: “The questions that do not even beg to be asked
are: valuable to whom and for the purchase of what?” (Moher 57;
Chakraborty 129). Chakraborty draws attention to the construction
of “postcolonial” university syllabi that adhere very closely to two
“postcolonial canons”, which she identifies as the “old postcolonial
canon” of Chinua Achebe, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Salman Rushdie

and V. S. Naipaul, and the “new canon of ‘how to manage diver-

sity’ in multiculturalism” of Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa,
Rohinton Mistry and Michael Ondaatje (130). She suggests that in
the construction of these two canons “ideological state apparatus
function through higher institutions of learning to fix these alien
hyphenated individuals ‘as generic representations of their cultures

of origin’ ”, a version of Spivak’s “native informant” (Chakraborty
132; Lloyd 230). Chakraborty uses the case of Anita Rau Badami to
highlight:
a narrative of who constitutes a “proper” Canadian writer, and

implicated in it are the old debates around citizenship, migrancy,
ethnicity, minority discourse, and what such “diversity” can teach
the dominant community. The rhetoric of who belongs to the
Canadian nation, how long it takes an immigrant to become
indigenous, and when and which diasporas can stitch themselves
into the warp and weft of the Canadian quilt is whirlpooled
around the polyethnic model of diasporas that James Clifford
theorises. (130)
Elleke Boehmer also questions the emphasis placed by dominant

Western powers on the potential pedagogical value of diasporic lit-
erature. “Far from bringing disruption”, she writes, “the foreign and
the ‘primitive’ were enlisted by Western tradition as instruments of
its own internal renewal” (1995: 139). If, as Khachig Tölölyan sug-
gests, “diasporicity manifests itself in relations of difference” (650),
it is those differences, which may be essential cultural touchstones
for diasporic communities, that are often fetishized by the dominant
group. “Difference” therefore takes on an ambivalent function.
There is also the matter of distinguishing between internally and
externally originating diasporas. That is, between the histories, con-
cerns and challenges of diasporic indigenous people who have been
displaced within the modern settler colonies, as distinct from immi-
grants who have come from elsewhere to settle within a country.
At times, the interests of and within these groups conflict, and it is
necessary to pay attention to the different systems by which different
diasporic groups have been oppressed.
Antonella Riem Natale anticipates the potential of science fiction to
deal with questions of postcolonial diaspora. After suggesting that the

diasporic writer seeks to create a “personal space within the borders of

a national identity” from (and to) which to write (18), she says that:
the postcolonial writer transposes his/her reality onto another

dimension which is linguistically and imaginatively “other”.
In this creative act, s/he translates it from beyond the plane of

reality to the plane of images, of hyper-real figures and beyond a
mimetic description. (22)
Though Natale goes on to suggest that this “hyper-reality” is actu-

alized in the form of over-much cultural specificity, an exaggeration
of “local colour” and signifiers of a particular history, I would argue
that, in a sense, the same dynamic might work also in an opposite
way. This “dimension” might take the form of one in which the
local and the historical are held in tension with the possible and
the transnational/transcultural, and even the neocultural: the inclu-
sion of alien cultures. The diasporic SF narratives analysed in this
section are examples of this dynamic, particularly Nalo Hopkinson’s
Midnight Robber, in which a version of Caribbean history is literally
“transpos[ed] . . . onto another dimension” and worked through there.
Nalo Hopkinson has put forward the descriptor “multiply located”
(Batty 200) in order to describe those writers who do not fit into
one generic mould but rather cross boundaries and locate themselves
in several. I would expand this term to include not only genre but
also other forms of identity. My argument is that, rather than see-
ing diaspora/belonging as a dichotomous opposition, a more useful
view might be to categorize “Americanness” or “Canadianness” or
“Jamaicanness” or “Indianness” or any sort of legal or cultural or con-
ceptual ctizenship as a feature, not a category, in a way that allows for a
“multiply located” identity. This inclusivity of difference would allow
for a thoroughly dynamic politics of difference, in which difference
might be mobilized to the effect of a greater diversity in SF, as opposed
to the ghettoization of “other” SF, which still happens too often.
Salt Fish Girl: Mist and Forgetfulness
Larissa Lai’s identity, like the identities of her protagonists, is mul-

tiply located: she is a Chinese-American-Canadian writer. Lai is the
author of two novels: When Fox is a Thousand (1995, republished

2004) – a thrice-woven narrative of the Chinese folk figure of the

fox, a historical Chinese poet and a modern-day Chinese-Canadian
international adoptee – and Salt Fish Girl (2002), a juxtaposition of
historical fabulism and SF future dystopia. Her work is primarily
concerned with alienation and systematic oppression, especially in
terms of race, gender and sexual orientation. Here, I undertake two

thematic readings of Salt Fish Girl: one in this chapter and one in
Chapter 4, which focuses on hybridity.
In the afterword to the 2004 edition of When Fox is a Thousand,
Lai writes: “I want this book to give materiality to the complexities
of being young, brown and female at the present time” (2004: 253).
The novel was written during the “height of the ‘identity politics’ era
in Canada”, Lai says, commenting that “identity-based work was at
once liberating and debilitating because it required the use of the lan-
guage of oppression in order to undo oppression. There was always
an element of reproduction embedded in the act of liberation” (2004:
254–255). This paradox, which is further worked out in Salt Fish Girl,
might be read as a reiteration of Audre Lorde’s oft-repeated maxim
(as already cited in Chapter 1) that one cannot dismantle the mas-
ter’s house with the master’s tools. This same theme – and opposition
to it – repeats itself across the variable body of postcolonial and other
marginalized literatures, as Hopkinson addresses it in the prologue
of So Long Been Dreaming and in Yamano’s description of postwar
Japanese SF as a “prefabricated house” built by American writers. Its
importance cannot be minimized, especially in a postcolonial read-
ing of diasporic and other marginalized literatures: the concept that
the colonized often have few discursive tools with which to articu-
late their oppression or liberation, because the colonizer has taken
them away through the imposition of his own discourse, either as a
method of control or sometimes, ironically, in an attempt to “help”.1
The many-stranded, intertwined story of Salt Fish Girl swings back
and forth between two linked points of view. Nu Wa is a shape-
shifting creature who becomes many things in turn: a lover, a thief,
an immigrant to a place “unmoored from history” (139), and then to
one where history itself, and her history, has begun to bubble con-
stantly into the present. Miranda is a Chinese-Canadian girl who,
living in the mid-twenty-first century, has been exiled with her family
from the suburban neocompany town of Serendipity to the Unregu-
lated Zone, the ruins of Vancouver. Like Nalo Hopkinson’s Toronto

in her Brown Girl in the Ring, (explored in Chapter 4), the Unregu-
lated Zone is the space of those who are both figuratively and literally
marginalized.
It is in the book’s scenes on the “Island of Mist and Forgetfulness”
where memory and diaspora are most strongly linked. Nu Wa, in
the form of a Chinese village girl, has fallen out with her lover the

Salt Fish Girl, who insists on working in a sweatshop factory mak-
ing wind-up toys for the Western market – she insists that “it’s not
that bad . . . at least it’s work” (119). Nu Wa prefers to be a pickpocket,
relieving rich Westerners – implicitly colonizers, as the sequence is
set after Britain’s Opium War victories – of their money. A rift grows
between them, between the Salt Fish Girl who, like Kevin in “Termi-
nal Avenue” (explored in Chapter 1), plays by the Westerners’ rules
in order to get by, and Nu Wa who, like Wil in “Terminal Avenue”,
subverts those rules and attempts to chip away at the power of the
powerful.
One day, Nu Wa notices a tall, pale woman feeding pigeons. The
woman, Edwina, entrances Nu Wa, takes her hand and brings her to
her “home, the city of Hope on the Island of Mist and Forgetfulness”
(124). The gates of the city read “Progress” and “Democracy”, and
when she sits down in a hotel bar with Edwina, Nu Wa feels “a new
language enter her”; following this, she goes to urinate and feels her
“old language gushing away from [her], liquid, yellow and irretriev-
able” (126). One of the many tragedies of diaspora is the loss of one’s
own language, not through forgetfulness but rather through subalter-
nity and lack of opportunity – communities are imagined partially
by their vernacular, and, as in the case of Nu Wa, assimilation often
requires the sacrifice of one’s own language along with its concomi-
tant culture. The old language is treated as a waste product to be
voided, rather than a cultural touchstone to be valued.
Edwina does not pay the bill as promised – an evocation of the
bait-and-switch of the diasporic promise for a “better life” – and Nu
Wa is forced to work for the hotel as a “toilet scrubber and bed-
sheet changer” while under threat of deportation (128–129). There
is a bleakly funny irony in the way in which this sequence of magical
realism mirrors and condenses the diasporic experience, particularly
for trafficked women and other “illegal” immigrants, who, like Nu
Wa, must often work at menial and exhausting jobs for little pay –
or, again, as in the telephone scamming job that Nu Wa takes to

get by, jobs that are themselves illegal. The sequence, like the mis-
nomer of the City of Hope, is full of small ironies that add up to
a Thomas King-style ironic deconstruction of immigration politics.
The administrative centre of the Island of Mist and Forgetfulness is
called Ville Despair, an ironic corruption of the French Ville d’Espoir,
meaning “City of Hope”. It “had once upon a time been settled by the

French”, a fact that draws a clear link between the island and modern
Canada, with the English, “ever competitive”, having named their
settlement “Hope” in response (139). (This, of course, might also be
read as a comment on the subaltern position of French-Canadians
within the nation state of Canada.) Edwina shows up again, takes Nu
Wa to Spool Island for a trip to the beauty salon (staffed by brown
women), and on the way back uses her as a mule to transport heroin.
Five years later, when she is finally released from prison (where she
studied statistics in the hope of making a decent life for herself), Nu
Wa is told that she must join the Statistics Guild to work as a statis-
tician, but must have five years’ experience as a statistician on the
Island of Mist and Forgetfulness in order to join the Guild (143). This
is the sort of impossible institutional catch-22 too often imposed on
immigrants, whose lower social and economic status the dominant
culture benefits from and has an interest in propagating.
In the end, Nu Wa escapes, but is derided by Edwina for doing so,
“after all [Edwina has] invested” (145); even when Nu Wa finally kills
Edwina out of hatred and despair, and her blood spills out cold across
the bed, Edwina remains convinced of her own inherent superiority.
The stark juxtapositions of the new (post)colonial immigrant’s hope
for a better life and the stark reality – one of despair, forgetfulness
and a mist that hides the way home – show the schizophrenic reality
of many immigrant experiences.
The concept of culture and cultural memory as diasporic detritus,
with no more importance than urine in the bowl, is challenged both
by the above sequence and by the concept of the “memory disease”.
In the same story, near-future protagonist Miranda is one of many
who suffer – or, perhaps, are gifted – with a condition in which they
are compelled to live in the most painful parts of the past. This condi-
tion is nicknamed the “memory disease” (59), and is co-symptomatic
with a strong scent that lingers around the body – scent, of course,
being the sense most closely associated with memory. It is associ-
ated with the genetic modifications that scientists have carried out

on almost all forms of life, including human beings, symbolically

co-opting the process of hybridity for the purposes of power. The
book’s critique of the concept that memory should be seen as a “dis-
ease” rather than a life force – that the histories and memories of
colonized peoples ought to be forgotten and their bodies co-opted for
the purpose of progress − is perhaps its strongest and most incisive

element. The weight of history – the homesickness and displacement
of diaspora, the subjugation and literal objectification of women and
people of colour – is in truth inescapable for all of the characters,
most of whom have been unwillingly changed in one way or another.
In all, the story moves between past and future, riverbank and prison
cell, privileged and subjugated lives, linking all of them together in
the same larger system that spans both miles and centuries. Though
the novel is many things, it is perhaps primarily a meditation on the
ways in which the lessons of the past make themselves known in the
present, whether unbidden or chosen.
Midnight Robber and Multiply Located Histories
Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican-born writer who immigrated to Canada

when she was 16, burst onto the SF literary scene in 1998 with her
first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, which won the first Warner Aspect
First Novel Contest (and which I address in Chapter 4 of this book).
Since then, she has published several novels and collections of short
stories, as well as many stories in anthologies and magazines, and has
edited three collections: Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean
Fabulist Fiction (2000), Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003) and, with Uppinder
Mehan, So Long Been Dreaming (2004), the first-ever anthology of self-
consciously “postcolonial science fiction”.
Midnight Robber, Hopkinson’s second novel, includes several tra-
ditional science-fictional tropes: planetary colonialism, interdimen-
sional travel and a near-omniscient computer. It is less explicitly
fabulist than Brown Girl in the Ring but it draws no less on Caribbean
culture and history: a hybrid story that uses elements of the Western
discourse of science fiction within its own totality as a narrative.
These themes run through nearly all of Hopkinson’s work. She
applies the linguistic conventions and spiritual traditions of her
native Jamaica to both a North American idiom – at times – and a
science-fictional idiom, centring the experience of black, diasporic
and marginalized peoples in these contexts.

Midnight Robber is the story of the young girl Tan-Tan, whose father,
Antonio, accidentally kills his wife’s lover and escapes through the
“Dimension Veil”, carrying Tan-Tan along with him. They land in
a place called New Half-Way Tree, populated both by sentient aliens
and by cruel humans. Tan-Tan befriends the aliens by accepting them
as intelligent beings, but she must find her way through trials of

her own, including her father’s inappropriate sexual attentions and
his girlfriend’s murderous jealousy. It is here where Tan-Tan, raised
on stories of the brilliant, independent Midnight Robber, herself
becomes the legendary figure.
Returning to the concept of “multiply located” identities discussed
in the introduction to this chapter – one that maps partially onto
the multiply layered concept of identity, and which is inherent to
diasporic identity – I would argue that this text engages with the mul-
tiplicity, proliferation and (particularly) ambivalence of both historical
and potential identity in a diasporic context.
The planets of Toussaint and New Half-Way Tree are presented
as versions of each other, and the relationship between them, like
many other relationships in the text, is both doubled and ambiva-
lent. The “Dimension Veil” separating them is a one-way portal
between, it would seem initially, two different forms of the same
world, as the novel’s griot-like narrator explains it: “New Half-Way
Tree is how Toussaint planet did look before the Marryshow Corpo-
ration sink them Earth Engine Number 127 down into it like God
entering he woman; plunging into the womb of soil to impregnate
the planet with the seed of Granny Nanny”2 (2). This explana-
tion of the relationship between the two places therefore sets up
an intense ambivalence in the settlement of Toussaint (and, as is
later revealed, of New Half-Way Tree). On the one hand, the image
of the land as submissive female – and colonizer as impregnat-
ing male, spreading his seed both materially and metaphorically to
untouched distant places – is one of the primary metaphors used
by colonialists and colonial writers to describe the colonies.3 It also
has a parallel later in the book, when Tan-Tan describes her repeated
rape by her father: “He was forever trying to plant me, like I was
his soil to harvest” (260). Another common expression used by
colonialists and colonial writers was to describe the parts of the
world not yet colonized as “dark”, implying that they were with-
out enlightenment: similarly, New Half-Way Tree is “a dub version
of Toussaint”, the two described as “a thing and the shadow of that

thing . . . in almost the same place together” (2). As well, Marryshow

is a corporation, as the progenitors of many colonial endeavours were,
particularly in Canada with the Hudson’s Bay Company and the
fur trade; and the image of “God . . . and he woman” echoes iron-
ically the Christian myth of the divinely begotten child-messiah.
The name Marryshow itself signifies the ambivalence of the black

colonial project in the story: Marryshow himself hoped for a time
when “the West Indian Dominion will take its place, small though
that may be, in the glorious Empire”.4 It soon becomes clear that
the colonists on Toussaint have genetically altered the indigenous
life forms to suit the needs of humans, and have eradicated – have
committed genocide upon – douen, the indigenous aliens who later
turn out to be intelligent and who still live on New Half-Way Tree,
“to make Toussaint safe for people from the nation ships” (33).
Therefore, in one sense, the colonists on Toussaint are replicating
the colonization and genocide of their own ancestors, who were
“Taino Carib and Arawak; African; Asian; Indian; even the Euro,
though some wasn’t too happy to acknowledge that-there bloodline”
(18). An interesting result of this replication is that colonialism is
expanded outside of the exclusive domain of the historical colonial
powers, and portrayed as an independently destructive force no mat-
ter who its perpetrator is. It is a non-essentialist view, and one that
turns out to be explicitly anti-racist: descendants of colonized people
are not valorized or idealized, but are rather portrayed as poten-
tially colonial – the same as historical colonizers – and therefore as
possessing agency.
On the other hand, the colonists are free this time, and have come
to this new planet to settle in a place where they would have the
ability to determine their own destiny – the ultimate realization of
a separatist political project.5 At Jonkanoo, a communal festival on
Toussaint named after the festival in the Bahamas, the artisan Ben
explains to Tan-Tan’s nurse the symbolic meaning of the hat with
candles that he puts on Tan-Tan’s head:
Long time, that hat woulda be make in the shape of a sea-ship,

not a rocket ship, and them black people inside woulda been
lying pack-up head to toe in they own shit, with chains round
them ankles. Let the child remember how black people make this
crossing as free people this time. (21)

Escape from Earth is implicitly seen as an escape from history: over-

writing the narrative of the Middle Passage, the deadly sea journey
of African slaves to their eventual destinations with another one in
which diaspora is free and voluntary. There is a philosophical simi-
larity here, however, between this escape from history and the one
posed by the sinking of Japan in the narrative of Japan Sinks, dis-

cussed later in this chapter: geography and identity are not identical,
and the erasure, by leaving or by sinking, of the land of origin does
not elide cultural memory. In Midnight Robber, the slave narrative has
not been erased but rather displaced – the genocide on to the bodies of
Toussaint’s douen and other life forms, and the slavery on to the peo-
ple sent to New Half-Way Tree. As Tan-Tan discovers, there is a whole
settlement on New Half-Way Tree, Begorrat (named after a promi-
nent slave-plantation owner in Trinidad in the early 1800s), in which
“Boss” has a sugarcane plantation and keeps slaves to work it. When
the slave woman she meets describes her condition as “indentured”,
Tan-Tan thinks: “Indentured. A word from her history lessons” (285).
Here, then, diaspora functions as an unsuccessful attempt to run from
history rather than learn from it.
Journeys in Midnight Robber are also spaces of ambivalence, due to
the contrast between the historical context of the forced diaspora of
slavery; the colonists’ voluntary, even joyous, diaspora on Toussaint;
and the further exilic diaspora of those on New Half-Way Tree.
At Jonkanoo, Tan-Tan listens to the tale of the Robber King, a cos-
tumed master of ceremonies and storyteller, who tells a story, “much
embroidered over the centuries”, that:
mirrored the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, an African

noble’s son stolen into slavery on seventeenth-century [sic] Earth.
The Robber Kings’ stream-of-consciousness speeches always told
of escaping the horrors of slavery and making their way into brig-
andry as a way of surviving in the new and terrible white devils’
land in which they’d found themselves. (57)
Despite recent claims, published after Hopkinson’s book, that

Equiano was born in America and not Africa (as the Robber King
claims in his own version of the Interesting Narrative), the story of
Equiano, who purchased himself out of slavery and became an abo-
litionist, is an interesting and apt reference point for the narrative

of the people of Toussaint.6 The use of the term “brigandry” here

may have a double signification, however, referring both to Equiano’s
work in the Caribbean slave trade for Robert King, and to the
“brigandry” of the colonial journey of those from Toussaint. It has
been a crossing of free people, but also one of colonization and eco-
nomic advantage; and some of those people, those on New Half-Way

Tree – the “shadow side” that most people on Toussaint would pre-
fer not to see or recognize – are made slaves again. The journey
between Toussaint and New Half-Way Tree is also contrasted with the
original colonial journey to Toussaint: during the dimensional shift,
Tan-Tan and her father Antonio are “trapped in a confining space,
being taken away from home like the long time ago Africans” (74).
The dimension-shift of the journey through the veil entails a literal
transformation and instability of body shape: at one point, Tan-Tan
feels herself turned into a manicou rat and sees and smells her father
turn into a mongoose-like creature (74). This ambivalence of phys-
ical form seems a similar, or perhaps a responsive, strategy to Toni
Morrison’s use of absence to describe the Middle Passage in Beloved
(1987). Rather than absence, however, the shifting of Tan-Tan and
Antonio’s bodies seems to represent the fearful anticipation of pos-
sible futures once they reach their destination, a fear that combines
the unknown of the actual conditions, the alienness of the journey
itself and the contrast with the freedom of the ancestral journey to
Toussaint to produce a sense of the terror of exile.
Upon her arrival on New Half-Way Tree, Tan-Tan is greeted
by Chichibud, a douen who speaks her language, and she learns
throughout the narrative that douen are not animals but are rather
the colonized people of New Half-Way Tree. At first Tan-Tan is startled
that he can communicate with her, and he tells her, “Anglopatwa,
Francopatwa, Hispanopatwa, and Papiamento. Right? We learn all
oonuh speech, for oonuh don’t learn we own” (95). The concept
of the patois or creole language is a recurring theme in the narrative
as well as being a metatextual stylistic strategy; Hopkinson herself
is the first science fiction writer to write in Jamaican patois, which
works to ground the text in a particular history as it speculates about
the potential trajectories of that history. The most important nar-
rative function of linguistic creole in the story, however, is that of
Nannysong, the “creole” language that the pedicab runners (51) – a
Luddite-like community of those who prefer to live low-tech – have

developed to talk to “Granny Nanny”, the Grande Anansi Nanotech

Interface. Granny Nanny is the AI governing the communications
cybernet as well as the “eshu”, AI beings that take care of menial
tasks on Toussaint (and, significantly, call humans “Master”). Ulti-
mately, it is the hybridity of this creole language, actualized in the
body of Tan-Tan’s eventual son, that provides the possibility of a

link between the exiles on New Half-Way Tree and Toussaint. Tan-
Tan’s son, who she calls Tubman, is himself an ambivalent figure.
Born of an incestuous rape, he nevertheless represents to her the
potential for freedom, and represents in the narrative a new gener-
ation of sorts, a generation for whom the entire body is calibrated
for communion with Granny Nanny, who has searched for Tan-Tan
through “infinite dimensions” before finding her too late. Granny
Nanny has therefore incarnated herself as part of the body of Tan-
Tan’s son, crossing the Dimension Veil to do so. Granny Nanny
herself is a paradoxical figure of domination and of several indige-
nous oral traditions. Just as the rape of the planet of Toussaint
may yet be atoned for, if not erased, so might Antonio’s rape of
Tan-Tan bring about some eventual good despite in itself being an
evil act.
Toussaint and New Half-Way Tree are therefore multiply located.
There is an essential distance between them that is actualized in their
separation from each other, but is eventually reconciled at the end
of the book. Granny Nanny, the provider of the orature that makes
up the book’s metanarration, is the only being that can exist on both
sides of the Dimension Veil, and therefore it is inherently “multiply
located”. Granny Nanny’s orature, both the method of telling and
the traditional stories themselves, are the thing that ties one loca-
tion to another, that ties the diasporic subject both to home and to
the adopted home. Even this, however, is ambivalent: for all Granny
Nanny’s protection, for all her giving Tubman a “sixth sense” as she
claims, because he is “a living connection with the Grande Anansi
Nanotech Interface” (328), the fact remains that Granny Nanny
is also associated with the colonizers. She is, as Tan-Tan calls her,
“mother, caretaker to a nation” (328), a nation that has colonized
Toussaint and denuded it of its indigenous people. Therefore, Tan-
Tan’s naming her son Tubman might be read either as an irony or as
an aspiration: either he represents the first colonial agent of Granny
Nanny on New Half-Way Tree, or he represents the potential to use

the power of Granny Nanny to build a non-colonial society: like his

namesake, “the human bridge from slavery to freedom” (328).
Diaspora and the Disappearing Nation: Three Versions

of Komatsu Sakyō’s Japan Sinks

Komatsu Sakyō’s novel Nihon chinbotsu (Japan Sinks, 1973) is one
of the most famous works of modern Japanese SF, and its 1976
translation into English made it the first major work of Japanese SF
to become a bestseller overseas. It is included here rather than in
the previous chapter because it has as its heart a nearly universal
postcolonial anxiety about diaspora and its implications.
Nihon chinbotsu contains its story in the title: the Japanese
archipelago sinks for ever into the sea due to a fluke of mantle convec-
tion currents and plate tectonics, leaving the Japanese people perma-
nently diasporic. The narrative follows various characters in different
positions – scientists, politicians and civilians – as they deal with the
process and aftermath of the sinking. In the end, Japan is entirely
submerged and its people sent into permanent diaspora. The work
deals with questions of diaspora, of course, but also of nationality and
nationhood, the role of geography in determining national identity,
and the possibility of constructing identity in a radically different
way. This section will look at Michael Gallagher’s translation of the
original novel, as well as two film adaptations of the story: Moritani
Shirō’s popular 1973 film and the recent 2006 adaptation directed by
Higuchi Shinji – whose work is mostly associated with daikaiju films
and blockbuster anime – which featured teen-favourite celebrities in
the main roles and a drastically, significantly changed ending.7
In a foreword to the 1995 Kodansha edition of his novel, Komatsu
suggests that the novel was conceived as a comment on Japan’s
propensity towards natural disasters: as a volcanic island close to
the edge of a tectonic plate, Japan is more prone to earthquake and
tsunami than many other nations (7–8). Many political events in
Japan have been catalyzed by natural disasters, particularly earth-
quakes and typhoons. Marius Jansen makes the argument that major
waves of peasant uprisings in the Tokugawa period, for instance, were
usually spurred by natural disasters that caused crop loss (Jansen
225–226). As well, the Socialist Party’s parliamentary loss in 1996 to
the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had been in power from

1955 to 1993 and remained again in control of both houses of the

Diet from 1996 until August 2007, was brought on at least partially by
the aftermath of the 1995 Kobe earthquake (Beasley 2000: 291–292).
However, the idea of a permanent Japanese diaspora is more inter-
esting from the perspective of postcolonial studies. Through the
sinking of their homeland, Thomas Schnellbächer suggests, “the sub-

merged Japan [at the end of the novel] has been virtualized and
internalized” (Schnellbächer 393). Japanese identity, in other words,
has been made inherently a diasporic identity. Functionally, in Japan
Sinks, its sinking has nullified the “ontopology” – the conflation of
ontology and topology – that Gayatri Spivak and Jacques Derrida
have critiqued (Dayal 46); the “diasporic double consciousness” (47)
that Samir Dayal suggests in place of a dichotomous and therefore
conflicted identity is enforced, in real terms, because the topology
of Japan no longer exists. The diasporic longing for the homeland,
a now impossible dream, is transformed into an identity divorced
from a geographical referent and therefore associated entirely, exclu-
sively, with non-geographical markers of identity.8 Schnellbächer
writes that Komatsu’s narrative ultimately asserts “a quiet confidence
in the worth and durability of the Japanese identity – understood
in cultural, not national terms” (393). This assertion, while astute,
is somewhat simplistic; the concept of a nation is not limited to
geographical identity. Anthony D. Smith has suggested that nation-
alism can be divided into two categories, “territorial” and “ethnic”
(Özkirimli 181–182). Whilst his work ought to be taken with a grain
of salt, especially in his Orientalist contention that “Western” nations
are territorial and “Eastern” nations are ethnically constructed –
a contention that is disproven by the imperial history of Japan itself –
there is in this view of the nation some valuable sense that the
concept of nation can be constructed beyond, and even without,
geography: that the nation is a permeable, changeable and adaptable
concept. A diasporic identity predicated on culture therefore includes
the nation, which itself is not limited to geographical identity, as
Smith and Benedict Anderson, and more recently Thomas Foster
and Mark Poster, have suggested.9 Schnellbächer writes that Komatsu
“provocatively leaves open” the question as to whether national
identity is inextricably tied to land (392); certainly, the novel presents
both views. Perhaps it is possible to resolve the question, then, by
conceptualizing the nation in a different way: as a community whose

“imagined” nature, to invoke Benedict Anderson once more, allows

it to float free of geographical moorings if necessary, despite its birth
within them. It is also worth noting that the fictional diaspora of
Japan is doubly imagined: the strength of science fiction in this case
is that it has the capacity to imagine potential, as well as historical,
communities and forms of community.

Japan’s empire, however, as with all empires, was both cultural and
geographical: in a discussion of the relationship of Japan Sinks to
Japanese colonial and postcolonial history, the question of Japan as
geographical entity as well as nation is necessarily relevant. The text
is full of sardonic references to the Japanese Empire and its failure,
which in very real terms had to do with sinking. One of the turning
points in the Pacific War was the sinking of the vast majority of the
Japanese fleet, both merchant and navy, by 1944, which meant that
Japan was unable either to defend itself by sea or to import resources
necessary for the war effort (Beasley 210). Schnellbächer points to
the scientist Nakata’s ironic invocation of the old Sino-Japanese War
folk song “The Valiant Sailor”, in which it is asked, “Oh, have we
sunk the Teien yet?” (234); “the joke is that, though incapacitating it
at anchor was a key success for Japan in winning this war, the ship
never did sink” (391). Earlier in the novel, Nakata finds amusing the
government’s resurrection of the old imperial slogan “A Bold Leap
Into the World” for the purposes of encouraging the populace to look
outward in preparation for potential disaster (81). Kuneida, a repre-
sentative from the prime minister’s office, replies with a parody of
a song that was popular in the period of expansion in Manchuria:
“If you go, I go too/Who wants to stay behind/In shaky old Japan?”
(82). The juxtaposition of the slogan and the song captures per-
fectly the ambivalence of Japanese colonialism: not only was there
a simultaneous idealization and denigration of the colonies them-
selves, but the colonial drive was coupled with a sense of disdain
for Japan – disdain that, it can be argued, drew from a deep well of
self-resentment for its past as victim of Western free-trade imperi-
alism. Japanese imperialism was at least partially driven by a desire
to join, as Jansen calls them, the “great powers”; Kang Sang-jung
describes this as a form of Orientalism perpetrated by Japan, and
frames Japan’s dilemma as a paradoxical desire both to escape from
and to lead East Asia (100). In this way, Komatsu has encapsulated
the imperial dilemma of Japan, which has been transformed here

ironically into the diasporic dilemma: in this case, Japan will be not
a colonizer but a homeless, diasporic people, not powerful but pow-
erless. These textual elements also tie together the science-fictional
device of the sinking of Japan and the metaphorical “sinking” of the
Japanese Empire. However, the reality, in the novel as in history, is
more complex than this. As Schnellbächer writes: “There is much in

the old Japanese Empire that is best left to go under–yet in some
important aspects, it will never sink” (Schnellbächer 391). If we con-
sider the nation as detachable from geography, then the history of
the nation does not die with the geographical nation itself. Japan
will carry even into its own diaspora a history of imperialism, a his-
tory that is discussed at the UN meeting regarding which countries
will take in refugees. Just as history cannot be rewritten or broken at
the site of nuclear disaster, and just as disaster does not cut ties with
the past, neither does the sinking of Japan. Watari, the old man who
functions as a kind of sage, expresses this sentiment as the scientists
huddle around him and ash falls outside: “Once this Japan of ours
is gone forever, once it is taken from the Japanese, then our iden-
tity is simply that of human beings, it would seem, but in truth the
problem cannot be reduced to terms so simple” (155). Watari himself
is Komatsu’s ironic reference to an important part of Japanese impe-
rial history – that some communities in Japan were already diasporic,
descended from people brought to Japan either willingly or unwill-
ingly during its imperial period, the “hidden” diaspora about which
Kang Sang-jung writes. Though Watari is presented throughout the
text as both a source of ultimate wisdom and as the ultimate in
traditional Japanese identity, he reveals with his dying breath that
his father was a Chinese monk (232). It is worth noting, as well
(though Komatsu significantly does not address this in the novel),
that Japanese diaspora is not a new idea, and that some Japanese peo-
ple had already been scattered – and, at times, persecuted, as in the
American and Canadian internment camps during the Second World
War – around the world. Japanese identity, therefore, is itself unsta-
ble and changeable, is itself a process rather than a stable category: its
diaspora will not be a new thing, a breaking off of history, but will
rather be another step in a process of identity formation.
In Japan Sinks, the Japanese representative, Nozaki,10 meets the
Australian prime minister in an attempt to persuade Australia to take
in Japanese refugees. Nozaki is asked about the potential for other

countries to take on refugees as well, particularly the Soviet Union,

whose huge, sparsely populated reach extends across to Asia. Nozaki
mentions that the Soviet Union is “beyond our comprehension”
(149) in many ways, but “its record with regard to racial minorities
gives grounds for hope” (150). “Except for the problem of the Jews,
that is”, replies the prime minister, as an aside; but this brings into

the discussion the dilemma of one of the only other permanently
diasporic peoples in the world: the Jewish people.11 Interestingly, the
existence of Israel is brought up only obliquely in the meeting, in that
it is the Jordanian representative to the UN who mentions the prob-
lems of refugee camps, perhaps referring to the Palestinian refugee
camps in the Israeli-occupied territories; at the time Nihon chinbotsu
was published in Japanese, the Yom Kippur War of 1973 had not yet
happened. Throughout the novel, then, the Jews are treated alter-
nately as an example of what the Japanese might become and a con-
trasting example of what the Japanese are not. In the scene in which
the scientists visit Watari, the ethnologist, Fukuhara, comments:
The example of the Jewish people is not especially relevant . . . . The

Jews have the experience of a two-thousand-year period of exile.
Whereas this island people of ours have had the happy experi-
ence of living secure in their own country for a like period . . . .
Would we gain some wisdom from our Diaspora over the years?
And throughout such a period, would the Japanese people remain
the Japanese people? (154)
It seems to me, however – and to Watari – that the example of the

Jewish people is entirely relevant here. If one uses the Jews as an
example, a group that has over thousands of years retained not only
a cultural but also arguably a national identity despite being entirely
in diaspora, Fukuhara’s question is answered. The Japanese would not
remain unchanged, but would become Japanese-in-diaspora, because
their identities are a process. The term “Japanese” would then become
a definitional problem, as the term “Jew” has become, but would
remain and retain its relevance in some way.12 Watari answers:
. . . we have our karma – in our culture, our language, our history.

And that karma will be resolved when this nation called Japan and
its culture and its history – when all alike are swept away with the

land itself. But the people of Japan will still be a young people, a
people uniquely gifted. And this other karma, a living karma, is
one that will go on. (155)
Schnellbächer suggests that this response is “not the expression of
fatalism, but of hope” (393). I would argue that these two pas-
sages together are something more complex than either fatalism or

hope: they are rather an expression of the ultimate unknowability
of diaspora, the ultimate uncertainty of exile. The second passage is
also problematic in its suggestion that the historical “karma” of Japan
can ever be swept beneath the waves, and that the living “karma” of
the present and future can be divorced from the historical “karma”
of the Japanese Empire. Like an inversion of the Teien, the islands of
Japan may sink, but the Japanese nation never will. Even the erasure
of Mount Fuji beneath the waves cannot sever Japan from its his-
tory. As long as the diasporic Japanese remember Japan and consider
themselves part of the Japanese nation, Komatsu’s text suggests, they
will bring their history – all of it – with them wherever they go.
Nippon chinbotsu (1973) and Nihon chinbotsu (2006):

Diaspora or Salvation?
The VHS copy of Nippon chinbotsu13 that I watched while undertak-

ing research in Japan was taped from a television special in the 1990s,
and included after the credits a few moments of the television presen-
ter speaking. Although the segment was not long enough to catch his
name, one of his comments on the film was particularly noteworthy.
He suggested that the point of the film was not whether or not Japan
would actually sink, but was whether the Japanese people could be
international. The separation at the end, he suggested, was not an end
for the film’s lovers, Onodera and Reiko, but rather a new beginning.
Susan Napier has a different perspective: she sees the film as “homage
to history” (336) and an “elegy to a lost Japan” (335). Japan has been
“lost”, Napier suggests, because the legacy of the occupation coupled
with the Economic Miracle of the 1960s had given the Japanese peo-
ple a sense of “eroding identity and an ambivalent attitude toward
power and success” (335). Although these views seem to be in con-
flict, it is possible to synthesize them: Nippon chinbotsu, building on
Komatsu’s novel, reaches both back into the past and forward into
the future, functioning as a Janus-like waypoint between them. Like

the novel, it is neither funereal dirge for an idealized nativist past nor
creation of an empireless tabula rasa, but is rather a complex work-
ing through of questions of Japanese identity. This identity, as Napier
suggests, is not “eroded” but transformed.
Nippon chinbotsu is more expressly political than Komatsu’s novel,
though sometimes in ways that speak more to the difference in media

than differences in purpose. The scene in the novel between Nozaki
and the Australian prime minister is relatively subtle in its presenta-
tion of motivation, with the prime minister attempting to distance
himself from his family’s “White Australia” past while at the same
time justifying to himself more subtle racism in his stereotyping of
Nozaki’s outward lack of emotionality as the famous “inscrutable
smile” of the Asian (149). In the film, however, the prime minister
is explicit in his simultaneous greed and concern. After he is gifted
with the Buddha statue, as in the novel, he says to an aide: “If we
have to accept Japanese, I’d prefer them to be treasures rather than
people . . . if we let Japanese into our country, they will simply use our
land and resources to build themselves another country.” In another
correspondence with the situation of the Jews during the Second
World War, this declaration closely mirrors the contention of T. W.
White, Australia’s delegate at the Evian conference in 1938 to discuss
the issue of Jewish refugees fleeing from the Nazis, that “under the
circumstances, Australia cannot do more . . . as we have no real racial
problem, we are not desirous of importing one”.14
The concept of the Japanese nation carving another sovereign
nation state out of Australian territory is what bothers the Australian
prime minister in the film: he does not trust that they will stay
diasporic, but rather worries that they will want a country of their
own once more – and, implicitly, that they may again become an
imperial nation. These anxieties are likely borne both out of a territo-
rial anxiety, in terms of Australia’s concern for its own sovereignty
and its concern about Japan’s imperial past, and a certain latent
racism. As well, the UN meeting in the film is clearer in terms of
its politics: the Jordanian ambassador explicitly uses the state of
Israel as his framework for discussing the problems that arise when
a vast new population settles in an area whose ownership is unclear,
displacing natives and forming a new nation state. The Australian
prime minister’s worry, therefore, becomes expressly linked to histor-
ical example. While I do not mean to suggest that the film takes a
particular political position regarding Israel, like the novel it presents

(but more explicitly) the diasporic problems of the Jews and the
troubles of Israel as a ghost that haunts the potential future of the
Japanese people.
Nippon chinbotsu is, in terms of formal genre, primarily an SF dis-
aster movie. Like most other Japanese disaster films, as well as many
disaster films in general, it contains both political and social com-

mentary. There is great emphasis on the scenes of destruction, which
resemble both war-film bombing raids and daikaiju (giant monster)
films. Shots of wide-scale destruction, using intricate miniatures and
waves of water, alternate with close-up shots of the victims them-
selves. A man begs for help but no one helps him; someone who is
on fire falls out of a car; one particularly unfortunate woman has
her skull nearly bisected by a jagged sheet of glass that protrudes
from her eye, blood running down her cheek. There is fire, as in
bombing raids; there are collapses, such as Gojira caused; and there
is water, rushing in to engulf the cities. The sea itself is a daikaiju
in this film, creating havoc that has real significance. The film even
bears traces of the threat of nuclear warfare: the charred bodies in
the aftermath of the destruction wrought by the tsunami, heaped
like cordwood, resemble wartime photos of the victims of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. This Japanese disaster, like so many others, includes
the influence of its predecessors, and in this way the device of sci-
ence fiction has been used to work through issues of identity and
anxiety.
At the end of the film, as in the novel, Japan sinks entirely, with the
names of the sunken cities floating like ghosts over an ocean that is
intensely blue. The movie ends with close-up shots of Onodera and
Reiko, the former on a train in Siberia and the latter on a train in
Switzerland, and then a final shot of a train receding into the dis-
tance. Napier suggests that the film has “definitive narrative closure”
(330), but I would suggest that it does not; that, in fact, the purpose
of this ending, in which the lovers end up in different places and may
never see each other again, is to leave the narrative open. In this, the
film and the novel agree: the future is unknown, and it will be up to
the diasporic Japanese, cut loose into the world, to determine what
the Japanese nation becomes.
The 2006 version of Nihon chinbotsu15 , on the other hand, might
as well be called Nihon chinbotanai, “Japan Doesn’t Sink”. Despite
its being titled “Japan Sinks”, Japan, in fact, does not do anything
of the sort. The film was an enormously popular blockbuster on its

release, though it has not yet been released outside of Japan. It stars
pop singer Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, from the popular teen band SMAP,
as Onodera, and the actress Kou Shibasaki as Reiko. The narrative is
altered heavily, and most significant is the change in the ending: the
scientists figure out a way to use a nuclear-type bomb to disintegrate
part of the ocean floor and stop Japan from sinking, and Onodera

sacrifices himself to save the rest of the country. Like Takodoro in
the novel, he commits a shinjū, or “love suicide”, for Japan. The
thrust of the narrative therefore becomes personal rather than politi-
cal, the story of one man’s sacrifice for Japan rather than the story of
a nation’s diaspora.
Of course, the personal is political, and the rest of the film is
significant in its implicit political overtones. Its stance is very dif-
ferent from that of Komatsu’s novel, which sought to work out
philosophical issues from a relatively neutral, though decidedly anti-
nationalist, position: it would be fair to call this film nationalist in
its sentiment. No foreign countries are visited, and foreigners are
not seen at all – the audience is not shown UN meetings or meet-
ings with foreign dignitaries as in the scene with the Australian
prime minister in the novel and in Moritani’s film. Foreigners are
only shown at the beginning, when an American scientist gives
a talk about Japan’s imminent doom, and during foreign “news-
casts”. Foreign countries outrightly refuse to take in Japanese refugees
(rather than vacillating), and there is “TV coverage” of violent anti-
Japanese-immigration riots. The Japanese stock markets crash in the
wake of concerns about Japan’s geological stability, and the news-
caster implies that this is because the United States has abandoned
Japan. This is a significant development, considering the histori-
cal unequal treaties, the current close economic interdependence
between Japan and America in which power is tilted in favour of
America, and the historical echo of the atomic bomb attacks. The
gift of a single national treasure to Australia becomes a poignant
scene in front of a mountain temple in autumn, part of a mon-
tage of Japan’s slow destruction, as Kyoto’s treasures are packaged
up for transport overseas, and monks bow their heads and pray. Sig-
nificantly, large boxes are marked for China and the United States,
a reflection of the difficult relationship between Japan and both
countries in recent years. This detail may also signify Japan’s slowly
rising nationalist sentiment, resulting in resentment of America for
occupying the country after the war, as well as fraught relations with

China, against which Japan opened the Pacific War and lost. This is
not a story of Japan’s exile into the world: it is a story of Japan against
the world.
In the end, Japan is saved by the sacrifice of Onodera, who pilots
a submarine to slot a specially developed undersea bomb in its
launcher – in a scene reminiscent of American averted-disaster films

such as Armageddon (1998). It is not a story of how Japan would sink
and why. Nor is it a story of Japan without Japan, Japan in diaspora.
The character of the sage, Watari, whose musings on the meaning of
Japanese identity provide the philosophical backbone of Komatsu’s
novel, is replaced by Onodera’s mother, whom he visits before he
goes on his final mission and whose musings are to do not with hard
questions of karma and identity but rather with the importance of
love and family, a more audience-friendly subject. She stays behind
not for the love of Japan itself but for the spirit of Onodera’s father,
playing the role of the traditional Japanese wife. In a paralleled scene,
Onodera himself is sent off by a tearful Reiko who meets him at
the helicopter that will take him off to his heroic death, and their
last kiss is set to a Japanese pop song about impossible love. There
are echoes of the kamikaze here, the romance of the ultimate sac-
rifice, and although the Earth’s crust is hardly an enemy warship,
the antagonistic way in which foreign countries are portrayed sug-
gests that there are echoes of the war here. This thematic decision
is particularly ironic in light of the epilogue of Komatsu’s novel, in
which part of the American General Grant’s speech is explicitly mil-
itaristic: “I think as a people”, Grant states, “[the Japanese] have a
Kamikaze instinct. Or else you might say that they’re all soldiers at
heart” (222). Further irony in this ending can be seen in light of
the following quote from Komatsu’s novel, when the Japanese prime
minister meets with his advisors who suggest to him that Japan needs
a “nation-saving hero” to give it direction and purpose, and the prime
minister responds:
And then, too, in present-day Japan the memories of the war are
still vivid, and I have the feeling that there are very many Japanese
who have had their fill of “nation-saving heroes”. They feel in
their bones, you see, that heroes and the cult of heroes have
had a disastrous effect upon Japan and the lives of the Japanese
people. (175)

The “cult of heroes”, in this case, has occluded and then dis-
carded the entire purpose behind Komatsu’s novel: to explore
national identity through a hypothetical diaspora. In Komatsu’s
text, there is no hero, and his story is one in which there
can be no hero. The hero symbolizes rigidity rather than diver-
sity, conventionality rather than potentiality, and therefore the

focus of Higuchi’s film on the hero’s triumph, and the aver-
sion of the nation’s demise, ultimately halts any deeper explo-
ration of national identity beyond the geographical confines of
the nation or the historical confines of reactionary national-
ism.
Conclusions
A constant in the literature of diaspora is the echo of the past that

does not die: it cannot be shaken off by advances in technology or
global media domination, nor can it be swept beneath the waves,
even if everything else is. In Nihon chinbotsu, Japan’s empire – and
Japan’s victimization by empire – remains fixed in the minds and
bodies of the Japanese people, and in their art. Similarly, in Midnight
Robber, the colonists on Toussaint and its shadow, New Half-Way
Tree, simultaneously escape and reinscribe their own histories of col-
onization and oppression. Likewise, Salt Fish Girl’s engagement with
issues of diaspora is deeply ambivalent, and echoes the diasporic
dilemma of assimilation versus cultural preservation: memory is a dis-
ease, and native language a waste product, but both are inescapable –
and, indeed, essential.
The diasporic identity is doubled: s/he is both stranger and not;
both home and the land are strange yet familiar. Perhaps the con-
cept of “double consciousness”, as defined by Dayal (discussed earlier
in this chapter), resonates in this link between postcolonialism,
diaspora and science fiction: the past echoes into the future, and the
future into the past. One of the great strengths of science fiction is to
enable a sort of temporal “double consciousness”: SF can help us see
the links between history and the potentiality of the future, which is
not endless in a postcolonial world but rather bounded and inflected
by history. Diaspora, too, is not transplantation but negotiation, not
status but, like postcolonialism itself, a process.

3
Race, Culture, Identity
and Alien/Nation

In 2009, the science fiction blockbuster District 9, directed by Neil
Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson, hit theatres worldwide.
The film, about a ship full of insectoid aliens who are corralled
and kept in a township-like ghetto in apartheid South Africa, was
preceded by a brilliant marketing campaign. Public places were
plastered with silhouettes of the aliens, crossed out in red-like no-
smoking signs, demarcating these spaces as “humans only” and
providing a number to call in order to “report non-humans”. Other
billboards specified that “picking up non-humans is forbidden”, pro-
viding the same number to call and report any infringement. These
advertisements – clear references to the infamous “no Jews and dogs
allowed” signs that proliferated throughout Germany in the early
Nazi era, the “Whites Only” signs in America before the civil rights
movement and various similar signs elsewhere throughout colonial
history – self-consciously set up District 9 as historically aware of
colonialism’s explicit dehumanization and alienation of its others.
Within the history of the film itself, however, there is a subtler and
deeper connection between diegetic prejudice against extraterrestri-
als and historical dehumanization of colonial subjects. Blomkamp’s
short film on which District 9 was based – the six-minute Alive
in Joburg (2005) – spliced footage of an alien ship splitting the
clouds, and alien-human firefights, with real man-on-the-street inter-
views that asked passersby what they thought, for instance, about
Zimbabwean immigration to South Africa. These interviews were
stripped of their original context and inserted into the film’s narra-
tive; therefore, the xenophobic sentiments of the interviewees seem
81

to be directed at the extraterrestrial aliens as opposed to the human

legal “aliens” within South Africa’s borders. Although the interviews
in District 9 are fictional, they are inspired by those in Alive in Joburg,
and the parallel is clearly set up: this story of non-humans contains
the colonial story of dehumanization and oppression.
District 9 is not perfect: for all its postcolonial understanding and

anti-racist sentiment, there remain issues such as the film’s stereotyp-
ing of Nigerians as opportunist gangsters and prostitutes. However, it
represents one of the most explicitly stated parallels in all of science
fiction between the figure of the alien in SF and the figure of the other
(specifically, the racial/cultural other) in postcolonialism. It seems, in
fact, to have started a trend in this direction: Jon Favreau’s Cowboys
and Aliens (2011), though as yet unreleased at the time of writing,
seems from its title and its trailer to tackle the cowboys-and-Indians
trope of the American western in a similar science-fictional way.
As I mentioned in the Introduction to this book, a mutual cen-
tral focus of science fiction and (post)colonialism is that of otherness:
how it has been conceptualized, acted upon and subverted. Politically
and pragmatically, the distinction between self and other has func-
tioned as a method of control in colonial societies, creating a power
hierarchy predicated both on physical and cultural difference and on
enforced Foucaldian differentials of knowledge.
In science fiction, otherness is often conceptualized corporeally,
as a physical difference that either signposts or causes an essential
difference, in a constant echo of zero-world racialization. Although
this concept of alienness does not always signify a colonial rela-
tionship, it often dovetails with the colonial discourse of the Other.
As well, although physical difference in science fiction generally
denotes different species, the parallel often has much to do with race:
an invented sink category that infers intellectual, emotional, cultural
and other differences based on relatively minor human phenotypical
variation. It is this connection between the science-fictional Other
and the Orientalized Other on which this chapter focuses, in the
context of online avatar-driven play in the massively multiplayer
online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft (WoW). The
participatory aspect of play lends another layer to the activation
of racial stereotypes, as I discuss in detail in this chapter, which
is another reason I choose to focus here on a multiplayer partic-
ipatory game. WoW has been chosen in particular because of its

Race, Culture, Identity and Alien/Nation 83
nearly Manichean division between familiar and foreign, a division

that splits the game along racial lines that are an exceptionally clear
metonym of real-world racial divisions.
The pseudoscientific discourse of race, although far from limited to
colonial ideology, has been (and continues in neocolonial projects) to
be used as an active tool of colonialism. This happened, for instance,

in Nazi attempts to use medical science to prove Jewish physical infe-
riority, and in Western attempts to use the theory of evolution to
“prove” that African people were lower down on the evolutionary
ladder than were white Westerners.1 Historically, this has been an
active method of “alienation” – that is, dehumanization – between
groups: a creation of scientific, taxonomic categories into which dif-
ferent people were sorted, and after which the groups themselves
were sorted according to an invented social hierarchy.
Race is a constructed concept, actualized through a pseudoscien-
tific dialectic of knowledge production; colonialism has often worked
in a similar way, with colonial powers constructing methods of gov-
ernance, of communication and the creation of invented power
structures in the colonies to inherently favour the colonizer. These
structures are created not only by a combination of knowledge and
power but by the valorization and prioritization of the particular
type of knowledge produced by colonial powers, at the expense of
indigenous and colonized methods of knowledge production.2 Race
is, according to the colonial model, immutable. Unlike culture (one
of Young’s three mediating terms of the colonial triangle; the other
two being race and desire), it cannot be changed and, unlike diaspora,
it cannot be escaped.
Much science fiction production focuses on what Ursula K. Le Guin
calls “the White Man’s Burden all over again” (84) and what Gregory
Benford describes as the “Galactic Empire motif” (55): the concept of
a human empire of many planets, scattered across the stars. Benford
suggests that this plot is a:
common, unimaginative indulgence of science fiction. There are

generally no true aliens in such epics, only a retreading of our own
history. This underlying structure is so common in science fiction,
even now, that it is difficult to know whether we should attribute
it to simple lack of imagination or to a deep unconscious need to
return repeatedly to the problem. (55)

I would also agree with the second half of Benford’s statement:

there is a “deep, unconscious need” in formerly (and, in the case of
America, arguably currently) colonial societies to return to the site of
conflict, trauma and destruction.
There are two related issues here – besides, of course, the necessity
to give an appalled cry at the suggestion that “retreading”, or rather

working through and remembering, of our own colonial history is
a problem rather than a necessity. One is that the concept of alien-
ness, in many of these narratives, has acted both as metaphor and
as perceived historical metonym rather than extrapolative device. That
is, the “alienation” of the colonized, conquered aliens in so many of
these stories corresponds closely to the historical dehumanization of
indigenous colonized people – even, perhaps especially, when those
“aliens” are humans themselves. In Le Guin’s The Word for World is
Forest (1976), for instance, the green-furred indigenous people of New
Tahiti are called “creechies” by the colonists and are used as manual
slave labour, a clear and deliberate echo of the institution of human
slavery.3 Similarly, colonial writers often referred to colonized peo-
ple as animals and other-than-human, and colonial armies treated
them as such. Frantz Fanon describes the humiliation of this treat-
ment, along with anti-colonial subversion of it, in The Wretched of
the Earth:
The native . . . laughs to himself every time he spots an allusion to

the animal world in the other’s words. For he knows he is not an
animal; and it is precisely at the moment he realizes his humanity
that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure
victory. (27)
This tendency, in the form of science fiction that is critical of the

colonial encounter, functions as an important postcolonial site of
acknowledgement of the colonial past. As well, for writers who
align their identities with groups that have been made subaltern by
colonialism, texts that deal critically with alien encounter function
as sites of continued resistance. As Leela Gandhi has put it:
We might conclude that the postcolonial dream of discontinuity

is ultimately vulnerable to the infectious residue of its own uncon-
sidered and unresolved past. Its convalescence is unnecessarily

prolonged on account of its refusal to remember and recognize

its continuity with the pernicious malaise of colonialism. (7)
The major difference between science-fictional aliens and (post)

colonial aliens, of course, is that the latter group shares at all times
a fundamental connection – all are human beings. However, colo-

nial discourse has often placed the human other in a similar position
to the science-fictional other, in that it has “dehumanized” or sig-
nificantly “alienated” the colonized: this distinction is therefore
elided.
This is a major reason why science-fictional portrayals of aliens,
and therefore of alienness, can be so effective in conceptualizing the
ways in which otherness functions in our world. Donna Haraway
writes that “the boundary between science fiction and social real-
ity is an optical illusion” (149); this assertion can be expanded to
include the boundary between human races, which is also a socially
constructed optical illusion (literally optical, even in some science
fiction, as when minor phenotypical differences are taken to signify
alienness: this is the case, for instance, with the many humanoid
species in the Star Trek universe – Ferengi, Vulcan, Romulan, etc.).
They bleed into each other, and they look into each other: from each
vantage point, the other is both other and self.
Race, colonialism and the problem with play: World of

Warcraft and identity tourism
It may initially seem odd to include World of Warcraft (WoW), a

game that on the surface seems to work in the classic fantasy role-
playing paradigm, in a study of science fiction. However, the game’s
use of science-fictional elements is significant in that it constructs
a colonially inflected structure of “civilized” and technologically
curious Alliance “us” versus spiritualist and savage Horde “them”.
The Draenei are technologically advanced aliens, the Gnomes are
engineers who experiment with robots and other aspects of tech-
nological progress (that these experiments have gone wrong is a
major plot point in the game), and the Dwarves are expert met-
alworkers. “Engineering” is an obtainable skill, for the creation of
high-tech science-fictional items such as teleporters; and engineered
items always have a risk of failure and unintended consequences,

whether beneficial or harmful – a humorous play on engineering

outcomes in the real world. More significantly, the Draenei, one of
the races introduced in “The Burning Crusade” expansion pack in
January 2007, are literally aliens from another planet who crash-land
in the WoW world of Azeroth, and their “home city” is actually their
crashed starship; the technology of this ship is clearly technology. The

significance of the Draenei race’s science-fictionality is also integral
to the divide between Alliance and Horde: their use of technology
identifies them with a Western idiom of technological progress and
futurism, an idiom that allies them ideologically with the rest of the
Western-inflected Alliance and with a colonial ideological basis more
generally.4 In contrast, none of the Horde races are portrayed as tech-
nologically competent or curious, and their power centres on magic
rather than science. Troll “voodoo”, Tauren spirit-walking and other
forms of Horde spirituality, like real-world non-Western spiritual tra-
dition, might be considered exclusively as part of the fantasy idiom
and is seen from the Horde side as an interpolation of a marginalized
spirituality into a technologized space that is hostile to it.
There is also the question of whether WoW might function as a
kind of meta-SF – indeed, whether any technologically created world
might do so. WoW is a created world that is mimetically static: poten-
tial for subversion lies within the inbuilt potential of the world’s code,
but cannot exist outside it. Therefore, one might say that WoW is a
kind of cross between a large-scale social experiment and a large-scale
exercise in what is, literally, a fiction of social science: the taking on
of fictional identities by a large group of players.
Identity tourism and online play
In her 2002 book Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Inter-
net, Lisa Nakamura argues that the Internet does not erase racism and
oppression based on identity, but rather constructs identity in a dif-
ferent but no less inequitable way. Maria Fernandez has also touched
on this phenomenon. She writes that “the lack of physicality and the
anonymity made possible in electronic communication are believed
to elide all differences. To admit that inequalities exist in cyberspace
is for some tantamount to authorizing inequality” (63).
Len Findlay’s assertion about Canadian contemporary postcolonia-
lity, which can as easily be applied to virtual spaces, is that it

threatens “a shift from the predatory terra nullius to the cyber-

predatory terra virtualis – that wired and wonderful world, mysteri-
ously planetary yet dematerialized, which aggravates inequality and
injustice even as it promises to end them” (298–99). “Canada” is
as created as “Azeroth”, the virtual geography of WoW, which is as
created as the doomed fictional planet Alderaan in the Star Wars

universe, the digital hyperrealities in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash
(1992), the false reality in the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (2001)
or even the dream-realities of Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010).
The difference is one of physical and not political geography. Each is
in a sense a consensus reality, created with particular laws and par-
ticular limitations. And such virtual spaces, too, can or even must
be considered in terms of the postcolonial. The term “cybercolo-
nialism”, though it might seem at first glance impossible – after all,
cyberspace is theoretically limitless and ownerless – is an important
referent in any discussion of the way identities are constructed, and
deconstructed, in the increasingly important virtual and cyberspaces
of the contemporary world. A central space of tension in the move-
ment of selfhood online is the extent to which online existence is
alienated from non-online interaction – and the extent to which this
alienation is or is not recognized.
There is also the matter of appropriation of identity: what
Nakamura calls “identity tourism” (39). Virtual identities within vir-
tual spaces complicate and layer the question of alienation. They
include choices of public presentation that are unavailable in non-
virtual space – you can be a different gender, a different race, a
different height – but virtual identities also limit those choices by
making only certain modes of presentation available. Nakamura sug-
gests that where self-identity is limited to a series of predetermined
choices, “identities that do not appear on the menu are essen-
tially foreclosed on and erased” (2002: 102). These “menu-driven
identities” therefore act not only as erasures of possibilities outside
of them, but they also act as reinscriptions of the particular cho-
sen identity types. Where those identity types themselves reinscribe
various destructive stereotypes, as they do in many virtual environ-
ments, they become problematic. As Nakamura, Fernandez, Findlay
and others have shown, recognition of virtual modes of inequal-
ity is vitally important, both in conceptualizing the unique ways in
which inequality and marginalization are played out in cyberspace

in general and in MMORPGs in particular, and in attempting to find

ways to interrupt and change those new and destructive patterns.
This section deconstructs race as source of identity formation and
source/mimesis of alienation within the context of playership, and
of WoW, a virtual geography in which one’s race is both entirely
choice-based and entirely circumscribed.

WoW requires players to choose between two factions and to ded-
icate large amounts of playtime and resources to the faction of their
choice in order to have access to the highest-level content. Each fac-
tion is comprised of seven “races” (as of the December 2010 release of
the “Cataclysm” expansion), which function as something between
race and species; they are not entirely social constructs, but inter-
marriage is possible, as are mixed-race children in some cases. The
“Alliance” is comprised of humans along with Tolkien-inspired races
such as Elves and Dwarves; the “Horde” is depicted as a group of
non-human indigenous peoples, variously colonized, postcolonial
and otherwise subaltern, whose belief systems and aesthetic senses
borrow heavily from real-world cultures that have themselves been
marginalized and colonized. The most popular game servers are PvP,
or “player versus player”, on which take place an all-out war with
players of each faction encouraged to kill anyone who belongs to a
hated race.5
Much has been made in both in-game and para-game discussion of
the assignation of the label “good” to the Alliance, and “evil” to the
Horde. However, the central space of tension between the two sides
is that between familiarity and otherness. Despite the Alliance and
the Horde being functionally equitable in terms of game mechan-
ics, WoW carries out a constant project of radically “othering” the
Horde, not by virtue of distinctions between good and evil but rather
by distinctions between civilized and savage, self and other, centre
and periphery. The assumptions of good and evil that derive from
these characterizations are not direct, but are rather symptoms of
a common Western cultural association of foreignness and insidi-
ousness, an association that itself derives from colonial ideologies.
By using the term “familiar” and “other”, however, I do not mean to
imply an entirely Western audience for WoW, nor do I mean to cre-
ate a centre−periphery model of players that mirrors the one in the
game. Rather, I would suggest that globalization of media access has
combined with America’s role as the world’s most pervasive cultural

producer to situate Western cultural mythos as familiar to audiences

worldwide. There is also the simple fact that Blizzard, the manufac-
turer of the game, is an American company, which likely influences
its tendency to construct its games’ ethnocultural schema along the
lines of Western, particularly American, social ideology.
I contend that in terms of correspondence with the real world,

race in WoW functions thus: Trolls correspond directly with black
Caribbeans, particularly but not exclusively Jamaican; Tauren with
Native North American people (specifically the Native American and
Canadian First Nations tribes who have historically lived on the
plains); Goblins with Jews; Humans with White British and White
American people; and Dwarves with Scottish folk. The other races,
both Alliance and Horde, do not correspond so directly to real-world
peoples, but they still represent the general familiarity or foreign-
ness of their factions. For instance, certain cues such as hairstyles
and body shape suggest that Orcs represent colonial depictions of black
people in general, and the Undead seem to represent a sort of “pure”
otherness centred in Kristevan abjection (which will be discussed at
length later). Blood Elves, the newest Horde race, seem on the sur-
face to upset the familiar/foreign schema of the factions, but I would
argue that they are portrayed largely as analogous to drug addicts,
a class of people who are marginalized within white Western society
rather than locked outside of it. Gnomes, Draenei and Night Elves
have similar sliding significations, with the Night Elves in particu-
lar seeming at times to represent a stereotyped East Asianness, with
their Japanese torii gates and their “Darnassus Kimchi”. In American
society, East Asian people are often considered, condescendingly,
to be “model minorities” who remain somewhat outside of soci-
ety but contribute to it positively rather than negatively.6 The race
of the Draenei, added in the first expansion pack, “The Burning
Crusade”, in January 2007, are technologically advanced, science-
fictional humanoid aliens whose use of technology goes together
with a Western cultural idiom.
All of the Horde races, especially those that most explicitly corre-
spond with real-world marginalized societies, are represented as less
like the player (who is in all cases human) than are the Alliance races
that do the same. In fact, if there is one thing that it is possible to
claim about all WoW players, I think it is that they are all, unques-
tionably, human. By making “human” a specific category within the

game – limited to avatars who have Caucasian features, whose skin

darkens only to a very deep tan and who speak in North American
accents – the game excludes those real-world players whose cultural
markers are represented by in-game non-humans instead of in-game
humans. Implicitly, the game suggests that those players who have
Jamaican accents, for instance, are “humanoid” – but specifically not

human. Furthermore, these bodies deliberately suggest not the actual
bodies of people from real-world cultures but rather stereotypical repre-
sentations of those bodies. Here, then, is the crux of the problem with
Blizzard’s cultural borrowing: if in-game races are closely identified
with real-world races, and those same in-game races are treated more
as biologically distinct species than as socially categorized races, then
the implication is that real-world race is also primarily biologically
determined – an outdated and destructive implication that belongs
to a racist discourse.
Horde bodies and their environments
In order best to analyse the racial dynamics of WoW, it is necessary to

detail the parameters on which the discussion is based. This section
contains close, though by no means complete, analyses of the bodies
and general environments of each Horde race.
Tauren
The Tauren are quite literally cow-people, and are named as

such. They are bipedal and their body shapes approximate those of
humans, but are cowlike in their horns, snouts, hooves and pelts. The
cow is an interesting animal to use in this context, as cows are inte-
gral to Western society as both source of meat and milk (symbol of
plenty) and as avatar of rage (angry bulls).
The resemblance between the bodies of the Tauren, and stereo-
typical depictions of Native American and First Nations (hereafter
referred to for brevity’s sake as Native) bodies, is perhaps the least
direct of the three. However, there are many Tauren hairstyles and
accessory-styles available that echo those worn by Native People as
depicted in many old photographs made for commercials for a white
audience. The near-ubiquity of Native American/First Nations styling
suggests that the images of the Tauren, like those old photographs,

“open [them] up to real or imaginary appropriation as private prop-

erty by non-Indians” (Marez 2004: 340). Their literal fusion of human
and animal may also be a reference to the “closeness” with nature
that Natives are presumed by white colonizers to have, and/or it may
be read as a physical conflation of Plains tribes and the buffalo they
hunted for their livelihood.

The majority of Tauren reference to Native culture is situated in
the Tauren home environment of Camp Narache, Bloodhoof Village
and Thunder Bluff. All are peaceful places, with rolling hills and crea-
tures such as wolves and big cats. Tauren dwelling structures are,
in essence, giant tepees, modelled very closely on those sturdy but
portable dwellings made by the nomadic, herd-following Native peo-
ple of the American and Canadian plains. The painting on these
structures also resembles closely the geometric and colour schemes
of the most well-known traditional Native art. There are also large
totem poles scattered throughout Tauren lands.
Tauren non-player character (NPC) names – which are part of
the environment as they float above the heads of the characters by
default, though this option can be switched off – are modelled heav-
ily on stereotypically Native names. Many are called “Braves”, after
the archaic American term for Native soldiers, and they have names
such as Leaping Deer and Windfeather. The music in Thunder Bluff is
a concoction of breathy pipes, drums and other stereotypically Native
elements. All of these factors combine to make an environment that
is stereotypically, but not authentically, Native: to borrow a phrase
from Bhabha’s theory of mimicry as method of colonial control, it is
“almost the same, but not quite” (italics in original) (1994: 86).
Trolls
The racialization of Trolls as black Caribbeans is at its clearest in

terms of accent and appearance. Jamaican voice actors perform the
Troll accent; NPCs say, “Whatagwan?” and call the player’s character
“child”, both idiosyncratic Jamaican idioms. At other times, however,
they seem to represent a more generalized association with blackness
that comes in the form of pastiche rather than representation.
The Trolls are further noticeably defined by their deviation from
Western beauty norms, particularly Troll women. Trolls, while
humanoid, have non-human features such as tusks, a pronouncedly

slouched stature, large two-toed feet and blue or green skin. Although
Night Elf and Draenei females also have similarly non-human fea-
tures such as pointed ears, purple or blue skin and glowing eyes, these
features on Night Elves and Draenei are geared towards a Western
conception of beauty, whilst those on Trolls are geared towards ugli-
ness. Take, for instance, the jokes told by the Troll female: one is

a sardonic “I feel pretty, oh so pretty”, followed by the sound of
spitting, and another is “Strong halitosis [bad breath] be but one of
my feminine traits.” The latter joke has a counterpart in the Troll
male, who claims that “I like my women dumpy and droopy with
halitosis”, which not only presents the Troll female body as disgust-
ing but adds an extra layer of revulsion for the male’s preferences.
Troll females are presented as simultaneously hypersexualized (their
dance is explicitly sexual and resembles Jamaican dancehall) and
repulsive – this depiction echoes classic colonial representations of
black women, and even some contemporary ones.7 This simultane-
ous idealization and denigration echoes Edward Said’s well-known
Orientalist paradox.
The specifically Troll home environment is not as extensive as
those of the other Horde factions; like the Gnomes, they have come
under the protection of another faction after losing their own home-
land. There is, however, Sen’Jin Village, which is highly Caribbean-
influenced. The background music is resonant of a kind of pastiche
of Caribbean music. It is a town of open, thatched-roof wooden huts,
decorated with masks that are extremely similar to those used in
religious rituals in Vodou, a religion that has historically been den-
igrated and ridiculed in Western cultural production.8 Vodou is also
referenced in the “mojo” that drops from hostile Trolls in the larger
world, and in instances, in the spoken NPC phrase “stay away from
the voodoo,9 mon”; also in some Troll questlines. Similar architec-
tural patterns are found in Troll settlements elsewhere in WoW, such
as in Stranglethorn Vale and Zul’Farrak.
Orcs
Unlike the Trolls and the Tauren, the Orcs do not clearly correspond
with any specific real-world culture. Rather, they seem at times to
represent colonial depictions of blackness, and at times to be a sort of
sink category, not a specific racial type in itself but a symbolic drain
into which all sorts of negative stereotypes seep. The Orcs have dark

(green) skin, fangs, stocky bodies and wide, grimacing mouths: all
symbols of aggression and unattractiveness in Western culture. Like
Troll females, Orc females are particular targets of racist discourse,
though this is perhaps less tied to real-world racism. They, like their
Troll sisters, are considered both unattractive and hypersexualized –
their “dance” resembles nothing so much as a particularly bawdy

strip show. These elements put Orc women in the subaltern position –
in terms both of gender and race – that has historically been imposed
on women who have not conformed to feminine social norms, and
women of colour.
Blood Elves
With their impossible beauty, Blood Elves express their bodily

otherness in a different and paradoxical way. They can be seen to rep-
resent the strictly unrealistic, airbrushed beauty standards of Western
society, along with arrogance about that beauty and derision for the
appearances of the other Horde races, which occasionally slips into
outright racism (whether this racism is presented earnestly or as a
critique of itself will be discussed below). Perhaps the best example is
one of the Blood Elf female jokes: “So I went to this Troll spa the other
day and I wound up with dreadlocks and a freakin’ bone in my nose!
I mean, come on! Who PAYS for that?” The Blood Elf male’s physical
otherness, on the other hand, is presented through feminization and
implied homosexuality. All but two of the available Blood Elf male
hairstyles are long, flowing locks; the two exceptions are anime-style
spikes. And again, the jokes contribute to this characterization: taking
his cue from the American girl-group the Pussycat Dolls and quoting
one of their earliest hit songs, the Blood Elf male coos: “Don’t you
wish your girlfriend was hot like me?”
The Blood Elf environment is similarly paradoxical. Ethereal trees
drop golden leaves whilst desperate magic addicts stumble around
beneath them. Creepy, ghostly Mana Wyrms abound in the midst of
green grasses, and magical brooms sweep up dust in what is perhaps
a nod to the classic Disney sequence The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a cau-
tionary tale for those, like the Blood Elves, who believe that they can
control magic without it controlling them.
The Blood Elves are also significant in that they, like the Draenei,
were not included in the original release of WoW and did not exist
for the first several years. They were added later in the game’s life, in

the “Burning Crusade” expansion in January 2007, and they, unlike

any of the other Horde races, have the ability to be paladins, a trait
that was formerly restricted to the Alliance. Even in this, though, the
familiar/foreign dichotomy of the factions is at work. While Alliance
paladins use the Light (their name for the source of magic), Blood
Elf paladins abuse it – they are portrayed as junkies and addicts to

the power of magic. The Light is a powerful force, but the Alliance
paladins use it in a “civilized” way in religious rituals that are dis-
tinctly Western, whereas Blood Elves use it in a “savage” way: to find
out how to gain access to the power of the Light, they kidnapped a
Naaru – a sentient godlike being of pure Light-energy – and tortured
it until they worked out how to use it.
Goblins
The most recent addition to the Horde, as of the December 2010

“Cataclysm” expansion, Goblins have existed in WoW since its incep-
tion, primarily as travelling merchants, bankers, equal-opportunity
arms dealers and owners of the game’s auction house. They possess
a “natural greed” and “cunning”, and their primary goal is to amass
money, which they see as the ultimate power. They are also small in
stature, with large ears and even larger hooked noses. When playable
Goblins speak or tell jokes, they do so with a Brooklynesque Woody
Allen-style accent.
Readers familiar with anti-Semitic propaganda will see where this
characterization is heading. It is one of the clearest in the game.
Interestingly, the Goblin backstory involves Goblins having been
slaves of Trolls – another Horde race – mining a particular element
that had the unexpected side effect of producing high intelligence
and technological prowess in the miners. Ultimately, the Goblin min-
ers overthrew their Troll masters and built their own city in the mines
where they were formerly held prisoner.
This story has several functions. First, it serves to strengthen the
Jewish parallel by giving the Goblins their own version of Exo-
dus. As well, it complicates the subaltern character of the Horde
by presenting Trolls as simultaneously oppressed and oppressor –
though the history of the slave trade in our own world also demon-
strates collusion by indigenous peoples, including but not limited
to black Africans, in the enslavement of members of other tribes.

The technologization of the Horde through the inclusion of the

technologically brilliant Goblins also complicates the question of
technology’s role in the game, though Goblin technology is some-
times referred to as “sinister” – and is inherently unstable, with all
Goblin-made items carrying a significant risk of blowing up in the
player’s face. It is what I might call “low technology” – ugly and mis-

firing – as opposed to the physically beautiful, incredibly advanced
and perfectly functional “high technology” of the Alliance Draenei.
Undead
The otherness of the Undead functions differently from that of the

other Horde races: a useful theoretical framework for the embodied
othering of the Undead is Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. The
abject is neither subject – I – nor object, “an otherness ceaselessly
fleeing in a systematic quest of desire”. Rather, it is the place “where
meaning collapses”, the place “where I am not”, not the opposite
but the negation of subjectivity (1982: 1–3). One of Kristeva’s most
important examples of abjection is in the body of a corpse:
The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremedi-
ably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more
violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance.
A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of
decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death –
a flat encephalograph, for instance – I would understand, react,
or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse
and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to
live. (1982: 3)
In this sense, the Undead are the apotheosis of the Horde’s foreign-
ness. Their role in the game is one of constant negation. They are
allied to the Horde not to contribute what they can to the faction
but to take what they can from it. Their corpse-bodies are skeletal
and spare, a paradox in their own impossibility. They belong to a
larger category of undead creatures within the game, all of which are
physically repulsive because their bodies are not how they should be:
namely, they are incompatible with life, as what should be inside is
on the outside. The desired player reaction to this reversal of bodily

integrity is one of disavowal and disgust, and the fact that Undead
bodies are seen as more in line with Horde than Alliance bodies
enhances the bodily otherness of the Horde.
The Undead environment is similarly abject. The Undercity’s
waterway flows not with water but with toxic magical waste,
inverting the source of life into a source of death. It is buried under-

ground like a tomb and yet is populated, putting it in the same para-
doxical category as its inhabitants. Like the Undead themselves, the
Undercity represents a space of abjection, “the place where I am not”.
Playing the other
The depictions of subaltern races and cultures to be found in WoW

are not nuanced representations; rather, they are processed, general-
ized cultural memes, thrown in to give each race its own “flavour”.
The purpose is to reinforce a particular feeling or atmospheric sense
about the race in question. WoW does this by utilizing aspects of
those cultures, particularly spoken accents and myriad visual cues,
which are easily and quickly identified with them. This, like all stereo-
types, has the effect of a narrative or aesthetic “shortcut” to the
desired player reaction. This recalls Homi Bhabha’s assertion that
stereotyping is a method of making otherness “safe” and comfort-
able for the colonizer (1994). Of course, as Terry Eagleton (2006)
asserts, stereotypes are inescapable and sometimes inevitable, as some
method of distinguishing people from each other is necessary to
function in the world. The problem here is that Blizzard’s use of real-
world cultural inflection in WoW is often so simplified that it invites
a similarly simplified view of the entire corresponding culture.
Although online space has traditionally been considered in many
ways “disembodied”, the inclusion of visual avatars in online inter-
action, especially video games, has “re-embodied” the player. This is
related to the idea of WoW as what Thomas Foster, drawing on Mark
Poster’s work, calls a “kind of territory”; that is, it is not “pure mind”
but rather “a new kind of location rather than a pure space of dis-
location” (Foster 207; Poster 152). “This possibility of reimagining
the place of ethnicity along the lines of an informational model”,
(207) as Foster writes, provides a sense of geography, a solidity and
kind of associated relevance, to the virtual world. Similarly, along
the lines of my discussion of the city and the body in Chapter 5 of

this book, there is a sense of implicit weight to the player’s embodi-

ment. The player’s avatar, her or his virtual embodiment in the game
world, is one of the main features of WoW. The state of the body
has also been important in postcolonial theory as a key identity
marker, both in terms of colonial oppression based on the physical
differences between colonizer and colonized and as a site of anti-

colonial resistance. Virtual embodiment of the type available in WoW
can be seen as the next step in online communication: instead of
being a visual blank, as were players in earlier text-based Multi-User
Dungeons (MUDs) and MUD, Object-Oriented (MOOs), the player
has the capacity to decide on his or her own appearance to others.
In the colonial, racist paradigm, it is the colonizer who has power
relating to embodiment: he creates and maintains a power hierarchy
based partially on unchangeable facets of physical identity such as
skin colour and face shape. In a virtually embodied space such as
WoW, however, this power is given over somewhat to players: they
can choose how to be embodied, which seems to create a structure in
which players have the power, and in a sense they do.
However, as Foster writes elsewhere, such virtual embodiment is a
mode of play that “privileges vision as a mode of information process-
ing, and visual perception remains inextricably linked to a history of
racial stereotyping” (1998: 160, in Nakamura 2002: 34). There are two
layers to the stereotype-based embodiment that happens in WoW:
that of the players’ own biases, brought into the game world from
the real world, and that of Blizzard’s own stereotypes, built into the
game world itself.
The first layer, player-based stereotyping, has been discussed at
length by Nakamura and by Jeffrey Ow. Nakamura writes of the
“orientalized theatricality” of players in LambdaMOO, a text-based
online role-playing game, in which several white male players go by
nicknames that reference East Asian culture: characters from other
video games and icons such as samurai from East Asian history (2000:
39). These players perform a role within the game that is deliberately
constricted and guided by both real and imagined features of the
stereotypical framework they have chosen. This sort of stereotyping is
not dependent on visual cues; it can as easily be activated by a name
or a textual description. However, it remains important, and per-
haps takes on even more importance, in games with a visual centre.
Nakamura posits a possible explanation for the preponderance of

such frankly unimaginative play: “racial cybertypes”, she writes,

“provide familiar, solid and reassuring versions of race which other
users can readily accept and understand since they are so used to
seeing them in novels, films and video games” (2002: 40). This
echoes again Bhabha’s assertion that stereotypes are comfortable and
“safe” spaces for the colonizer, or the group in power, to inhabit.

Over time, however, and with the constant repetition and replica-
tion of pop cultural paradigms in today’s media, these stereotypes
are caught in a feedback loop: “seeing them in novels, films and
video games” players take them up and solidify them, and are seen
by others, which solidifies them further. Eventually, the question of
authenticity recedes further, as simplified depictions take over in a
Baudrillardian feedback loop.10
Jeffrey Ow attempts to counter this by unmasking the player. He
argues that players “neither know nor care” about the authenticity
of their depictions of Oriental characters, and that they are “unwill-
ing to truly transform” themselves, instead wearing “the digital skin
to become superficially Oriental” (2000: 40), without giving thought
either to the authenticity of their claims or, more importantly, to the
impact that they may have on the actual people they claim to rep-
resent. Of course, the Orientalizing white males of Nakamura and
Ow’s narratives are certainly not the sum total, or even the majority,
of those who participate in online games. However, racist colonial
stereotypes engendered by past and present Western colonialism
continue to proliferate within online discourse.
The second layer of embodiment involves Blizzard’s own in-game
paradigms. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, in Cybertypes,
Nakamura identifies “menu-driven identities” that behave both as
erasures of alternative possibilities and as reinscriptions of the cho-
sen identities. The repetition of these reinscriptions that happens in
a game such as WoW, in which images are repeatedly reproduced,
adds magnitudes of strength to these depictions. Within WoW’s own
version of this, I would emphasize two different aspects: one is the
humanoid virtual bodies themselves, and the other is the environ-
ment in which they are embodied and the connections between
the bodies and their surroundings. In each of these two areas, the
Horde is depicted as foreign, while the Alliance is depicted as familiar.
Indeed, the inclusion of real-world race in the equation, along with
folklore-constructed race, further complicates this already complex
dynamic. Nakamura writes:

Being raced in cyberspace is doubly disorienting, creating multiple

layers of identity construction. While on the one hand people of
colour have always been postmodern (and by extension “virtual”),
if postmodernism is defined as that way of seeing subjectivity as
decentred, fragmented and marginalized, on the other hand their
lack of access to technology and popular figuration as the “prim-

itive” both on- and offline (those virtual samurai and geisha are
certainly not to be found in “modern”, let alone postmodern,
Japan) positions them simultaneously in the nostalgic world of
the premodern . . . . The celebration of the “fluid self” that simul-
taneously lands postmodernity as a potentially liberatory sort of
worldview tends to overlook the more disturbing aspects of the
fluid, marginalized selves that already exist offline in the form of
actual marginalized peoples, which is not nearly so romantic a
formulation. (2002: xv–xvi)
There is a power imbalance here. On the one hand, you have the
players, who are able to “take on” by proxy the identity (though,
significantly, not the subjectivity) of a person from a marginalized
group. This capability, taken further, may invite the dangerous idea
that because one plays, for instance, a Tauren, one knows in some
small sense what it is like to have the subjectivity, rather than just
the audiovisually indicated identity, of a member of the real-world
group that the Tauren represent. On the other hand, you have the
real-world people whose identities are being borrowed, some but not
all of whom are actual players. Therefore, the people whose cultures
are being appropriated in WoW are in a double bind of sorts. They
are marginalized both in the real world – they are made “virtual”
by virtue of their inclusion in popular discourse as stereotypes rather
than individuals – and in the game world, where they are constructed
as the exotic Other whose bodies (and, putatively, minds) any player
can claim to inhabit. In his discussion of the potential of the “posthu-
man”, a theoretical category into which WoW can be included, Brian
Carr argues that:
it is precisely this figure [of the dehumanized] – that racial-

ized non-subject whose access to the representational status of
the “human” subject is fundamentally halted – which seems so
routinely evacuated in the governing logic of the posthuman’s
liberatory promise. (120)

The “erasure” of race from the discourse of the posthuman –

seen in Carr through the lens of its absence from discourses of
psychoanalysis – coupled with the stereotypical and neocolonial
imposition of racial stereotypes in the game-text and the disjunction
between apparent and actual subjectivity, creates a complex, unsta-
ble space of representation in which race is alternately absent and

involuntarily imposed.
Player subjectivity, mimicry and minstrelsy
Much has been written on the open-ended potential for the

expansion and dispersion of selfhood in an online environment.
In “Postcolonial Media Theory”, for instance, Maria Fernandez draws
on Sherry Turkle’s work to suggest that players “are authors not only
of text but of themselves” (64). Bruce Damer, similarly, writes, “part
of the most thrilling and enticing aspect of the virtual experience is to
live the fantasy of being another person” (132; qtd in Gonzales 44).
Miroslaw Filiciak argues that “digital media, video games included,
enable us – for the first time in history on such a scale – to manip-
ulate our ‘selves’ and to multiply them indefinitely” (88). There is
a theme emerging here in terms of the multiplication, elision and
fluidity of selfhood in the course of video-game play.
This postmodern multiplication of selfhood, however, makes the
notion of self less secure and less definite. Destabilization of the for-
merly fixed self suggests an emptying out of the self as the space of
individual definition, replaced with a highly contingent selfhood that
looks outward – towards the mass media, for instance – rather than
inward for meaning. The danger inherent in this is of refilling the
emptied self with stereotypes or other forms of “mass identification”
(such as, for instance, brands produced for capitalist consumption),
thereby making the self into an infinite mirror and replication of
stereotyped, simplified ideas as opposed to a site of contextualized
critical thinking and complexity.11
The multiplication of the self that happens everywhere online is
present to an even greater degree in Massively Multiplayer Online
(MMO) games. Leigh Schwartz, drawing parallels between the sus-
pension of disbelief in the audience’s experience of cinema and
the player’s experience of video games, writes that this suspen-
sion “enables players to experience game spaces, causing them to

take in not only the realistic and fantastic game elements but also
the meanings underlying the representation” (315). Similarly, Sheila
C. Murphy writes:
Gamer identification fuses – or to borrow a term from film theory –

sutures the gamer to the game. In doing so, the gamer and the
game being played become intertwined . . . it is also grounded in

interactivity (instead of passivity), in a combination of simulated
and actual movement, and in a fundamentally different relation to
media – as user, inter-actor and not spectator or consumer. (235)
The concept of suture, which in film theory refers to the ways in

which film uses both representation and visual spaces or lacunae to
“sew” the viewer into the film, is perhaps amplified in the playing of
video games: the player participates in suturing him- or herself into
the game world, both visually and physically. The suspension of dis-
belief demanded by WoW, coupled with this form of suture, therefore
puts the player in a vulnerable position: the game has successfully
asked the player to suspend a portion of his reasoning faculties in
favour of the unadulterated experience of the game. In doing so, the
game fills the player’s real(ized) experience with its own constructed
alternate reality, breaching the barrier between the game world
and the real world. If this experience includes the familiar/foreign
dichotomy I have described along with associated stereotypes of real-
world races, these aspects of game play risk bleeding over into the
player’s real-world thought processes and interactions.
This dynamic of many-layered multiple identities can be linked in
terms of WoW to two concepts borrowed from postcolonial studies:
identity tourism, as imagined by Lisa Nakamura, Maria Fernandez and
Tim Dean, and mimicry/masquerade, as discussed by Frantz Fanon,
Homi Bhabha and Niti Sampat Patel, among many others. The con-
cept of identity tourism speaks to the ways in which the illusion of
multiplicity of identity can work to obfuscate the experiential real-
ities of those people who have been and are marginalized because
of their offline, fixed identities. The latter is a discursive and per-
formative strategy that has been utilized both for the purposes of
colonialism and as a reappropriated mode of anti-colonial resistance.
The aforementioned potential disjunction between the player’s
real-world identity and in-game identity is therefore useful in terms

of this study when it represents a player who takes on, in-game,

the body of the “other”, especially when the player belongs in the
real world to a non-subaltern group and chooses a Horde body. Ow
and Nakamura, among others, write about players who take on East
Asian-ified identities online and put on virtual “yellowface”; in the
case of WoW, unlike in nearly any other game in existence, it is pos-

sible to put on virtual “blackface” or, as one might say, “redface”
as well.
Though there are an increasing number of black characters in other
science fiction and fantasy video games, I cannot think of any Native
North American character in any SF or fantasy game.12 As well, the
difference in characters in WoW is that, to an extent unique among
contemporary video games, Horde bodies, home areas and character
backstories are defined by their racial difference, predicated on real-
world racial difference.
This tendency can be related to the American, and later British,
tradition of minstrelsy, in which white performers used burnt cork to
blacken their faces and performed skits that showed black people as
lazy, stupid and prone to embarrassment. This type of performance
became popular in 1830s America and was popular until around the
turn of the century; in Britain, the tradition lasted into the 1970s
with the television show The Black and White Minstrel Show (although
Britain had a higher ratio of parody to vitriol than did the American
shows in the 1800s).13 Along with the role of minstrelsy as enter-
tainment, it functioned in America as a method by which negative
impressions of black people were transmitted and proliferated: in
this way, it was an actively oppressive art form. Ronald L. Jackson II,
drawing on William Pinar’s work, writes that “Sambo”, one of the
central characters in the classic minstrel show, was a “live image of
how Whites perceived Blacks”; Sambo “was not seen by Whites as a
caricature as much as a true depiction of the obedient, servile, and
docile slaves they owned” (20).
Homi Bhabha writes about the concept of mimicry as colonial strat-
egy, which is useful in the context of American minstrelsy. Bhabha’s
theory takes from Said’s theory of Orientalism the concept that
the colonizer constructs an identity for the colonized based on the
colonizer’s philosophical system rather than on the self-proclaimed
identity of the colonized. Mimicry, Bhabha suggests, is a method by
which this control is actualized:

colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other,

as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which
is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an
ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually
produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The authority of that
mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore

stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representa-
tion of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry
is, thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of
reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other
as it visualizes power. (italics in original). (86)
I see WoW as reproducing a dynamic of colonial mimicry, and would

apply this understanding to the depiction of the Horde in WoW,
where there is a similar dynamic at work: although the stereotypes
that are clustered with race in Horde bodies may act as a distanc-
ing factor between straight racist stereotypes and the avatars of
the Horde themselves, the racial stereotypes are not presented as
fabulated but as true representations of some aspect of blackness
or Native American/First Nations. By appropriating Caribbean and
Native American cultures, and changing them so that they are, as
Bhabha writes, “almost the same, but not quite”, the developers of
WoW assert a colonial power over the cultures themselves: they go
on to construct the identities of those cultures in the same way that
Western colonizing powers did. Although Blizzard does not explic-
itly claim to speak for these cultures, it does this implicitly through
appropriation of their cultural aspects, and therefore puts them
in the subaltern position. Blizzard has not only appropriated their
identity but has appropriated the mechanisms – costume, accent,
environment – by which that identity is articulated.
However, this same dynamic, reversed, may also function as a
way in which players can go beyond the stereotypes presented by
Blizzard’s character design. Patel, drawing on Fanon, suggests that
masquerade holds potential for anti-colonial resistance: “Far from
reasserting the foundation of power that the coloniser imagines him-
self to possess, the colonised subject, through imitation subverts and
undermines the absoluteness and fixity of the colonialist’s author-
ity – the very basis of his identity” (xviii). This, actualized in-game,
is not exactly the same as the anti-colonial resistance that Fanon and

Patel talk about – it is likely that statistically few Horde players will
be from these marginalized groups, and therefore the resistance is not
from those colonized groups but rather from a proxy for those groups.
The idea of non-members of subaltern groups using the discourse
of anti-colonialism to speak for the subaltern against colonization
is contested in postcolonial thought, most significantly by Spivak’s

“Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). Video games, however, are a
relatively new medium and produce a new kind of discourse, and
application of postcolonial theory to video games may unlock new
ways of thinking: perhaps there is the potential, in the very multi-
plicity of the player’s self, to use his or her “becoming” the Horde to
unseat those stereotypes upon which the Horde is predicated.
The ability for anybody, in any body, to take on any racial body
in WoW shows, therefore, that WoW might be used as a tool for a
black person, say, to use a virtual white human body to carry out a
project of anti-colonial mimicry that undermines colonial ideologies
of white supremacy, or alternately, for a white player to “pretend” to
be Jamaican, to put on a textual Jamaican accent and contribute to
the game’s general pastiche of blackness, and thus be a part of the
proliferation of such images of subalternity. Such permutations, or
any other possible permutation of this sort are offered by WoW. It is,
therefore, inherently an unstable text, a status that I would ascribe
both to Blizzard’s implicit and explicit construction of racial cate-
gories in the game and to the fact that it is, in the end, a game. It is
an interactive medium the content of which, if not its context, is
partially player-determined. Its instability is therefore a source both
of racism and of potential anti-racist resistance.
Conclusions
There is a fine line to walk with cultural borrowing in video games,

and regardless of their intentions, many game designers have come
down on the wrong side. In an essay on the Civilization series of
historical-simulation games, in which the player’s empire must take
over stretches of land populated by “barbarians” but considered
“empty” by the game design and the official manual, Christopher
Douglas writes:
though some might find the game’s recognition of historical

contingency progressive and liberating, I would argue that its

ultimate effect is to reinforce the pattern of interaction between

the colonising power and the aboriginal . . . . The game has abstract
radical potential, but it is circumscribed by how things really
turned out. That radical potential thus works ideologically to
reinforce the notion of cultural and maybe racial supremacy.
That things might have turned out differently need not produce

existential-national anxiety in Western players, in light of the
imaginable histories that include the subjugation of those players
on an alternative, virtual earth. Rather, the actual story becomes
explicable, when faced with the endlessly replayable historical
simulations of civilization, only through reference to a kind of
spiritual or cultural rightness of European civilization. (2002)
Schwartz concurs with Douglas, writing that “game designers rein-

force cultural meanings while appearing to challenge them” (319).
Furthermore, Schwartz writes that “Through collaborative effort
between the players and the designers, virtual spaces reproduce larger
ideological patterns” (322). It is this dynamic to which WoW seems
sometimes to fall prey, although sometimes it avoids it. The game
acts much of the time as a purveyor of straightforward stereotypes:
this seems most in evidence, and most destructive, in WoW’s charac-
terization of the Trolls. The game’s relentless characterization of Trolls
as cunning, wily, barbarous and vicious, coupled with the extremely
close modelling of Troll civilization on a pan-Caribbean cultural aes-
thetic, is racist. However, this same racism and race-based worldview
is critiqued in the Blood Elf female joke about the Troll beauty par-
lour, in which the Blood Elf and not the Troll is implicitly ridiculed
for her ignorance. WoW is a tricky, complex construction of cultural
meaning in this way: it can be read as both racist and anti-racist at
the same time. Of course, part of this complexity is because WoW is
not a fixed text: it is a game. However, the game also mirrors the real
complexity – and, often, ambiguity – of wider discourses about race
and colonialism.
Appropriation of identity, which I touched on earlier, is also impor-
tant. Those who play Alliance are slipping into a role that follows
both Western fantasy conventions and video-game fantasy conven-
tions, but those who play the Horde are appropriating an identity
informed by otherness. This is, however, not necessarily a criticism:
some may do this to experience the exoticism of otherness, but others

may do so in order to fight, though virtually, against the very norma-

tivity that gives rise to this dichotomy. Just as WoW is complex in
terms of race, it is complex in terms of identity. Thus, the inherently
hybrid identity of the player/avatar has the potential not only to be
used for “identity tourism” but also for subversion of the expected
norms.

Though player-driven stereotyping and game-driven stereotyping
are in a sense distinct systems, they affect each other significantly.
Players give feedback to Blizzard on content development, and Bliz-
zard’s depictions of Horde bodies and Horde environments feed the
players’ own ideas about the Horde races – and about the cultures
on which those races are based. Again, we have a feedback loop
between Blizzard and the players themselves: one that becomes more
and more complex as time goes on, in which issues of race and
colonialism are both reinscribed and subverted.

4
Hybridity, Nativism and
Transgression

The matter of the “hybrid” – the person, the planet, the society – is
a common trope in science fiction, so much so that it has become
almost a cliché. From Frankenstein’s monster – made from spare
human parts – to the alien-hybridized humans in Octavia E. Butler’s
Xenogenesis trilogy to the monstrous hybrid child Dren in the
Canadian film Splice (2010), the spectre of the intersection and/or
combination of the familiar and the foreign has long haunted the
science-fictional imagination. The hybrid is terrifying because it is
uncannily both us and not-us, and is wildly hopeful for the same
reason: in hybridity lies the potential for humanity to be either sub-
sumed or enhanced, or perhaps both. This dynamic in SF is perhaps
best characterized by the “hopeful monster”, a term that encapsulates
the simultaneous horror and potential of the hybrid. Used as a scien-
tific term for a mutation with potential benefit, “hopeful monster” is
also the title of a story by the Japanese-Canadian writer Hiromi Goto,
which tells of a child born with an ambivalent mutation,
Such a characterization will be familiar to the postcolonialist. As I
mentioned in the Introduction to this book, the spectre of the
stranger, the Other, who is both self and not-self, who is human but
is dismissed as “animal” (as Fanon puts it) – in a word, the Orientalist
view – is a common central issue in science fiction and postcolonial
theory. Ania Loomba writes that “one of the most striking contradic-
tions about colonialism is that it needs both to ‘civilise’ its ‘others’
and to fix them into perpetual ‘otherness’ ”, casting hybridity in
one sense as a rigid form imposed on colonized people by their
colonizers, and as a source of limitation rather than freedom (145).
107

It certainly has been used so: empire’s demand for its subjects to
embody two directly conflicting ideas – both passionate and obedi-
ent, both present and absent, both ‘other’ and ‘civilized’ – at best has
been a source of anxiety for colonial subjects, and, at worst, murder.
Hybridity has also, however, been used as a strategy for subversive
resistance. Colonized peoples have embraced hybridity and created

what Ashcroft et al. call “new transcultural forms”: an attempt both
to synthesize the disparate cultures and traditions and to subvert the
rule, both political and cultural, of the colonizer (118). Robert Young
provides the example of Gandhi’s communication style. Drawing on
the work of Ashis Nandy, he suggests that:
Gandhi’s political style, like his Hinduism, consisted in the show-

man’s touch of mixing incompatible genres, cultures, castes and
classes. This performative, hybrid mode was the secret of his pop-
ularity, how he achieved the active and enthusiastic support not
only of the Indian Hindu bourgeois elite, but also of the vast
majority of the Hindu peasantry with whom he publicly iden-
tified – a peasantry whom no other politician or political party
had succeeded before in mobilizing effectively on the national
level. (346)
Antoinette Burton further expands the definition of hybridity, sug-

gesting that it “is not necessarily only about ‘mixed’ biological or
even cultural origins, but manifestly about movement through space
and through time” (1998: 20). This argument identifies hybridity,
like decolonization, as an active process that spans both spatial and
temporal distance. If postcolonialism is to be considered “not just as
coming literally after colonialism and signifying its demise, but more
flexibly as the contestation of colonial domination and the legacies
of colonialism” (Loomba 16), it must be, itself, a work-in-progress,
incorporating change as it happens.
Luke Gibbons encapsulates this necessity for hybridity within the
discipline of postcolonial theory: “Theory itself needs to be recast
from the periphery and acquire hybrid forms, bringing the plurality
of voices associated with postcolonial cultures to bear on criticism
itself” (27).
Finally, the concept of otherness, whether the stranger or the
strange land, is also a hybrid concept. Each self – the colonial self,

Hybridity, Nativism and Transgression 109
the colonized self – is layered, doubled, by its otherness to its own

other. In the same way, each land is doubled by its simultaneous
familiarity and otherness to its indigenous and colonial (in the case
of the colonies) or diasporic (in the case of flight to the imperial
seat, or other displacement) inhabitants. It is the power differential
of colonialism, however, that assigns either familiarity or strangeness

to people and places; and even then there is the palimpsest, the
remnants of that inherent doubleness.
There are levels upon levels of hybridity here, then: hybridity of
form, of genre, of criticism, of concept, and of course the diegetic
hybrids themselves – the monsters, hopeful or otherwise, peering
from the page or the screen.
Whilst postcolonial hybridity can be a triumph, a method by
which colonized peoples resist both the oppressive totalization and
the appropriative mimicry of the colonizer, its very necessity can be
seen to remain as a trauma. It is an imperfect solution (as solutions
often are), and it is often a site of simultaneous despair and resis-
tance. Some SF works restate the catastrophe of hybridity, seeing it
as a destructive force. Others see it as constructive or harmonious,
or holding the key to a balance of sorts, or, most significantly in
the context of this book, the only possible way forward in the current
reality.
There is also the opposite impulse: the drive towards what is often
referred to as nativism, the desire to drive out the colonizer alto-
gether by (re)capturing some notion of pure indigeneity. Benita Parry
critiques the common postcolonial drive towards nativism and its
“claims to ancestral purity and inscriptions of monolithic notions of
identity”, which are often “cited as evidence of the failure to divest
itself of the specific institutional dominations of the West” (2008:
275). The trouble with nativism is similar to Mishra’s trouble with
the “impossible mourning” of diaspora, which I address in Chapter 2:
like nostalgia, it is longing for something that is not only unrecupera-
ble but that is wholly imagined in its purity and perfection. As Masao
Miyoshi, drawing on Basil Davidson’s work and Fanon’s critique of
nativism, has written, decolonized spaces are haunted by the “dou-
ble processes of colonization and decolonization” that collide and
cause both practical and ideological troubles (729). Further problems
arise in appealing purely to precolonial nativism as a decolonization
strategy, as “the golden age of a nation-state’s memory proved to be

neither pure nor just, nor even available, but a utopian dream often
turned into a bloody nightmare” (730).
Hybridity and trauma: Radical transgression
The trauma of colonization takes many forms. One example is the

loss of control inherent in governance by an alien colonial body.
This imposition of an external culture and worldview along with the
demand that the colonized hew to it in every way – physically, men-
tally and spiritually – does produce productive resistance, but also
a cultural wound. In Vandana Singh’s Distances (2008), discussed at
length in Chapter 5, Anasuya’s master perhaps has a point to make:
it is in part boundaries that make us what we are, differences that
drive us. Certainly, our abilities to live as we choose and work for the
good of our own communities, to build and develop and practice our
own spiritualities and our own cultures, are some of the most funda-
mental rights of any society – the rights that were most significantly
discarded by colonial powers.
That said, different cultures have always interacted with, and been
influenced by, each other. Despite the calls of the nativists, there is
no perfect or pure past to which it is possible to go back to. This inter-
action is not the source of trauma. Rather, it is the forced collapse of
boundaries by a strong and violent power, and the deliberate erasure
of indigenous culture in the form of colonialism, that creates a torn
and ragged place at the site of transgression.
One theme of postcolonial science fiction has been to examine
that place, to explore the ways in which boundaries were and are
transgressed and hybridity activated – on every level, and in every
aspect, of society – and how the trauma of such transgression might
be expressed, and how it might be recuperated as resistance.
There are three sites of boundary transgression upon which this
chapter concentrates – the boundaries of the city, of the body and
of the mind. Each of these represents what Fredric Jameson calls
a “frame” of reality, which he suggests are “radically discontinu-
ous” in the postmodern city (Jameson 1988: 351). Like layers of an
onion, these boundaries – city, body, mind – are contained within
each other, mind within body within city, and so each transgres-
sion is echoed, doubled and perhaps trebled. Together, they create an
intricate web of radical inclusion which draws on Jameson’s vision

of the postmodern metropolis, and which invokes the postcolonial

concepts of hybridity and doubled vision. Following these discus-
sions, I provide a short study of gender hybridity in Ian McDonald’s
River of Gods (2004).
Hybridity and the city

The contemporary city is an ambivalent, hybrid space, both a site
of multicultural richness and a symbol of technological progress and
imperial domination – as, in general, is much science fiction, espe-
cially but not exclusively in the “golden age” of American SF. The
city is stratified both physically and socially, and has been a space of
contestation in both postcolonial and SF discourse, especially in liter-
ature that combines the two. Gary K. Wolfe, drawing on the work of
Lewis Mumford, writes that the modern city, especially as expressed
in post-1950s SF, is:
an unmanageable, cacophonous, barely conceivable environment
that has long since shifted from the communal imperative to
the survival imperative: cities that were once social organizations
to promote the protection of the individual from a hostile and
chaotic environment must now devote more and more of their
resources to the protection of the individual from the hostile and
chaotic environment that the city itself has become. The innocent
visions of the past have become the traps of the present, and it is
tempting to blame the visionaries. (87)
This inversion of the city’s purpose, from protector to aggressor,
is similar to the metropolitan myth in terms of the immigrant
experience: rather than an opportunity to move both phys-
ically and metaphorically to an opportunity-rich metropolitan
centre, immigrants – especially immigrants from colonies or former
colonies – often found themselves immovably on the bottom rung
in a dangerous place, compounded by the colonizer’s pervasive insis-
tence that these immigrants did not belong in the seat of imperial
power. Gleaming façade notwithstanding, the city was a microcosm
of stratification and subalternity. Wolfe cites Fritz Lang’s film Metropo-
lis, adapted from Thea von Harbou’s novel of the same name, as
one of the first instances of SF cultural production to depict this
dynamic. Metropolis, Wolfe writes, is unlike the other SF works he

is discussing in that it “presents us with an aspect of that vision that

is missing from the other works: the subterranean city of the work-
ers that underlies and perpetuates the innocent utopia above” (87).
It is this, the unseen and unacknowledged flip side of the utopian
metropolis, which has concerned so many writers of postcolonial sci-
ence fiction as well as postcolonial writing in general. The structure

of marginalized people both working hard, and refusing to do so, for
the sake of the privileged ones who have forced them into that posi-
tion is a strong link between the power matrices of these textual cities
and of the colonial metropolis.
In addition, the postcolonial science-fictional city often subverts
what Thomas Foster identifies as “the ideological and often specifi-
cally racist subtext that informs the language of urban ‘ruin,’ ‘decay,’
or ‘blight,’ language more often used to describe racialized ‘inner-city’
ghettoes than cities in general” (206). Foster describes the “ambiva-
lence” of cyberpunk’s celebration of these spaces, a textual strategy
that risks reinscribing ghettoization at the same time as it claims to
contest these “racialized mappings” (206). The texts I am analysing
here take a somewhat different, two-pronged angle: their racialized
metropolitan spaces are sometimes ghettoes and sometimes entire
cities, and are spaces of resistance. Rather than erasing and overwrit-
ing the ghetto’s racialized history, they work through it and show
that it is caused from without, not from within, by institutionalized
racism. At the same time, the culture of these spaces is celebrated and
is portrayed as active resistance to a racist society.
In an article on China Miéville’s novel Perdido Street Station (2000),
Joan Gordon draws on Brian Stross’s definition of hybridity, quoted
here in part:
The cultural hybrid . . . can be a person who represents the blend-

ing of traits from diverse cultures and traditions, or even more
broadly it can be a culture, or element of culture, derived from
unlike sources; that is, something heterogeneous in origin or
composition. (Stross 1, in Gordon 456–457)
Gordon argues that hybridity is absolutely integral to the novel,

and is implemented fractally across every level of the text and its
inhabitants: from the mind, to the body, to the city, to the text
itself (Gordon 461). She calls the novel “heterotopian”, a complex

alternative to the utopia/dystopia model, used also by Ralph Pordzik

to describe a wider “project of cultural decolonization” in literature
that is:
characterized by the gradual displacement of approved forms
of utopian representation, based on narrative and epistemo-
logical closure, by a reassessment of heterotopian alternatives,

constructed on principles of diversity more appropriate to the
heterogeneous nature of postcolonial cultures. (168)
Many of Perdido’s main characters are internal refugees of the city,
which itself is a conglomeration of enclaves. Some of these com-
munities are situated entirely within the city, such as the scientific
community of New Crobuzon University, to which der Grimnebulin
is affiliated; some are situated outside of the city, such as Yagharek’s
home tribe; and some, such as Lin’s khepri people, are the descen-
dants of a group who fled to the city and then built an exclusionary
community, a ghetto, within it. Therefore, the city is both ideolog-
ically and spatially complex, resulting in a heterotopian space in
which, in Foucault’s words, “things are ‘laid’, ‘placed’, ‘arranged’, in
sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a
place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them
all” (xvii). The central site of the city is the titular Perdido Street Sta-
tion, whose name means “lost”: the city is metaphorically centreless,
a collection of unlike and contrasting things and peoples.
New Crobuzon, the city in which most of the novel takes place,
is divided spatially both horizontally and vertically. Its different
districts, as in most cities, vary in terms of economic and social
privilege, but it is also divided vertically like the eponymous city
in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). In parallel to the subterranean
workers in Lang’s film, the visible portion of the city is divided
from the underground “punishment factories” in which labours a
class of bodily altered and mutilated people called the “Remade”,
who keep the city’s utilities running and its people supplied with
goods. Aboveground is not much better – “it was not”, Miéville
writes, “a purer realm that loomed above the city” (78). Even
so, however, the borders of these strati are shifting and unstable.
The city’s borders are layered; its conglomerated character con-
tains cities within cities, all of which are constantly transgressed
in a cycle of breakdown – formerly privileged neighbourhoods fall

prey to the flight of the well-off from within their borders, and even
the boundaries of homes are unstable, as evidenced in the “defaced”
khepri district in which walls are mutated and reformed by the
structural saliva of the khepri women (3).
The city of Varanasi in Ian McDonald’s River of Gods (2004) –
explored further later in this chapter and in Chapter 5 – is in many

ways similar to New Crobuzon: a cacophonous, heterogeneous, cos-
mopolitan metropolis, divided horizontally. McDonald’s India is one
that might be called postpostcolonial: its media, nightlife, politics
and economy have become almost fully indigenized. That is, the
hybridity of these things has become nearly self-determined, with the
past spectre of the colonial West as a memory, not a fear. This overtak-
ing can be seen in the image of the Chattrapati Shijai Terminus, the
station at the heart of Mumbai, described as “a bezoar of Victorian
excess and arrogance, now completely domed over with shopping
precincts and business units, like a toad entombed in a nodule of
limestone” (201). The station itself, built in the Raj period and repre-
senting colonial pomp, has been relegated to history and become a
fossil and a curiosity. “For thousands of years people have been flow-
ing over this vast diamond of land” (200), and the station has become
nothing but a monument to a lost historical period, ironically taking
the place in the past into which the British colonizers of India had
previously placed India itself.
George Alec Effinger’s Marîd Audran trilogy – When Gravity Fails
(1986), A Fire in the Sun (1989) and The Exile Kiss (1991) – is inno-
vative in its reversal of expectations. Set in an unidentified Middle
Eastern location, it is written from the first-person perspective of the
aforementioned Audran, a red-bearded Algerian Muslim in a Balka-
nized world where nations, per se, have become near-irrelevancies in
the background. Audran’s stomping ground is the Budayeen, the vice
district of a universalized futuristic Middle Eastern city; with a gate
at one end and a cemetery at the other, it is “a dangerous place and
everyone kn[ows] it” (11). The district is walled on three sides, the
only entrance being the eastern gate, which is on the opposite side
of the city to the cemetery: this topography is significant in that it is
a horizontal analogue to the vertical “above” and “below” construc-
tion of the city as stratified body: the deeper one penetrates into the
Budayeen, the closer one seems to death, or to a place where power

functions in different ways than it does on the outside. The Budayeen

can be conceptualized as a zone of resistance to the power structures
outside itself in the city “proper” – as a place where personal ability,
rather than wealth or other traditional signifiers of power, trumps
those other signifiers. That this ability is coded in terms of capacity
and talent for violence is a theme that recurs in this and other works

and will be addressed later in this chapter.
Despite the walls around the Budayeen, however, it remains charac-
terized more by its inclusiveness than its exclusivity. As I will discuss
in the next section, it is peopled by those whose bodies and/or minds
do not fit into the roles available in the city outside, such as Chiri, the
nightclub madam; Laila, the slightly insane moddy-shop owner; and
Yasmin, the transsexual call-girl. Those it excludes are the “tourists”
who fetishize the place because of its subversion of the outside norms
of social construction; this dynamic is also related to the colonialist
politics of desire for the exotic, explored at some length in Chapter 1.
In a way, the Budayeen itself has transgressed against the boundaries
of the city, by its radical existence as an anomaly within a larger
power structure that predicates itself on an elite brought to power
by wealth and privilege rather than the Budayeen values of physi-
cal strength and capacity for overt cruelty or manipulation of others.
To read it in a Marxist context, the Budayeen is the site of a powerful
proletariat; that this power is coded as violence suggests that as long
as the bourgeoisie exist, this will be the only way for the proletariat
to have power at all.
Ultimately, the most powerful, and dangerous, people in Gravity –
as in Brown Girl in the Ring, also discussed at length in Chapter 5,
and in Perdido Street Station – are those who are able to synthesize
these two power structures and work within both. Friedlander Bey,
a Godfather-like figure who has fingers in most of the Budayeen
pies, lives outside the Budayeen in “a large, white, towered man-
sion that might almost have qualified as a palace”, a home that
is not-so-strangely reminiscent of the sort of Europeanized house a
colonial governor may have built himself on his appropriated land
(110). There is a double transgression here: in adopting convenient
membership within both the Budayeen and the city at large, Bey
plays both systems of power off against each other, corrupting each
and compromising both the subversiveness of the Budayeen and the

relative physical safety of the rest of the city. His hybridity is located
in power instead of resistance, and as such is not subversive but
destructive.
Hybridity and the body

In Gravity’s Budayeen, not only the shape of one’s body but also
the gender and even the race is changeable, creating a space of
contestation in one’s physical representation. A consequence of this
changeability and uncertainty of the body is that it becomes less sig-
nificant in representing the nature of one’s personhood. The lack of
necessary fixity not only removes gender and race from easy identifi-
ability, but it also frustrates the dichotomy between perception and
actuality in terms of these categories, and complicates the question
of authenticity when posed in terms of the origin of one’s gender or
racial identity. This has larger implications, not only in terms of the
racial and gender politics of the fictional Budayeen, but also in terms
of a postcolonial reading of the text: the “novum”,1 in this case, is
that of the removal or ability to reassign two of the many interlock-
ing systems of oppression to which colonized peoples were and are
subjected.
This transgression of bodily integrity also represents another layer
of the collapsed and contested boundaries that characterize the
colonial metropolitan space. One interesting aspect of the ease of
corporeal change in the Budayeen is that the characters in Gravity
tend to gravitate towards the extreme cliché or stereotype of the
characteristics of that gender. The change becomes, to an extent,
a shallow appropriation of the shell of the desired race or gender,
without its context. Nikki, who, like many characters, is a male-
to-female transgendered woman, has an ultra-Nordic doll-like face,
which is described as ill-fitting a strong, muscled frame. “It was a
common enough error”, Marîd Audran confides; “people chose sur-
gical modifications that they admired in others, not realizing that
the changes might look out of place in the context of their own
bodies” (33). The concept implicit in this statement, that the ini-
tial reaction to hybridity is one of repulsion by its strangeness,
reverberates across each of the layers of hybridity. Another charac-
ter, Tamiko, a cartoonishly tough prostitute, is alternately described
as “the avenging specter of a murdered Kabuki character” (32)

and an “assassin-geisha”; perhaps it is meant to shock the reader

when Marîd asserts that “Tamiko looked very convincing, with the
epicanthic folds and all, for someone who hadn’t been born an
Oriental” (35). Racial and gender identity is, in this case, both dou-
bled and negated, placed into a contradictory body-space within a
contradictory city-space, and made hybrid.

One character in Perdido Street Station, in particular, functions as a
synecdoche of the hybridity inherent on every level: Mr Motley, like
the city of New Crobuzon where much of the novel takes place, is
hybridity embodied. Motley is, as his name suggests, as pure a phys-
ical hybrid as is possible, a strange conglomerate of spare parts of
various beings: skin, fur, feathers, paws, claws, hooves, “tides of flesh
wash[ing] against each other in violent currents” (52–53). A radical
example of the Remade, whose bodies are shaped for punishment,
profit or personal preference into different forms by the art Miéville
calls “thaumaturgy”, Motley’s parts are identifiable as to their original
species; the whole, however, is not. Because his original form is not
knowable, questions of identity and authenticity are frustrated as the
body is no longer a site where they are clearly delineated. When Lin –
herself a hybrid, her shape that of a woman with a beetle’s head –
asks, with trepidation, “What . . . what were you?”, Motley, annoyed
and angry, replies:
“I wondered when you’d ask that, Lin. I did hope that you
wouldn’t, but I knew it was unlikely. It makes me wonder if we
understand each other at all . . . . It’s so . . . predictable. You’re still not
looking the right way. At all. It’s a wonder you can create such art.
You still see this –” he gesticulated vaguely at his own body with a
monkey’s paw –“ as pathology. You’re still interested in what was
and how it went wrong. This is not error or absence or mutancy: this
is image and essence . . . ”. (140)
Motley is inherently anti-nativist: by belying any origin whatsoever,

preferring an entirely hybrid existence that he places specifically out-
side of origin, he forecloses on the possibility of anything better or
more pure – or, indeed, anything at all – before his current iteration.
He is a denial of the nativist impulse towards the past and towards
purity. Rather than, like the nativist argument, being “interested in
what was and how it went wrong” or seeing hybridity as somehow

absent or impure, he sees his own radical hybridity instead as the

essence of reality.
Although, as Ann Laura Stoler (1995) points out, Foucault did not
extend his analysis in the first volume of History of Sexuality to the
colonial body, it seems relevant to link Motley’s assertions here to
Foucault’s criticism of the codification and pathologization by the

modern medical establishment of the body and its workings (1978).
Motley demands that Foucault’s position be taken to its extreme con-
clusion: that nothing about the body can, or should, be codified, and
that totality – to borrow Jameson’s term – is only by radical, totalizing
inclusion of any and all elements. He is in himself a “new transcul-
tural form”, and his very existence reveals an ambivalent, ambiguous
subversiveness that can be linked to Homi Bhabha’s conception of
the ambivalence of colonial response. His body is a symbol of his
mimicry of, and mockery of, systems of “legitimate” power in New
Crobuzon, which in fact are at least as corrupt as his own criminal
enterprise. Bhabha, writing on the form of resistance that he calls
“colonial appropriation”, in which those subjected to colonial rule
mimic aspects of the colonizer in order to subvert them, suggests
that its success “depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects
that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resem-
blance and menace” (86). The contrast between Motley’s power in
New Crobuzon, itself straddling the border between legitimate and
covert, and his “inappropriate” body – which he himself finds entirely
appropriate – suggests this postcolonial double-vision.
Hybridity and the mind
Marîd Audran of Gravity prides himself on being the only one in his
immediate circle not to have had his brain wired for “moddies” and
“daddies”. A moddy, in the parlance of the Budayeen, is a personality
module: by connecting it directly to surgically created neural path-
ways through a jack at the base of the brain, a person can choose
to have his or her subjectivity overtaken almost entirely by that of
another person, either real – in the case of Honey Pilar, the world’s
most famous supermodel – or fictional, as in the case of one of the
assassins in the book, who uses a moddy to make himself into James
Bond. A daddy, on the other hand, as Marîd explains, “gives you
temporary knowledge. Say you chip in a Swedish-language daddy;

then you understand Swedish until you pop it out” (12). The use
of these two devices nearly defines life in the Budayeen, and nearly
everyone has had his or her brain wired; the sheer prevalence of
the surgery suggests an environment in which subjectivity itself is
alterable and mutable. Marîd is himself no stranger to altered con-
sciousness: his smug self-description of having a brain unchanged by

surgery is perhaps undermined by his utter dependence on drugs.
However, his ability to change his mental state takes on a deeper
character after he has the surgery at Friedlander Bey’s behest. Upon
plugging in a moddy of Nero Wolfe, the hero of a series of detective
books and twice the weight of Marîd, “the first frightening sensation
[is] of being suddenly engulfed by a grotesque glob of flesh”, the dif-
ferential between Marîd’s relatively slim body and Wolfe’s corpulent
one (197). The idea not only that his subjectivity is alterable, but
that subjectivities – whole personalities – are interchangeable, repre-
sents the extent to which the mind’s boundaries have collapsed in
the Budayeen. Marîd has become, in a sense, a hybrid: neither him-
self nor the fictional Nero Wolfe, but both – and neither – at the
same time.
Moddies must be handled with care, for one can transgress the bor-
ders of the mind to such a degree that both the body and the mind
are destroyed. Such is the fate of Laila, the owner of the moddy-and-
daddy shop to which Marîd brings a bootleg moddy whose contents
he wants to find out. This moddy is, in itself, a dangerous hybrid.
Instead of the single personality imprint of a normal moddy, it con-
tains the minds of a newborn baby, a starved and abused jungle
cat, and the dying, terrified moments of Nikki herself – each mind
overlaying the other in an electronic palimpsest. In one sense, this
particular moddy, more than the institution of moddies in general,
represents transgression of the mind. While moddies require special
surgery, they are used in order to become an idealized version of a
real or fictional person, while turning away from the imperfect real-
ity of the Buyadeen: whether it be the sex goddess Honey Pilar, the
secret agent James Bond, or, as experienced by Laila, the romantic
heroine Scarlett O’Hara. These moddies may act as a way of literaliz-
ing utopian idealism as much as is possible. This leads to cases such as
Laila’s, in which she has rejected “reality” almost wholly in favour of
a succession of moddies. The bootleg moddy, on the other hand, vio-
lates the boundaries established by normal moddies, and is dangerous

in doing so. It destroys Laila’s subjectivity, and threatens to do the

same to Marîd when he, in the book’s climactic battle, uses it as a
tool of battle, allowing it to “ma[k]e an animal of” him (281). Marîd,
whose mind, like his body and like the city, is structured accord-
ing to particular boundaries, is not compatible with this hybrid. Its
hybridity of personality is destructive to the human mind, suggest-

ing both a hard limit to the utility of hybridity as resistance and a
warning against its misuse. Too large a palimpsest – too doubled, or
tripled, or quadrupled a vision – and it will become useless.
Perdido Street Station contains a different threat to the mind: the
mutability of consciousness and subjectivity takes many forms in
the text, of which the two most significant are the bringing to con-
sciousness of inorganic materials and the invasion of New Crobuzon
by “slake-moths” which, quite literally, eat minds and excrete
nightmares.
In New Crobuzon, which is a quasi-Victorian steampunk city, there
are robots to do computations and menial jobs such as janitorial
work; they seem to run on a combination of mechanical and mag-
ical power.2 Der Grimnebulin has one of these “constructs” to do the
cleaning at his laboratory, and when it breaks down, the technician
he calls to fix it inserts a virus into the construct’s brain, in order
to turn it into a conscious entity. “No longer a destructive end”,
the virus becomes “a means, a generator, a motive power” (295).
And the end result is that “one moment, [the robot is] a calculating
machine. The next, it th[inks]” (296). This seemingly spontaneous
generation of a conscious subjectivity in an inorganic object repre-
sents a hybrid creation, a mind without a conventional body. This
crosses not only the border of the body but also of the mind: the
idea that a mind can arise outside of its conventional boundaries
throws open the door to radical inclusion not only of different states
of mental embodiedness, but also to different concepts of what the
mind itself is. The postcolonial link here is the possibility not only
of recognition in a strange creature, even a mechanical creature, of
similarity – non-otherness – but also the acceptance of such.
In Perdido Street Station, the slake-moths play similarly with the con-
cept of the mind by feeding on the minds of the New Crobuzon pop-
ulace. They are physical entities with mass, size and visual presence,
but beyond the larval stage they eat only conscious minds; this sug-
gests that in Miéville’s world, either the mind itself has mass and size,

or the discontinuity between the moths’ method of nourishment and

their physical existence points to some deeper, far more fundamental
hybridity in the fabric of existence in the text. This is also suggested
by the moths’ consumption of part of Lin’s mind, but not the whole
thing; as Yagharek tells it, in the final battle with the moths, he and
Isaac “ripped her from the moth half drunk. Half her mind, half her

dreams had been sucked into the gullet of the vampir beast. It is gone,
burnt up by stomach juices and then by Motley’s men” (828). The
beasts disembody minds, converting them to whatever energy powers
the moths, and the nightmare-inducing excrement that they drop
on the city when they fly above it. In a sense, what they do is similar
to what Nikki’s killer does in Gravity, when he records her aware-
ness onto a moddy that can be plugged into another person: they
transgress the boundaries of the mind, take what they want and leave
the rest – the body. This is not a positive or productive hybridity, but
may act as metaphor for the trauma of the boundary transgression
that leads to hybridity as response.
Gender, sexuality and hybridity in India
The concept of a sex or gender that does not fall into the male/female
constructed binary is fairly common in SF, particularly in feminist
and postcolonial SF. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, in
which the people of the planet Gethen are without sex or gender for
the majority of the month but may be either male or female during
the monthly time of reproduction, is a foundational SF text regard-
ing “alien” sex and gender. The Oankali aliens of Octavia Butler’s
Xenogenesis trilogy have three sexes: male, female and ooloi, the lat-
ter of which the former two require in order to reproduce. Melzer
(2006) and Pearson (2002) both refer to Melissa Scott’s book Shadow
Man (1995), in which five sexes negotiate gendered sexuality, as an
influential text in the science fictional exploration of sex and gen-
der difference. There is also Samuel Delany’s short story “Aye, and
Gomorrah . . . ” (1967), about a group of astronauts called Spacers
who, working in irradiated space, are neutered so that they cannot
pass on genetic anomalies; and the “frelks” who fetishize them. Dif-
ference in the physical construction of sex – which is more common
than difference in the social construction of gender – is a common
novum.

However, this novum functions in a more complex way in the

case of Ian McDonald’s River of Gods (2004), his novel of a near-
future, hyper-technologized India, and its associated short story “The
Djinn’s Wife” (2005): the particular construction of the third-sex nutes
is a science-fictional novum, but the concept of the third-sex itself
is a novum only in modern Western society, the society of the
book’s author – not in Indian society.3 It is important to note here

McDonald’s own postcoloniality; he is Northern Irish, and, as he
says in an email interview conducted between 2000 and 2001, “you
don’t pass the greater portion of your life through the ‘Troubles’
without some identification with similar conflicts in the developing
world” (para. 6). He identifies Northern Ireland’s kinship with other
postcolonial contexts thus:
I include Northern Ireland as a Third World country: a society

of two significant social groups that have been set against each
other by historical engineering; a skewed economic infrastructure
based on the public sector, with a highly economically significant
samurai elite (the RUC); a highly-politicised population with the
ability to arm itself to the teeth if it’s disregarded; a post-colonial
process of disengagement that failed half-way through; physical
marginalisation, poor infrastructure, a monied class rapidly mov-
ing upwards that is yet unable to engage fully in either Irish or
UK society; the sense of cultural inferiority that forces both social
groups into re-engineering of their cultural tropes . . . . (Para. 7)
This context informs his work. Although he tends to write across con-
texts (he has written science fiction about India, Kenya and Brazil,
amongst others), the most significant common theme in his writ-
ing is the negotiation of postcolonial identities – national, cultural,
sexual, racial – within a technologized future.
The gender-hybridity in these two texts is centred on a third sex
that, despite its name (“nute”, short for neuter), is actively sexual
rather than passively asexual. Nutes have been reconstructed entirely,
from the skin inwards, and their endocrine systems literally rewired
so that sexual activity is divorced entirely from reproduction. They
are not sexless, therefore, but instead have a sex that is constructed
and “rewired” rather than genetic (280), a cyborg sexuality that can

be associated with the subversiveness of Haraway’s cyborg theory.

Although they are not a literal hybrid of human and machine, like a
conventional cyborg, their sexual functioning has been made mechan-
ical: sexual response is contingent not on genital contact but on
“tap[ping] out the arousal codes” on a series of buttons on the wrist
(64). Nor are they genderless, as “nute” has been socially constructed

as a third gender, with a dedicated pronoun, “yt”, to match. There-
fore, the word “nute” is a bit of a misnomer: they are not neutered or
neutral, as the term suggests, but are rather sexually different. Wendy
Pearson (1999), writing in the context of queer theory, makes the dis-
tinction between “politics of identity” and “politics of difference”.
The first she posits as a deviation from the social norm that is itself
an identity, and the second as a deviation:
in ways that are radical and subversive, dedicated to exposing and

challenging an ideologized teleology that reaches beyond sexual
attraction to reveal the deeply un-natural and constructed nature
of our understandings of biological sex, the performative nature of
gender roles, and the sociocultural institutions founded upon this
ideology (3)
The “nutes” of Bharat seem to have their cultural basis in the tradi-
tional Indian hijra. The hijra is considered a third sex, and has been
present in the history of what is now India and Pakistan since the
beginning of recorded history in these areas.
During the era of British colonialism, the Raj was partially fuelled
by Victorian colonial values of sexuality: one tool of colonialism
was the attachment of a sense of shamefulness to indigenous sexual
behaviour, especially where it did not match up with the Victorian
ideal of monogamous Christian marriage. This was one reason the
Raj attempted to eradicate the social practice of hijra, as they saw it as
a breach of what they though of as “public decency” (372). Interest-
ingly, contemporary Western anti-Indian discrimination has centred
more on India’s perceived sexual repression, carried out through
“honour killings”, sati (widow-burning) and other forms of sexual
control as compared to Western nations, in which transsexuality and
other non-binary forms of sexual orientation and expression are at
least nominally accepted.4 Sexual expression has therefore proven

both a site of colonial contention, in that it is one of the ways in

which the colonial West has othered its colonized subjects, and a
double bind for India, in which it is seen as either overly permissive
or not permissive enough, but always in opposition and inferior to
dominant Western sexual paradigms.
This is not to say that nutes have replaced hijras in McDonald’s

texts. “Leaping hijras” are referred to in “The Djinn’s Wife” (446),
and the term is also used in the story as a pejorative for a nute (450),
linking the two and perhaps referring to the relative outsider status of
hijra in zero-world India as well as to the societal uncertainty about,
and discrimination against, nutes in McDonald’s Varanasi. The term
is also used as a pejorative exclamation (River of Gods 461). However,
it is significant that India has a cultural history that includes a gender
presentation alternative to male/female, in that the hijra is a histor-
ical tie between McDonald’s future India and zero-world India. This
also represents an “indigenization” of technology, in that techno-
logical progress is used for cultural aims. Hermaphroditism has been
described by Pearson (2002) as a “Derridean supplement, revealing
what was lacking all along” in the sex/gender systems of the two soci-
eties in Scott’s Shadow Man, an argument that can be applied here as
well. Here, the function of the nute is similar, but more complicated:
the lack has been in Western conceptualizations of sexuality, not in
Indian gender systems. The nute, therefore, is the technologized hijra:
yet extends the role of the hermaphrodite into terms associated with
the West, at the same time as these two texts have indigenized Indian
technology.5 The nute is a wholly subversive figure, hybrid not only
in terms of gender and sexuality but also in terms of indigenous resis-
tance to colonial norms in which tools adopted from the West are
indigenized and repurposed.
In River of Gods, in the end, Tal and the fugitive journalist Najia
form a romantic bond that transcends binary boundaries of gen-
der. Najia, laying her head on Tal’s shoulder as they escape the
pandemonium in Varanasi, thinks of Tal:
Not man not woman not both not neither. Nute. Another way of
being human, speaking a physical language she does not under-
stand. More alien to her than any man, any father, yet this
body next to hers is loyal, tough, funny, courageous, clever, kind,
sensual, vulnerable. Sweet. Sexy. (555)

Ria Cheyne has suggested that one of the ways in which a writer can
sidestep the hierarchical portrayal of the encounter between human
and alien is through a form of hybridity: the breaking down of the
dichotomous construction of human/alien (260). Here, the dichoto-
mous construction of sex and gender is similarly broken down, and
the result is a person who is simultaneously “alien” to natural biologi-

cal experience and wholly human, and who is simultaneously “alien”
to Western culture but finds roots, as in Cheyne’s model, in Indian
tradition.
Conclusions
In a sense, all postcolonial science fiction – indeed, all postcolonial

cultural production – is about hybridity. Nativism as postcolonial
strategy is an impossible project, as are notions of cultural purity
in any form. This is not to say that authenticity is impossible. Cul-
ture, after all, exists in distinctions, and it is certainly possible to
reject the cultural hegemony of colonialism while at the same time
using hybridity in a productive way. Similarly, it is possible to address
both the trauma of colonialism and the hopeful process of decol-
onization. Hybridity itself is an ambivalent state, like the nutes in
River of Gods: both one thing and another and at the same time
neither.
Here we might also return to Joan Gordon’s aforementioned work
on Perdido Street Station, in which she suggests that New Crobuzon is
a “heterotopia” as described by Foucault, and writes of the term:
If it is the other of two places, perhaps one place is in opposi-

tion to the other place, forming a dialectic, a feedback mechanism
between one and the other that generates the next place, a hybrid
that becomes the generator of a new cycle of dialectics. (463)
In each of these definitions there is a suggestion of the next phase,

the next cycle: what comes after the construction of colonial power:
the centre and the periphery, the postcolonialism to colonialism. It is
reminiscent of Memmi’s contention that in the dialectic between col-
onizer and colonized, there is, as Robert Young puts it, “the spectral
presence of all those liminal figures who slipped between those two
categories” (Memmi 1967, qtd. in Young 2001: 423).

In this way, we may read the radical hybridity evident in these

works as a positive rather than a negative characteristic, and the strife
and conflict that this inclusion causes as a residue, and therefore crit-
icism, of the zero-world historical (and present) Western colonial and
imperial projects, as well as those projects’ science-fictional permuta-
tions. Such a reading opens up a future space for positive voices of

radical inclusion.

5
Indigenous Knowledge and
Western Science

The conflict between indigenous methods of knowledge-production
and the Western scientific paradigm is often expressed through trau-
matic and destructive hybridity (a concept discussed at length in
Chapter 4), and is often resolved through hybridity that is productive
and allows for synthesis. This particular conflict is unique, because
the goal of each way of understanding the world is similar: to make
sense of the world, to bring it under control where possible and to
explain uncontrollable phenomena.
It is also important to note that the colonialist worldview itself con-
tained an inherent contradiction: it lionized the scientific method
and its results – particularly in terms of race, as I discuss in
Chapter 3 – at the same time as it imposed on indigenous peoples
its own patently unscientific system of spirituality, Christianity. V. Y.
Mudimbe sees the colonial conception of Africa – a conception that
can, to a certain extent, be generalized across colonial contexts –
specifically as:
incarnat[ing] three overlapping powers: the colonial state, sci-

ence, and Christianity. They ground three principal arenas of
conversion: the colonial commissioner’s transmutation of “savage
spaces” into “civilised settings”; the anthropologist’s codifying of
humans, institutions, and beliefs by their particularly vis-à-vis a
[sic] functional model; and the Christian missionary’s self-sacrifice
among “primitives” in the struggle between the “true light” and
local traditions. (4)
127

This chapter focuses specifically on the second of these powers –

science and its associated discourse – in opposition with native
spirituality and alternative sciences (which themselves are bound
together in a way that Western science and spirituality are not, or
at least not to the same extent). However, it is necessary, in the wider
view, to remember that all three of these methods of colonial “con-

version”, as Mudimbe puts it, functioned together in interrelation to
carry out colonialism.
There are, and have always been, strong links between science fic-
tion and religion and spirituality. Particularly after the Second World
War, although present to an extent in earlier work, Tom Woodman
identifies “the genuine metaphysical searching that is often endemic
to the genre” (110). Eric S. Rabkin draws a distinction between “fairy
tales” and SF with a spiritual or divine component: referring to the
“intervention of deity in the affairs of humanity” in Olaf Stapledon’s
Star Maker (1937), Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953) and James
Blish’s A Case of Conscience (1958), among other classic SF texts.
Rabkin writes: “Miracles are just as easily accepted in science fic-
tion as they are in fairy tales” (79). This occurs even, or perhaps
especially, where the “deity” is figured as a being so advanced it is
indistinguishable from magic (to borrow from Arthur C. Clarke), in
works such as Clarke’s own 2001 quadrilogy or Joe Haldeman’s Forever
Free (2000), or where science and magic coexist in the same universe,
such as in Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories, the online game World of
Warcraft (the focus of Chapter 3) or the Final Fantasy series of video
games, particularly iterations 8 through 13. Though it is often dis-
missed as deus ex machina, this elision between Suvin’s “cognitive
estrangement” and what I might call spiritual estrangement is inher-
ent in the fabric of both SF and fabulist tradition. It is this kind of
divine intervention, rooted firmly in a spiritual and religious tradi-
tion that itself belongs to mimetic reality, which occurs at the end of,
for instance, Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, not an invented
or unmoored magic.
It is also important to acknowledge the link between divinity
and “magic”, and the very different meanings of both of these
terms within a postcolonial context, resulting in a different kind
of emergent work. A divergent analysis of Clarke’s famous axiom
that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic” may be helpful here: rather than taking Clarke’s meaning,

Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science 129
that we call it “magic” because we don’t understand it, I see the

“magic” and “divinity” in Hopkinson’s work as signifying not sci-
entific ignorance – itself an assumption caught up in colonialist
assumptions about indigenous ignorance and intellectual unsophis-
tication – but rather a different way of understanding, a different
cultural logic. This science fiction is therefore something subtler.

Reading Hopkinson’s text as science fiction – as I do in this chapter –
is appropriate, therefore, not only because of the logical rigour of the
world-building or because of the historical tradition of divinity in SF
but also because such readings do two important things. They open
the genre of SF to new dialectical possibilities, and, more importantly,
acknowledge and foreground the disparate worldviews of colonized,
formerly colonized and diasporic peoples, for many of whom science
and spirituality are intertwined and inseparable.
The interpolation of divinity, spirituality and folktale with the sci-
ence fiction genre holds a particular significance for postcolonial
science fiction. Narrative, particularly folktale and legend, is a central
function of cultural memory; erasure of these narratives is a cen-
tral function of colonial power. Western science and the discourse
of progress – Anne McClintock’s “angel of progress”, as it were –
have been wielded as weapons by colonizers both literally and figu-
ratively, and have not overlaid but have often destroyed, and always
inhibited, indigenous narrative. As I mention in Chapter 3, in the
context of alienation as dehumanizing social and political construct,
colonial powers created their methods of governance, their power
structures and their methods of communication as deliberately hier-
archical in a way that favoured the colonizer. These structures are
wholly invented, and have at their heart the lionization – indeed, the
reification at the expense of all others – of the discourse and methods
of Western science, at the expense of indigenous worldviews.
Culturally, as McClintock has shown, colonized peoples were seen
by the colonizers to exist in what she has termed “anachronistic
space”:
colonised people . . . do not inhabit history proper but exist in a

permanently anterior time within the geographic space of the
modern empire as anachronistic humans, atavistic, irrational,
bereft of human agency – the living embodiment of the archaic
“primitive”. (30)

Cultural difference, therefore, is predicated not only across space

but also across time. The colonial ideology of progress includes the
drive for technological process, and figures time as linear, with tech-
nologically progressive societies pushing forward and leaving others
behind. There is a clear hierarchy to this concept, with colonial soci-
eties figured as superior and colonized societies as inferior. Christian

Gundermann draws on this idea, suggesting that the colonized world
is generally presented in colonial literature as “a world frozen in its
past and therefore devoid of history, a world that is imagined to
be both the origin of European civilization and its radical ‘other’ ”
(153). The dynamic of past and future is therefore complicated and
folded over on itself: the colonized are seen almost literally as not
only figures from history but as figures from the colonizer’s own past,
objects of simultaneous reverence as ancestors and scorn as primi-
tives. This thought process is one of the many ways in which the
colonial paradox of the idealized/reviled native functions.
“Indigenous scientific literacies”, Dillon writes, are “those prac-
tices used by indigenous native peoples to manipulate the natu-
ral environment in order to improve existence in areas including
medicine, agriculture, and sustainability. The term stands in con-
trast to more invasive (and potentially destructive) western scientific
method” (2007: 25). Dillon also refers to postcolonial SF as belong-
ing to “ceremonial worlds”, borrowing the term from environmental
philosopher Jim Cheney to describe works that honour and incor-
porate indigenous storytelling as a method of knowledge transfer,
“where story functions as ceremony to preserve tradition” (2007: 24).
These two terms – “indigenous scientific literacies” and “ceremonial
worlds” – suggest a different way of thinking about science fiction
in a postcolonial context, one that includes both a scientific and a
spiritual worldview. It seems to me that rejection of the Western
scientific method is not necessary in order to include indigenous sci-
entific literacies. Just as postcolonialism refers not to nativism and the
drive for purity of culture, but rather to a process of emergence from
colonialism and negotiation of postcolonial identity, so might the
“science” in postcolonial science fiction refer to a similar process of
simultaneous recuperation of indigenous scientific literacy and incor-
poration of those elements of Western science that prove beneficial.
A postcolonial view of science fiction therefore foregrounds the
concept that indigenous and other colonized systems of knowledge

are not only valid but are at times more scientifically sound than
is Western scientific thought. This is the case particularly where the
West has married scientific progress to global economic domination,
as in the international biotech industry, where large conglomerate
companies encourage and sometimes force the production of agricul-
tural monocultures to replace indigenous biodiversity. The physicist

and ecological activist Vandana Shiva has commented:
The universal/local dichotomy is misplaced when applied to the

western and indigenous traditions of knowledge, because the
western is a local tradition which has been spread world wide
through intellectual colonization . . . . When local knowledge does
appear in the field of the globalising vision, it is made to disappear
by denying it the status of a systematic knowledge, and assigning it
the adjectives ‘primitive’ and ‘unscientific.’ Correspondingly, the
western system is assumed to be uniquely ‘scientific’ and universal.
(2000: 10)
There is a large body of non-postcolonial science fiction, much of it

dystopian, that critiques the ideal of technological progress above all
else. Take Paul J. McAuley’s Fairyland (1995) and associated short sto-
ries, for instance, or the films Blade Runner (Scott 1982), The Fifth
Element (Besson 1997) or The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski
1999) and its sequels (Wachowski and Wachowski 2003). Or, of
course, the smash hit film Avatar (Cameron 2009), which reinscribes,
seemingly without irony, the Pocahontas/Dances with Wolves story
of the noble savage and the “gone-native” leader along with its
environmentalist message. However, the results of this technological
greed tend to be nuclear war and apocalypse (Miller, Jr., A Canticle
for Leibowitz (1960); Tepper, The Gate to Women’s Country (1988);
McCarthy, The Road (2006)); social breakdown (Collins, The Hunger
Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009) and Mockingjay (2010)); artificially
created pandemic (Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of
the Flood (2009); King, The Stand (1978)) or environmental disaster
(Christopher, No Blade of Grass (1956); Reynolds, Waterworld (1995)).
Science fiction within a postcolonial idiom, however, presents a
different critique of Western scientific development: instead of crit-
icizing the extent to which it is allowed to eclipse all other values,
postcolonial SF questions the system itself, and explores specifically

its deleterious effects on societies and cultures whose own worldviews

are built on a different basis entirely.
The key to postcolonial science fiction is not that it includes ele-
ments of fabulism, folktale, divinity, orature or other elements of
indigenous culture or narrative. Neither is it that these works chal-
lenge the paradigm of Western science, progress and the scientific

method as the only legitimate method of understanding the world.
Rather, it is how these elements come into play, and how they inter-
act with science fiction, that is important. To riff on Freedman’s
phrasing: it is the difference that such difference makes.
The idea that power dynamics are, fundamentally, knowledge-
based is also important to this discussion. As Benedict Anderson notes
in Imagined Communities (1983), the establishment of a common lan-
guage, a vernacular, is one of the bases of nationalism. Language, and
the discourse surrounding language, has been both a central method
of colonial control and a site of anti-colonial struggle. As Lee goes on
to show, both discourse itself and the method of discourse is at issue:
“The colonial encounter between the British and natives”, he writes,
“was for the most part a clash between literacy-based culture and
orally-constituted culture, a situation that was historically common
for European colonialism in general” (101).
“The Eye, Altering, Alters All”
As I mentioned above, a significant problem endemic to colonial sci-

ence, expressed through science fiction, is that of the anthropologist’s
gaze. This way of interacting with indigenous peoples distorts both
in its effect on observed behaviour and in skewing the power dynam-
ics between observer and observed, placing the former in a privileged
position in relation to the latter. Carl Malmgren finds this dynamic
in Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead (1986), the middle book in
Card’s original Ender trilogy. He draws on feminist criticism to make
the argument that “the supposedly neutral stance of the objective
observer is itself politically ‘loaded’ ” (22). As the feminist critic bell
hooks has written: “Subordinates in relations of power learn expe-
rientially that there is a critical gaze, one that ‘looks’ to document,
one that is oppositional” (208). Malmgren quotes Ender’s explana-
tion of the view of the alien pequeninos, or “piggies”, on whose
native planet the humans have set up a colony: “You see, the piggies

don’t think of the fence the way we do. We see it as a way of pro-
tecting their culture from human influence and corruption. They see
it as a way of keeping them from learning all the wonderful secrets
that we know” (324). This conflict, between the colonizer’s desire to
keep indigenous cultures “pure” for the colonizer’s own consump-
tion and observation, and the desire of those colonial subjects to

partake of the usually technological benefits brought by the colo-
nizer, is familiar to historical colonialism and makes up part of a
complicated problematic of conflict. The opposite but correspond-
ing conflict is between the colonizers’ desire to “civilize” and bring
their colonial subjects into what it perceives as the temporal present –
and the resulting indigenous drive towards “nativism”, the desire to
keep one’s own culture pure and to go back to an idealized precolo-
nial cultural state, against which Fanon argues in The Wretched of
the Earth. These conflicts have corollaries amongst both colonized
and colonizer groups – colonialists versus anti-colonialists, and col-
onized peoples who disagree amongst themselves as to the best way
to deal with the colonizer – whether it is better to fight on all counts
and hold as ideal a nativist utopia located in the past, or whether
it is better to become hybrid and to expand cultural identity whilst
taking advantage of whatever things, such as new technologies, the
colonizers may offer.
These dynamics speak to the ways in which colonial idealization
of native culture functioned: often, indigenous cultures were objec-
tified in this way, seen as curiosities to be observed – in fact, in the
very observation there is a level of disrespect, in the assumption that
the colonizer has a right to have access to aspects of native culture.
Later, aspects of culture such as dress, hairstyles and other visual
markers were made into visual media such as postcards, paintings
and reproduced curios, and were sold as cheap, simplified replica-
tions of an actual culture. These cultural “replicas” often came under
both over and covert attack from colonialists and missionaries, not
only because they were not true representations of that culture but
also because of the culture itself, as in the case of Native American,
First Nations and many African tribal cultures. Native culture, there-
fore, was being destroyed at the same time as inauthentic images and
copies of its cultural artefacts and customs were being proliferated:
it was destroyed as much by the greed of the colonial gaze as by
colonial guns.1

However, as Card writes, there is significant resistance to any

change in native culture. Colonialists like their indigenous cultures
small, manageable and static: indigenous culture is seen as something
to observe, to write about, to visit as a tourist and to gaze upon, some-
thing stuck in the past and stuck in one place, not something in
which people participate actively and often unselfconsciously and

which, like any other culture, is changing and dynamic. For this
reason, along with functional reasons, colonialists have often been
reluctant to share technological advances with native peoples. The
justification is that giving technology to indigenous peoples will
somehow “ruin” their culture, which, as already mentioned, is seen
as static and unadaptable. There is a doubled, paradoxical motiva-
tion here: some putatively benevolent-minded colonialists want to
avoid “polluting” native cultures, while others fear the result of pro-
viding technology to those whom they feel would be unable to use it
responsibly.
In both of these cases, native peoples themselves are seen as with-
out agency: it is the colonizers who are seen as “acting upon” native
culture, rather than the participants in that culture acting upon it
themselves.
Folktale and the Faithful Soldier
One major theme of indigenous and other postcolonial science fic-

tion is the recuperation of indigenous stories within the context of SF.
Some works, like Saladin Ahmed’s recent story “The Faithful Soldier,
Prompted” (2010), published online in the November 2010 “Arab Sci-
ence Fiction” special issue of Apex Magazine, are old folktales that
seem translated into the particular language of science fiction, as
one might translate to Russian or Amharic. This particular tale is a
retelling of the story of the “Ruined Man Who Became Rich Again
Through a Dream” from the Thousand and One Nights, the classic
compendium of Arab folktales. The story concerns a poor man from
Baghdad who dreams of a person who tells him to go to Cairo, and
he will become rich. He stays for the night in a mosque adjacent to a
house, which is robbed by three men who flee; the man is mistaken
for a robber and beaten and imprisoned by the imam of the mosque.
When the man tells the imam of his dream, the imam laughs at him,
speaks of the folly of dreams and tells him that he himself had a

silly dream about riches buried beneath a fountain in Baghdad – and

describes the fountain standing in the courtyard of the man’s own
house. The man returns to his house, digs up the fountain and finds
his reward.2 Faith, it seems, is of the utmost importance.
The same story has been retold before, particularly as Paulo
Coelho’s The Alchemist (1986, published in English 1993), and was

translated into Spanish as “The Tale of Two Dreamers” in Jorge Luis
Borges’s collection A Universal History of Infamy (1935, published in
English 1972). However, this is the first use of the genre of science
fiction in the retelling of this particular tale, and the science-fictional
elements are significant.
Ahmed’s story concerns a former soldier, Ali, burned out from his
time fighting in the Middle Eastern theatre of the Global Credit Cru-
sade, a war in a dystopian future that follows on closely from the
globally corporatized trajectory of our present: his battle cry, as he
fights a “nanohanced” tiger he encounters on the road, is “God is
greater than credit!” Ali is tired, and he is poor, living as he does
a long and dangerous walk from the city of Old Cairo. His part-
ner Lubna is ill from a biological weapon spread by “one side or
the other”, he doesn’t know which, and he hasn’t the means to
obtain the serum that will cure her. Again, this follows closely from
our present trajectory: biological weapons have been used indiscrim-
inately by all sides in Middle East conflicts in recent history, from
Saddam Hussein’s gassing of Kurdish civilians in Halabja to Israel’s
use of white phosphorus in its battle against Hamas,3 with most of
the damage being done to civilians – or “collateral”, as the military
term goes.
Ali has learned to ignore the residual prompts from an operat-
ing system implanted during the war that appear behind his eyes:
“God willing, Faithful Soldier, you will spend your leave-time dinars
wisely–at Honest Majoudi’s!”, for instance. However, he receives one
day a prompt that seems of divine origin: “God willing, Faithful Sol-
dier, you will go to the charity-yard of the Western Mosque in Old
Cairo. She will live.” These prompts, particularly the insistent repeti-
tion that “she will live”, continue throughout Ali’s journey to Cairo,
his imprisonment and his beating by the filthy-tongued Shaykh-
Captain of the mosque guards. Though grafted on to a science-
fictional device – implantable computerized “retscreens” that carry
orders for soldiers – there is ultimately no scientific explanation for

the prompts that lead Ali to Lubna’s salvation. Ali’s own explanation
is in the realm of the spiritual:
This was no head-hacker’s trick. No thieves’ scheme. He did not

understand it, but God had spoken to him. He could not dishonor
that. He had once served murderers and madmen who claimed to

act in God’s name. But Lubna–brilliant, loving Lubna–had shown
him that this world could hold holiness.
Ali’s world is one in which the greatest role of science and

technology – including economics, the “dismal science”, which has
laid waste to his world’s trade relationships and economic stability –
has been to cause havoc and kill. However, the technology of Ali’s
retscreen is also the conduit by which he receives the prompt that will
save Lubna. Ali’s relationships – with Lubna and with God – are his
salvation; his faith in love, his love for Lubna, is as transcendent as
his faith in his “dream”, the prompt from God. But people still dream,
even in high-tech societies; the technologization of Ali’s “dream”, the
fact that it is a prompt, suggests that technology’s role is more com-
plex than it seems. It is technology combined with colonialist ideology
that produces the world’s ruination.
We can read this response, this skinning of SF on to folktale, in
the context of Bhabhaian hybridity. The overlay of science fiction on
folktale, the mosaicism of science-fictional and mythological tropes,
or the coexistence of clearly scientific and clearly divine elements
within a work does not capitulate to the colonial power, but rather
demonstrates that cultural memory is not in fact destroyed by the
discourse of progress that seeks to situate it in the past and in pure
myth. Instead, as these works assert, indigenous stories – and indige-
nous peoples – exist and remain, and thrive, even within a discourse
that seems oppositional.
As Amal El-Mohtar writes of her own story in Apex, referencing the
legend of Alissar and the bull’s hide, by which she laid out the bound-
aries of Carthage by slicing it into a long, impossibly thin ribbon: “we
speak your language as well as you do, but we are not colonized by it;
we will use it to speak our stories, translate our lives into your under-
standing, and show you how much you miss by trying to silence
us. We live between your lines, and though you have never heard of
Alissar, we will show you how vast a country lies between them – how

many city-lengths we can scissor out of the bull’s hide you deign to
grant us.”4
Brown Girl in the Ring, multiculturalism and spirituality
Other works, such as Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, are

works that combine science-fictional and divine elements into an
internally consistent, rigorous world that looks to be impossible –
or, equally, possible. The system of spirits, gods and the afterlife in
Brown Girl in the Ring is as structurally rigorous as the technology in
many more traditional “hard-SF” works. Gerald Jonas writes in the
New York Times that Hopkinson:
treats spirit-calling the way other science fiction writers treat nan-
otechnology or virtual reality: like the spirits themselves, the
spirit-callers follow rules as clear to them (if not always to the
reader) as the equations of motion or thermodynamics are to
scientists or engineers. (26, in Rutledge 33)
This rigour in world-building, and the ability to analyse the book

along the same structural matrices as one might analyse a work of
“hard” SF, is essential to the book’s thematic arc. Indigenous culture,
including faith in indigenous divinities, makes as little sense within
a purely Western scientific context as does belief in various other SF
tropes such as faster-than-light travel; at the same time, Caribbean
religion makes more cultural sense than does the opportunistic
Mammon-worship of Toronto’s (the book’s setting) outer ring.
Brown Girl in the Ring (hereafter referred to as Brown Girl) is the
story of a future downtown Toronto walled off from the rest of the
city and left to destroy itself from within – although in Hopkinson’s
catastrophic Toronto, there is no available exit:
When Toronto’s economic base collapsed, investors, commerce

and government withdrew into the suburb cities, leaving the rot-
ten core to decay. Those who stayed were the ones who couldn’t
or wouldn’t leave. The street people. The poor people. The ones
who didn’t see the writing on the wall, or who were too stub-
born to give up their homes. Or who saw the decline of authority
as an opportunity. As the police force left, it sparked large-scale

chaos in the city core: the Riots. The satellite cities quickly
raised roadblocks at their borders to keep Toronto out. The only
unguarded exit from the city core was now over water . . . . In the
twelve years since the Riots, repeated efforts to reclaim and rebuild
the core were failing: fear of vandalism and violence was keeping
burb people out. (4)

It is worth noting that the economic structure of this fictional
Toronto is, to an extent, the inverse of that of zero-world contempo-
rary Toronto, in which wealth tends to be concentrated in downtown
and midtown areas and in which suburbs such as Scarborough and
Etobicoke, mentioned in the novel as safe, well-off havens from the
chaos of downtown, are often less wealthy.5 One major exception
to this is the southern end of Sherbourne Street, called “The Burn”
in Brown Girl, which bridges the novel’s world and zero-world by
remaining the same in both: a site both of multiculturalism and
of poverty, which are, in Canada’s white-dominated settler society,
unfortunately linked.
Toronto is particularly complicated in Brown Girl. It is the dis-
placed metropole: simultaneously a site of anti-colonial resistance
by formerly and currently colonized people – hence the shadow of
First Nations resistance in Temagami (which Michelle Reid (2005)
addresses), as well as the broken multiculturalism in the Burn – and
indirect colonial rule by white Canadians, anointed by the Crown in
British-inflected governmental positions.
This Toronto’s scorched economic system is ruled by a rare person
who straddles the border between within and without, and between
technology and spirituality: Rudy, a warlock and drug pusher who
acts both as ringleader of the city gangs and as surreptitious provider
of needed things. In the case dramatized in Brown Girl, he is con-
tracted to provide a human heart, to be ripped from a living and
unwilling chest – the ultimate in spiritually bankrupt technological
feats – for transplant into Uttley, the Premier of Ontario. Rudy, a black
man with Caribbean ancestry, uses Caribbean magic to make himself
indispensable to those who can afford his services. His role is that of
the collaborator, the African slave-merchant, the seller of antiquities.
The human body, in this text, functions as cipher for the dilemma
of the colonized. It has three functions: conversion to capital, as the
site of punishment and torture, and as an avatar for divinity. The

first is driven by technological progress combined with greed and

dehumanization; the second is a bastardized echo of Foucault; the
third is anti-colonial resistance.
The aforementioned Premier Uttley, she of the bum heart, eschews
the cruelty-free (or at least human-murder-free, depending on one’s
stance on animal rights) and available option of a specially engi-

neered pig heart in favour of a human one, however obtained, in
order to boost her political ratings and therefore her quotient of
power. Rudy is dispatched by the Premier to find and bring back a
healthy heart, which, due to the demolition of the living-donor pro-
gram many years before, will almost certainly have to be obtained
through murder. There is sad irony in Uttley’s agent Baines’ regur-
gitation of the party line that “human organ transplant should be
about people helping people, not preying on helpless creatures [pigs]”
(3), whilst at the same time preying on human beings whose social,
political and economic position makes them even more vulnerable
than are the animals generally used as transplant donors. The lives of
these people, according to those in power, are worth less than those
of animals. Of course, it is the citizens of Toronto whose hearts are up
for grabs, in Rudy’s eyes. When he suggests killing a street child for
his or her heart, Baines refuses, not because of the immorality of the
suggestion but because “most of them have had buff[drug]-addicted
mothers”, and the quality of their hearts would therefore be too low
to meet the capitalist demand (7). “Pity”, thinks Rudy; “no one would
have noticed a few more of the rats going missing” (7), again associ-
ating the people of Toronto with animals. The bodies of downtown’s
populace are not only transgressed but seen as eminently transgress-
ible by those in power; they are dehumanized and treated as colonial
subjects were treated.
Brown Girl, like Eden Robinson’s “Terminal Avenue” – discussed
at length in Chapter 1 – introduces a Foucauldian dynamic of
the tortured body as punishment and as spectacle. All punishment
is, Foucault suggests, “situated in a certain ‘political economy’ of
the body” (25), though he claims these have been mitigated and
sometimes forbidden with the development of legislative modernity.
In this vein, Rudy uses manipulation and torture of his underlings’
and prisoners’ bodies to punish them for slights against his enforced
order, combining in the worst possible way his spiritual powers
and the influence of the suburbs’ prejudiced dehumanization and

technological terrorization of Toronto’s people. He compels his zom-

bie servant Melba, whom he controls in both body and mind, to work
herself beyond her body’s ability to cope. When he tires of her, he
flays her alive in a particularly gruesome scene in order to make an
example of her to Tony, whom he threatens with the same fate if
he does not commit murder and bring a heart for Uttley. Melba has

already been robbed of agency and made into a flesh puppet; in strip-
ping her of her skin, Rudy strips her of her humanity, turning her into
a “living anatomy lesson” (136) – a reference to the dispassionate gaze
of the scientist, who eschews the spiritual significance of the body.
Salvation for Toronto arrives not by technological progress, nor by
indigenous spirituality turned dark and wrong by collusion with the
power elite, but rather in the form of members of the Caribbean pan-
theon. They stage a spirit takeover of the bodies of Ti-Jeanne and her
son, Baby, during Mami Gros-Jeanne’s ceremony (94–96), in order to
provide power to those who seek their help. The temporary creation
of the hybrid human/god body represents a productive hybridity to
counteract Rudy’s destructive hybridity. Rather than helping Tony
to escape the downtown core for the suburbs, the gods, by helping
to eradicate Rudy, in the end help to make the downtown a safer,
better place.
The significance that Caribbean gods, embodied in Canadians of
Caribbean descent, are the driving force behind Toronto’s salvation
is twofold. First, it opens up a space for non-dominant spiritualism
within science fiction narrative, both in terms of the SF genre in
general and within Canadian science fiction specifically. Second, it
puts forward the possibility that a paradigm, or a religion, other than
Canada’s dominant one is not only good but is actually essential. The
cosmopolitanism of the city is, in this case, quite literally a blessing.
River of Gods, indigenization of technology and cyclical

time
One of the main themes of Ian McDonald’s River of Gods, discussed

also in Chapter 4, is the explosive paradox inherent in the passage
of time: beneath the linear narrative of scientific progress there is a
deep cycle, predicated in this text upon Hindu gods that exist halfway
between metaphor and mimesis. The titular “river” is many things:
the Ganges that runs through the book’s split, warring India; the flow

of both time and space; and the fluidity of the super-powerful aeais
whose existence is distributed throughout the data streams of this
wired, late-late capitalist society. Milojevic and Inayatullah (2003)
identify the cyclical concept of time as in direct opposition to the
Western colonial paradigm of linear time: they identify several exam-
ples of non-Western conceptions of time, which centre on the past,

on a cycle or on a spiral metaphor rather than on a linear progres-
sion from past to future. River of Gods provides a synthesis of cyclical
and linear time, portraying them as coexistent. An image of non-
Euclidean geometry might best describe McDonald’s concept of time:
a straight line that nonetheless curves around and comes back always
to a place where it both has and has not been. Hindu gods are both
constant and changeable, both static and shifting, both real and
unreal.
This also speaks to the idea that culture itself is not static. Often,
the colonial encounter is considered in terms of a monolithic colo-
nial culture interacting with an indigenous culture that is seen as
similarly unchanging, on account of its permanent situation in a
historical past rather than its valorization as the pure, true, perfect
colonial culture that needs to be imposed universally. Each culture
is seen as static but in different ways. However, postcolonial cultures
are hybrid, which shows that they are changing and changeable; both
because the colonizer has forced them to change, and because they
have themselves created hybrid “new transcultural forms” (Ashcroft
et al. 2003: 118). The India in River of Gods is an extrapolation of
today’s India, which has embraced technology on the terms of the
West. The British colonizers brought British technology to India as
they imposed their own colonial rule; in recent years, America has
joined Britain in what might be called free trade imperialism in
India,6 exporting technologically skilled work to India while paying
those workers much less than they would make in America or Britain,
thereby continuing to exploit a vast economic disparity between
the economies of India and the two Western countries. The war-
ring states of Awadhi and Bharat in River of Gods, on the other hand,
have embraced technology on their own terms, have turned it to the
service of their own cultural idioms rather than allowing technol-
ogy’s contemporary Western cultural context to accompany it. One
of the projects of postcolonial hybridity, which Len Findlay has sug-
gested is to “Indigenize” (298), has been accomplished in River of

Gods: rather than attempting to include indigenous elements within

the framework culture of the colonizer, this post-postcolonial, even
decolonized, India has taken what elements of the colonizer’s cul-
ture it wants and built an intensely, intrinsically Indian culture that
includes them within it.
One way in which technology has been “indigenized” in River of

Gods and “The Djinn’s Wife” is that genetic engineering has brought
about a recasting of the caste system in light of new developments in
available technology. The caste system, which has its origin in Hindu
religious belief, history and culture, has not been destroyed, however.
It has been adapted to technology rather than taken over by it, using
technological progress in the service of native Indian cultural aspects
rather than losing those aspects in the face of the totalizing, pseudo-
utopian ideology of technological progress so often portrayed in
Western SF. The term “Brahmin”, which normally describes a person
of the highest Hindu caste, has been adapted for use as a descrip-
tive for the new, genetically altered humans, whose bodies age half
as quickly as do those of non-altered humans.
The alteration process that creates these children is available only
to those who can afford it – the designation “Brahmin” therefore
becomes one of economic and social class, not of inborn caste.
This replacement of reincarnation with capitalism, and of birthright
and heredity with genetic engineering, in the Indian caste sys-
tem, makes the Brahmin children both spiritually and physically
postcolonial. They are therefore an intensely ambivalent site of inter-
section, and conflict between the indigenous Hindu worldview and
colonial Western worldviews. Significantly, the Brahmin caste is his-
torically the priest caste, which becomes especially significant in the
text, considering the role of spirituality, and the blurring of bound-
aries between technology and divinity. They are presented, therefore,
as living paradoxes, sinister juxtapositions between eternally young
bodies and twisted minds: “They look like angels but inside they
are dark and old”, says one girl, Juha, of the Brahmin (302). Shiv,
one of the text’s main characters and Juha’s date for the evening,
agrees: “He does not know if it is real or his mind, but when he is
around Brahmins he can always smell wrongness, genes turned awry”
(303). The Brahmin children are seen not as a positive site of strate-
gic hybridity but rather as a site of colonial contamination in Indian
history and culture.

Another central site of ambivalence between technology and indi-

geneity in River of Gods is that of the aeais, whose significance is
manifold: they are created by humans but take the form of the cre-
ators of humans, in the Hindu origin myths; they are sentient in a
way that is comprehensible to humans but is utterly unlike human
consciousness; they are both terrestrial and extraterrestrial and they

exist in both our and other space-times. In their own existence they
bind together space and time, exemplifying how past, present and
future are inextricably interlinked. Harrison writes that:
The aeai are alien to us, and they are naturally multiple; we are
alien to them, and we are naturally singular. Inevitably neither
can understand the other; the persecution that humans initiate as
a result serves as a powerful abstract demonstration of the human
tendency to lash out at that which is different, or of which we are
afraid. (121)
The lashing out at the aeais isn’t “abstract”, however – it is fictional,

but hardly abstract. In fact, it is decidedly realistic, albeit within the
futuristic, science-fictional paradigm of the text.
The distinction between technology and religion has been altered –
not broken down, exactly, but technology and religion have been in
a sense conflated. At the end of the book, it is revealed that the aeais,
who have taken the form of Hindu gods, inhabit the very fabric of
the universe’s space-time. It is they who have created the Tabernacle,
and who have, through the construction of the faces therein, pushed
the circumstances into place for Vishram Ray’s machine to reach the
“cinder” of Universe 212255 (573), allowing it, and its aeai inhabi-
tants, access to our own in order to save the information contained
therein – namely, themselves, who have no discrete physical bodies
but instead live woven into the fabric of the universe. And as thanks,
they have sent the Tabernacle, which contains a “universal automa-
ton that codes the information in the Boltzmon [the subatomic
particle into which the universe of the aeais will have collapsed,
and which would contain all of the information in that universe;
namely, the ‘cinder’ referred to above] to a form comprehensible”
to human beings (574). Thomas Lull and Lisa Durnau marvel at the
meaning of this, which suggests not only a deep cycle but also a
reciprocal folding of time: that gods and humans are the same, that

technology and the divine are linked. “We were their gods,” Thomas
marvels. “We were their Brahma and Siva, Vishnu and Kali. We are
their creation myth” (574). Mark Teppo, in a 2006 review of River
of Gods, identifies McDonald’s India with “what mythologist Mircea
Eliade called the ‘epiphany’ – the point where the sacred touches
the profane and God manifests Itself; the common science fiction

term for this moment is the ‘conceptual breakthrough’ ”. This partic-
ular moment in the text signifies an epiphany, then: technology and
divinity merge into a singular concept. It is anti-colonial, in that it
rejects the colonial ideologies of linear progress and of technologi-
cal domination. And it is postcolonial, in that it specifically counters
the colonial history of India and the prevailing ideologies of Britain,
India’s most recent former colonizer.
It is significant that this divinity is conceptualized in terms of
Hindu divinity; more generally, that it is a polytheistic framework
of divinity, rather than the monotheistic, exclusive Christian frame-
work associated with the colonial West and with Western missionar-
ies. “The burning chakra of regeneration is endless” (574–575), thinks
Lisa Durnau, casting the events as both scientifically and divinely
cyclical, linking space and time. There may be a play in here on the
colonial notion that colonized countries are permanently situated in
a permanent time-lag of the the past; that travellers to the colonized
world are always, as Ali Behdad has written, “belated” (13). In this
case, India is the centre of a time-paradox of a different sort: the
confluence of past and future, not the irresolvable gap between them.
Salt Fish Girl and ecological fabulism
Larissa Lai’s first novel, When Fox is a Thousand, like Eden Robinson’s
first novel Monkey Beach, is more a fabulist story than a science-
fictional one; her second novel, Salt Fish Girl, discussed as well in
Chapter 2 is inclusive of science fiction. As I mentioned in the
introduction to this chapter, science fiction as a genre defined exclu-
sively in relation to Western scientific knowledge and understanding
poses a similar problem: the system of Western scientific inquiry
has generally excluded subaltern spiritualities and scientific literacies.
However, Lai’s science fiction, like other postcolonial science fiction,
can be read as a negotiation of a way out of this negative feedback-
loop: as Lai writes, these works are “another way of writing”, one that

“refuse[s] to nail certainties to the wall” and which therefore begins

to find a way out of the colonial identity trap (2004: 255).
The narrative of Salt Fish Girl, like that of When Fox is a Thousand,
is both fragmented and connected. It begins with a many-layered
“bifurcation” that spins into a hybrid tale of a hybrid woman, made
of equal parts human and fish, who fuses Hans Christian Andersen’s

The Little Mermaid and Chinese folk tradition. Nu Wa is a traditional
Chinese name for the first goddess in existence; she is ageless and
eternal, herself both “bifurcated” and synthesized into simultaneous
existence as character and as representation of genitive power. Nu
Wa is metaphysical. She brings forth life, and romantic and sexual
love, in communion with other women, a dynamic that itself sub-
verts the heteronormativity of the Western colonizers.7 Her presence
is a constant spiritual shadow in the science-fictional future.
The narrative is tied together also with versions of folk culture,
both Chinese folktales and religion and Western folktales, particu-
larly those by Hans Christian Andersen, which themselves, in our
world, have been adapted and commercialized and, in the process,
changed. The song of Clara Cruise and the red shoes that dance her to
her death, repeated as a motif throughout the text, is an Andersen ref-
erence, and the myth of the selkies, seal-people, who must eventually
leave their homes on land and return to the sea because they cannot
stop dreaming of water, is indigenous to Ireland but is also used, here
and in Hopkinson’s novel The New Moon’s Arms (2007), to signify a
positive diaspora in which those transformed can escape the literal or
figurative shackles of the colonizers and “live freely” (Dillon 2007a:
34). These correspondences are reshaped and deployed to set up a
series of unstable dichotomies – between colonizer and colonized,
man and woman, oppressor and oppressed, history and future, and
particularly spirituality and Western ideologies of scientific progress –
which demonstrate the spaces of tension in which those who have
been made subaltern must negotiate their identities.
Probably the most significant correspondence, the one that runs
most deeply through the book, begins with the opening scene of Nu
Wa’s bifurcation, in which her transformation from mermaid – a fish-
woman whose hybridity is significant – to human is accompanied by
the admonition: “The pearl will keep you alive forever . . . . But you
will never again be without pain” (8); this is followed by a wrench-
ing, gory sequence in which her tail is torn into legs. This echoes

Andersen’s tale of The Little Mermaid, in which the process of change

is painful for the mermaid, and her legs give her constant agony.
Andersen’s story and Lai’s adaptation both end with the returning
of the mermaid to the sea, but in Andersen’s the theme is linear:
she does not win the hand of the prince, and therefore becomes
a tragic figure, dissolving into sea foam in death. Lai’s “mermaid”

Nu Wa, on the other hand, becomes a mermaid again at the end
of the book, through her love for another girl, Evie – perhaps these
names and their final intertwining, as their “coils interlocked and
slid through one another” (269), point to a positive hybridity in the
foundational myths of Christian-Western and Chinese cultures. And
she gives birth to a baby girl, with the thought: “Everything will be
all right, I thought, until next time” (269).
The immortality of Nu Wa – who is also the lover of the young
Chinese woman living in the late 1800s, called the Salt Fish Girl, as
well as the protagonist Miranda – and the fact that her story “ends”
with the birth of her daughter, points to the same concept of cycli-
cal or circular time discussed above in the context of River of Gods.
This is common to many indigenous traditions, including Cree tradi-
tion as described by the writer Tomson Highway,8 and is prevalent in
postcolonial literatures, particularly postcolonial science fiction.
Science – or rather the concept of scientific progress as taking
precedence over questions of human rights and self-determination,
especially in terms of the body, and in particular the female body –
is therefore portrayed in opposition to the character Miranda and
her family and friends, who live in a nightmarish society in British
Columbia in the year 2044. In this society, large corporations own
semi-utopian company towns, and those without jobs are relegated
to dangerous marginal settlements in the “Unregulated Zone”. The
“jobs”, however, are often dangerous, even sadistic: Miranda’s father,
a tax collector, wears a bizarre virtual-reality costume sardonically
called a “Business Suit” (27), and his job resembles a video game
in which he shoots skeet-like objects on a screen and swallows the
numbers that come out – and then police literally beat the num-
bers out of him. When Miranda asks him why he does it, he says:
“The bank promised adventure . . . . It doesn’t hurt all the time” (29).
This dilemma will be familiar to many new immigrants, particu-
larly those who are in Canada illegally: either do dangerous work
that those in power will not do in order to stay in the colonial

nation or settler colony, or risk being thrown out into the “margins”.
Ironically, these “margins” present the distinct advantage of being
“Unregulated” and therefore outside of the control of the dominant
group. It is a double-edged sword: there is neither protection nor con-
trol. Miranda eventually dons her father’s Business Suit, gives money
back to the people and burns the taxmen who chain her to the wall;

the body is the site of both domination and resistance. So it is, too,
in Miranda’s escape from the geneticist Dr Rudy Flowers, who car-
ries out experimentation on her body without her consent, and her
eventual thwarting of his project later in the book with the help of
Nu Wa/Evie; she is battered by the demands of scientific development
and saved by communion with the spiritual.
In this vein, the oppression of the body of the colonized, specifi-
cally the female colonized, is revealed in the story to be the generator
of the vast wealth of the new society – in particular, its primary eco-
nomic conglomerate, Nextcorp, whose name may be a reference to
the ideology of unfettered scientific progress, constantly seeking the
“next big thing”. Miranda meets Evie, a woman who has escaped
from one of Nextcorp’s many factories, and who educates Miranda
about the ways in which goods are produced by the company:
“They’ve been making people for years” (157), she says, explaining
that she is one of over a hundred thousand women with identical
genetic material who are “not human . . . point zero three per cent
Cyprinus carpio – freshwater carp. I’m a patented new fucking life
form” (158).
The positive generative power of Nu Wa, then, is echoed, commer-
cialized and utilized as a method of subjugation by the economically
driven colonial power. And it is a colonial power: Nextcorp has
“bought out” the Diverse Genome project, which “focused on the
peoples of the so-called Third World, Aboriginal peoples, and peoples
in danger of extinction” (160), and has used their genes to create
the workers in their factories; the workers have “brown eyes and
black hair, every single one” (160). Nextcorp, therefore, has literally
bought the bodies of people who have historically been colonized
and used their genetic essence to create an army of slaves, who are
colonized, oppressed and enslaved now twice over. Evie’s escape,
then, and her and Miranda’s eventual free transformation back into
fish and Miranda’s subsequent birth of a child, represent an escape
not only from the factories but from a paradigm in which bodies are

constructed according to the desires of the colonizer to an organi-

cism of life in which bodies are birthed, and in which this birth is
not manufactured but spiritual.
Distances: The Trickster Wave

At times the confluence of Western science and indigeneity takes a
different form: not interpolation of ostensible opposites but rather
a harmonious approach, as a hyperbola approaches the axis, which
seems almost to merge the two. Vandana Singh’s novella Distances
(2008), in which “art and hyperspatial mathematics . . . reinforce each
other” both diegetically and metanarratively (127), is exemplary of
this form. Distances is fascinating in its constant interpolation of
science and spirituality, to the extent that science seems to lead to
spirituality and vice versa, and at the same time, each approaches the
other so closely that they become indistinguishable.
On an unnamed far-future world inhabited by various genetic
diversions from the contemporary human genome, the original
human settlers have lapsed into legend; the world seems made up
entirely of divergent forms, foreclosing any possibility of nativism,
or purity in the nativist sense. In fact, the question does not seem
to come up at all. That is not to say that each humanoid subtype is
seen as equal or that there is total harmony among the planet’s peo-
ples; there are indeed divisions between them, and in fact genetic
hybridity is seen as somehow wrong. This division is shown, for
instance, in the astronomer protagonist Anasuya’s shivering derision
of the “soulless witch-folk” on the “other side of the planet” who
“perform[] horrible genetic mutilations” (13); the Master of the tem-
ple that is her workplace is himself a genetic cross, a fact that makes
her profoundly uneasy. However, interracial relationships are not
anathema (nor are they fruitful in some iterations; splicing seems to
happen technologically) and one of Anasuya’s lovers has had a rela-
tionship with a “gwi”, a flying sentient worm. As well, no humanoid
subgroup seems to be default or normative; divisions, where they
appear, are between two distinct and putatively equal partners in dis-
dain, rather than a power-driven split between superior and inferior,
powerful and powerless.
In the fictional world Singh creates, there is no practical split
between science and spirituality, or between scientific progress and

a worldview that maps on to and seems to represent Earthbound

cultural indigeneities. There are two strands to this concept in Dis-
tances: spiritual experiences that occur within scientific discovery, as
in the astronomer Anasuya’s communion with the spectre Vara – or
“ripple” (38) – who arises from mathematical concepts within the
sthanas; and cultural concepts, such as oral storytelling, that coex-

ist with and do not contradict scientific progress. The only aspect in
which scientific progress and culture/spirituality do actually clash is
when Anasuya’s exploration is put to use, without her knowledge, by
a faction from the nearby planet Tirana for a purpose that makes
interstellar travel much more feasible – but could make possible
interstellar colonialism, which is an implicit threat in the text.
All astronomy and mathematical work takes place in the Tem-
ple of Mathematical Arts; scientific discovery is conceptualized
as a religious-esque avocation, melding science and spirituality.
The seven-dimensional, conceptual illusion-space in which Anasuya
works is called a sthana; the Sanskrit word is most commonly used
to refer to a place, but it also connotes for existence, being, basis.
The name is significant, both in its exquisite definition of the kind of
meta-environment represented by seven-dimensional space time and
in its derivation from a Sanskrit word sometimes used to describe a
religious and/or metaphysical concept.
Names and language are also important in the context of story-
telling, an indigenous tradition common to many colonized peoples,
utilized here in a science-fictional mode. Tirani astronomer Nirx is
taken to a “telling” at the Temple of the Two Lovers, a spiritual centre
in the city dedicated to Ekatip and Shunyatip, who are separated by
the trickster figure Anhutip, who causes them to forget their “mas-
tery over Number” (77) and therefore to lose each other in time: the
story of this sundering, preceded by “The Tale of the Two Lovers:
A Telling”, bifurcates the novella. “Shunyatip” may be derived from
the Sanskrit “shunyata”, meaning emptiness or void in the Buddhist
sense; “Ekatip” may have its origins in the concept of the Buddhist
spiritual journey. (I am unaware of any Sanskrit or other origin of
Anhutip’s name.)
The story skates along the edge of the boundary between folktale
and proto-science fiction. Although “Number”, or mathematics, is
portrayed as the ultimate foundation of all knowledge, in the folktale
as well as in Distances in general, it does not produce a society in

which science and technology negate the importance of spirituality

and art – themselves connected, both in terms of their transcendent
qualities and their conquest (in their indigenous forms) by colonial
powers. There is no diegetic indication beyond name choices that the
ancestors of Anasuya’s people were from contemporary India. How-
ever, these linguistic choices are important, as they describe a future

not dominated by a Western linguistic paradigm.
A central tension in the novella, and the central site of synthesis,
is the relationship between science and art, itself indistinguishable
from spirituality. For months, Anasuya tries to listen to what the spec-
tre Vara is trying to say. Finally, during one intense session in the
sthanas, she hears her whisper: “Make art.” (33). This is the result of
Anasuya’s mathematics: transcendence. Indeed, mathematical con-
cepts are often expressed through various forms of art: the young
Anasuya’s introduction to mathematics comes in the form of a poem
that she “writes” as she swims in the sea with her mothers:
Fish!
Fish fish!
Fish fish fish fish! (20)
This is, of course, the square of two; however, Anasuya expresses it in

the context of the natural world, the fish she sees as she swims in the
context of the form the poem takes.
This convergence between art and science continues throughout
Anasuya’s life, until finally she makes her ultimate discovery – not
through pure science or through pure art, but through a melding
of both. During the last months of her working life she is slowly
going “blind” to the environment of the sthanas due to the slow
dying off of her athmis, the sort of cross between chlorophyll and Star
Wars’ Force-enacting midichlorians that give her the ability to soar in
the seven-dimensional mathematical environment. Nevertheless, she
works simultaneously on her equations and on modelling a piece of
art, one that will be her masterpiece. They are finished at the same
time because they show the same thing, and more significantly, they
require the same skill and the same talents. Anasuya’s art, her spiritu-
ality and her science are not only linked, they are one and the same.
Ultimately, the secret of the crew from Tirana is revealed: they have
been seeking shortcuts across space time to mitigate the effects of

time dilation and the slowness of interstellar travel. This has been
Anasuya’s project, without her realizing it, and this revelation causes
a rift between the peoples and creates a space of trauma. The Mas-
ter of the Temple is so distraught that he tries to poison everyone,
and hangs himself. Anasuya’s friend and colleague Amas, who has
been poisoned, in his dying moments tells Anasuya that the Master:
“ . . . said it was boundaries . . . make us who we are . . . wrong, you did

wrong to . . . remove boundaries . . . ” (134). Here is both the Master’s
greatest folly and his most founded and logical fear. Before the Mas-
ter’s death, he takes one glimpse at Anasuya’s project and whispers:
“Why did you throw away time all these years and days? . . . . Sending
ships across the void for the foreigners? Why didn’t you create art
before?” (133). For the Master, Anasuya’s art and her science are dis-
tinct, must be distinct; they do not lead into each other. But Vara, the
spectre in the sthanas who might be seen as the voice of the divine, or
at least the spiritually transcendent, is the force that helped Anasuya
to understand that her art and her scientific discovery approach each
other, that they are mutually dependent.
However, the Master is also correct: it is boundaries and distinc-
tions that make cultures possible, and the elision of boundaries can
be dangerous – specifically, those elided by relationships of power dif-
ferentials, which is what he fears will happen if the Tirani have easier
access to Anasuya’s planet. The Master’s despair is that of indigenous
leaders who see their people marvelling at the newcomers to their
land, a despair these leaders have shared throughout colonial his-
tory. It is a fear not of hybridity, but of oppression – of the loss of
culture, the divorcing of the transcendent from the technological,
the replacement of indigenous scientific literacies by an alien system
that has no room to incorporate the indigenous within it.
Conclusions
In a way, all science fiction speaks to the necessary link between sci-
ence and art, between the concrete and the transcendent. Science
fiction, as art form, provides not only cognitive but also emo-
tional, and even spiritual, estrangement from our world: the distance
required to look back with a critical eye.
However, postcolonial science fiction occupies a specific role in
this wider thematic project. It speaks specifically to the injustices

perpetrated by colonialism in all its forms, melding science fiction

with other forms of cultural production – indigenous literatures,
oral storytelling, folktale, legend, religious text and story – as a spe-
cific response to specific historical, and potential future, events and
circumstances. Saladin Ahmed’s tale of the Baghdad man in “The
Faithful Soldier, Prompted” carries the relevance of faith into the

future and suggests that spirituality and science are not mutually
exclusive. River of Gods does the same: the idea of linear time, both as
scientific concept and as theoretical discourse of “progress” in which
indigenous peoples are situated in the past, is replaced by the deep
cyclical time shared by many cultures and by physicists who believe
that the universe is constantly expanding and contracting in a long
cycle of birth, death and rebirth.9 Brown Girl in the Ring emphasizes
the necessity not only for spirituality, but also for that spirituality to
be used properly, as balance both against amoral science and against
amoral spirituality (in the form of Rudy). The cyclical myth at the
heart of Salt Fish Girl is stronger than time, and stronger than science:
Nu Wa’s genitive power adapts to geographical displacement and to
profit-seeking science, finally escaping from its confines and activat-
ing in Miranda, a child of the future. This hybridity, the communion
of the goddess and the girl in the form of genetically modified fish,
demonstrates the meagreness of colonial control and the durability of
the spiritualities of the colonized. Distances functions both as celebra-
tion of science and mathematics, and as statement that these things
are indistinguishable, in the literal sense, from art and transcendence.
Indigenous traditions of folktale, oral storytelling and poetry are dif-
ferent, but no less effective and no less important, ways of finding
the same essential truths.
These postcolonial texts function above all as vehement denials of
the colonial claim that indigenous, colonized and postcolonial scien-
tific literacies exist in the past and have no place in the future. They
are not the ways of strangers, but of essential participants in tradi-
tional, diasporic and world communities. Their traditions and ways
of knowing are relevant, applicable and necessary. They belong to the
past, but also to the present and to the future.

Conclusion: Filling Holes,
Breaking Boundaries

To be frank: science fiction’s initial forays into “postcoloniality” were
a bit of a failure.
The twin volumes Future Earths: Under African Skies (1993) and
Future Earths: Under South American Skies (1993), edited by Gardner
Dozois and Mike Resnick and filled almost entirely by stories previ-
ously published in Asimov’s and in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction, might be considered the first attempts at self-consciously
including the “other” in science fiction. Although there were ear-
lier collections of international SF, most notably Tales from the Planet
Earth (1987) edited by Frederik Pohl and Elizabeth Anne Hull, Dozois
and Resnick’s volumes might be considered early attempts at putting
together collections of postcolonial science fiction, a project finally
achieved by Mehan and Hopkinson in 2004. Each collection is a
somewhat mixed bag in terms of subject matter, authorial context
and engagement with issues of race and colonialism: some stories
address the colonial histories of the places where the stories are set,
while others work within an almost egregiously colonial paradigm.
Both Dozois and Resnick have experience writing sensitive, tran-
scultural material; Resnick’s epic Kirinyaga (1998) about a Kikuyu
space station is extremely well regarded. The two Future Earths vol-
umes are problematic, however, both in their presentation and in
some of their content. The jacket text of Under South American Skies –
which boasts precisely zero Latino/a contributors – promises “Lost
Empires and Unconquered Lands”, and describes South America as a
“rich lode to mine for stories”, a strikingly colonial image that rein-
scribes the concept of the Third World as a metaphorical mine that
153

is open for the taking, associated both with colonial texts such as
King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and with oppressive mining practices
throughout the colonized and postcolonial world, some of which
continue today. The stories themselves range from colonial-esque
exploration tales such as Charles Sheffield’s “Trapalanda”, set in an
Argentina in which not a single Argentinian person appears, to a

mapping of a Maya-inflected Christian mythology on to an ideal-
ized South America in Orson Scott Card’s “America”, to the explicit
parallels between historical colonialism and alien invasion drawn in
John Kessel’s “Invaders”. Under African Skies contains one African
contributor – white South African Janet Gluckman, who fled the
country due to persecution for her anti-apartheid activist work – and
one black contributor, Judith DuBois, who has published one story.1
Like Under South American Skies, the jacket text of Under African Skies
is somewhere between terribly problematic and outright racist and
colonialist: it describes the stories in the volume as “fifteen expe-
ditions into possible futures amid cultures fully as alien as any of
extraterrestrial origin [emphasis mine]”. The description of African
cultures “fully as alien” and Africans as non-human beings is simply
racist. Perhaps these phrasings are simply poor marketing decisions,
although it seems to me that such marketers must take a dim view
of the potential readers of these anthologies in choosing to tap
into simplistic and racist societal undercurrents. Nevertheless, despite
intensely problematic covers – on whose merits, admittedly, it is usu-
ally unwise to judge a book – these texts can be seen to represent the
beginnings of a development in Western SF towards the multicultural
and, later, the postcolonial.
Despite this initial misstep, in the past seven or eight years, there
has been a small explosion in science fiction that might be called
postcolonial, and criticism that links postcolonialism and science fic-
tion has begun to emerge. Critic Uppinder Mehan and writer Nalo
Hopkinson collaborated in 2004 to co-edit the collection So Long Been
Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction, the first-ever and, so far, only
collection dedicated exclusively to postcolonial SF. Hopkinson her-
self is perhaps the most prominent postcolonial SF author writing
today, having edited several collections and published seven nov-
els and short story collections since Brown Girl in the Ring won the
Warner Aspect First Novel Contest and was therefore published by
Warner in 1998. As well, Sheree R. Thomas has edited two important

Conclusion 155
anthologies of black SF writing, Dark Matter: A Century of Specula-

tive Fiction from the African Diaspora (2001) and Dark Matter: Reading
the Bones (2004). In Canada, there is a large and growing commu-
nity of science fiction and speculative fiction writers whose work,
selves (or both), identify as postcolonial – Nalo Hopkinson, Larissa
Lai, Eden Robinson, Daniel David Moses, Celu Amberstone, Minis-

ter Faust, Hiromi Goto, and many others. In Japan, itself a unique
post-imperial/postcolonial space, science fiction has been and con-
tinues to be a highly popular and socially relevant genre, and there
has been in recent years more Japanese SF translated into English and
more contact between the Japanese and English-speaking SF com-
munities. This trend has been enabled by the availability of science
fiction media on the Internet and by closer links between the “IRL”,
or real life, communities, signified by 2007’s World Science Fiction
Convention having been held in Yokohama, just outside of Tokyo:
this may lead to a greater understanding and cognizance in the West
of Japan’s complex colonial and imperial history.
India is also an emerging centre of science fiction production,
despite its being mostly ignored in mainstream SF channels until
very recently. There is no entry for India, for instance, in Clute
and Nichols’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2001). The Indian Asso-
ciation for Science Fiction Studies also has an annual conference,
which has grown exponentially from the fourteen attendees at its
first meeting in 1998; the 2009 conference was covered by indus-
try magazine Locus and had as its keynote speaker Gajanana Bal
Phondke, SF writer and editor of It Happened Tomorrow (1993), the first
Indian SF anthology to be published in English. Although English-
language Indian SF remains a relative rarity – there is only It Happened
Tomorrow as an anthology of Indian SF in English, and even the semi-
professional website Indian Science Fiction and Fantasy (http://www.
indianscifi.com/) has not been updated since 2003 – a few SF writers
in the Indian diaspora are also finding success. Along with the for-
ays into SF of Amitav Ghosh and the great Salman Rushdie, younger
and emerging talents such as Vandana Singh are beginning to gain
prominence in the science fiction community.
Along with literature, there is an emerging body of postcolonial
science fiction in other media as well. India’s major entry into the
international science fiction community seems to be cinematic and
dramatic; there is a slowly growing list of big-budget Bollywood

blockbusters such as Koi . . . Mil Gaya (2003), its sequel Krrish (2006),
Love Story 2050 (2008) and the Tamil-language blockbuster Endhiran
(2010), directed by S. Shankar, which screened in major theatres
worldwide. Manjula Padmanabhan’s dystopian play Harvest, in which
Indian body parts are sold to Westerners for profit, garnered a
favourable review in the New York Times in 2006. Indian self-help guru

Deepak Chopra, Bollywood crossover director Shekhar Kapur and
British entrepreneur Richard Branson have also teamed up to create
Virgin Comics, a graphic-novel publisher set up specifically to foster
the development and furthering of a native Indian comics industry;
the goal, according to publisher Sharad Devarjan, is to “pioneer a new
wave of Indian content to share with audiences across the globe” (1).
Titles range from the epic urban fantasy of Devi (2006) to the divinely
inspired science fiction of Ramayan 3392 AD (2007); all are stylish,
beautiful and well-written, and although they are the result of inter-
national collaboration and Branson’s initial financial backing, their
creative teams are almost entirely Indian.
There are many other examples as well. Africa has a small but excel-
lent number of writers of speculative fiction, such as Ben Okri and
B. Kojo Laing, along with a very newly emerging indigenous sci-
ence fiction cinematic movement. Kajola, released in March 2010,
is the first Nigerian science fiction film, and the Nigerian-American
writer Nnedi Okorafor is writing some truly unique literature: “From
the Lost Diary of Treefrog7” (2009) is a fascinating exploration of
the tension between technology and nature. Cameroonian director
Jean-Pierre Bekolo Obama released Les Saignantes (“The Bloodettes”),
a dystopian SF horror film, in 2005, and in 2007 produced the cine-
matic installation Une Africaine dans l’espace (“An African Woman in
Space”) for the Musée de Quai Branly. China, which has a long and
complex history of unity/disunity and which was subject to Japanese
imperialism during the Pacific War, also has a long history of politi-
cally oriented science fiction, beginning with the anti-Qing dynasty
screed The Moon Colony (1904) and continuing into the future with
the dystopian The Prosperous Time: China 2013 (2010). Arab science
fiction is rare, for many reasons – in her blog in The Guardian,
Nesrine Malik suggests that it may be because SF “could be viewed
as an extension of a ‘foreign’ heritage” and therefore anathema – but
although Emile Habibi’s parodic novel The Secret Life of Saeed: The
Pessoptimist (2001) is, as far as I know, the only novel-length Arab

Conclusion 157
SF work translated into English,2 a larger body of work is beginning

to emerge, and Apex Magazine devoted its November 2010 issue to
Arab/Muslim SF (a story from this issue is given a close reading in
Chapter 5). Science fiction is plentiful in South America, inspired by
and intertwined with the region’s rich literary heritage of magical
realism. Darrell B. Lockhart’s anthology Latin American Science Fiction

Writers (2004) is an interesting introduction to the field, and several
works of South American science fiction are discussed in the 2010
edited collection Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World (in
which I also have one solo-authored and one co-authored chapter).
And, of course, there is plenty of science fiction by authors whose
personal context is not postcolonial but that explores postcolonial
themes. Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most prominent. Her novel
The Word for World is Forest (1979) was written in the wake of the
Vietnam War and touches on many of the major issues that come up
in postcolonial theory: the conflict between indigenous and colonial
scientific and spiritual worldview, the pillage of native land by colo-
nial capitalism, the enslavement and dehumanization of native peo-
ples, the necessity and ultimate inevitability of resistance. Mary Doria
Russell’s powerful duology The Sparrow (2004) and Children of God
(2006) explores the destructive havoc that even well-meaning explor-
ers can wreak on indigenous cultures by attempting to enact changes
without understanding the bases of those cultures, and what harm
can come to those who impose their own desires on another’s ritual.
Postcolonialism is also not limited by geography: Scottish author Ian
McDonald is a Scots-Irish writer living in Belfast, who sees himself as
a postcolonial writer but who frequently explores postcolonial issues
in other geographical contexts – Kenya in Tendeléo’s Story (2000),
part of his Chaga series; India in River of Gods (2004) and its asso-
ciated short stories; Brazil in Brasyl (2008). Canadian writer Geoff
Ryman’s Air (2004) centres on Chung Mae, a woman from a small
village in the fictional country of Karzistan, and tackles the problems
of cultural imperialism, globalization and technological imposition,
among others. The list is long, and welcome.
There is also a growing body of criticism dealing with science fic-
tion and postcolonialism. Uppinder Mehan wrote on postcolonial
Indian science fiction in Science Fiction Studies in 1998, an article
which I would consider one of the earliest examples of specifi-
cally postcolonial SF criticism. Other critics such as Ralph Pordzik,

Grace L. Dillon, Patricia Kerslake, John Rieder, Takayuki Tatsumi, Sara

Ahmed, Curtis Marez, and even the great postmodernist critic Fredric
Jameson (in his book The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia [2001]) have
written on postcolonialism and science fiction in various modes and
contexts.
As with decolonization as a whole, these works are part of a pro-

cess of identity formation that happens despite, rather than because
of, the way the genre – and its publishing mechanism – is structured.
In this way, colonized groups seize and have seized not only writ-
ing, but the precise type and genre of writing whose history and
implication has heretofore marked them as for ever other, lesser,
mythological and/or locked into a primitive past – has called them
strangers, and theirs lands strange. They have used it to tell their own
stories and to include themselves in the dominant discourse while at
the same time subverting the colonialist basis of that very ideology.
Into the future
To the question “What is the relationship between science fiction

and postcolonialism?”, then, my answer is: there are nearly count-
less facets of the relationship, all of which overlap, all of which are
continuously changing and developing. But this begs the question
of the future: into what might postcolonial science fiction develop?
This question I will leave to the writers, directors, artists and other
creators, who will answer it far better than I.
There is also the matter of science fiction’s ever-blurring bound-
aries, which seems to me to be one of the most important forward
trends in postcolonial science fiction. As these writers write their own
stories through science fiction, they recuperate the history, spiritual-
ity and what Grace Dillon calls “scientific literacies” of themselves
and their ancestors, those people whose own histories have been
supposedly erased by colonialism. The interpolation of subaltern
spiritualities into traditional science fiction generic narrative, and
the interpolation of science fiction elements into traditional nar-
ratives of colonized people (as in Daniel David Moses’s Kyotopolis),
has become more common in science fiction, most likely because
more postcolonial SF writers and SF writers of colour are being
published. Characters of colour and from colonized and formerly col-
onized societies are also becoming more common in science fiction

Conclusion 159
a prominent example might be Agent 355, who is a black woman,

in the acclaimed graphic novel series Y: The Last Man (2002–2008),
written by Brian K Vaughan and Pia Guerra.
Just as the cosmopolitan city gains both a multiplicity of voices and
an expansion outside of its former boundaries, so does science fiction.
It is not diluted or softened but rather transformed and enriched.

Notes
Introduction: Elephant-Shaped Holes

1. Nalo Hopkinson, in private conversation, 23 May 2005. I am immensely
grateful to Hopkinson for her cooperation and insight.
2. This discussion can be found at http://community.livejournal.com/sfwa/
8799.html.
3. See, for instance, the aforementioned SFWA blog, along with the blogs of
Nalo Hopkinson (http://www.nalohopkinson.com) and Tobias S. Buckell
(http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/weblog) and the collaborative blog of the
abovementioned Carl Brandon Society, which is “dedicated to improv-
ing the visibility of people of colour in the speculative genres of science
fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, etc.”, at http://carlbrandon.org/
blog/. Strange Horizons can be accessed at http://www.strangehorizons.com.
4. See also, for instance: Peter Fitting, “Estranged Invaders: The War of the
Worlds” (2000), Greg Grewell’s “Colonising the Universe: Science Fictions
Then, Now, and in the (Imagined) Future” (2001) and Sara Ahmed’s Strange
Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality (2000).
5. For a more detailed analysis of class distinctions and how they affect decol-
onization, see Chapter 1 in Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2nd
edn (2005).
1 A Question of History: Geographical/Historical

Context
1. Acadian identity, it is worth noting, is not linked exclusively to Canada;
the Cajun communities on the Gulf coast of the United States are
descended from Acadians who ventured all the way down the Mississippi
River to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. The word “Cajun” is a
creolization of “Acadian”.
2. See, for instance, the work of the following scholars: Yoshimoto,
Mitsuhiro, “The Difficulty of being Radical: The Discipline of Film Stud-
ies and the Postcolonial World Order”, Boundary 2, Vol. 18, No. 3, Japan
in the World (Autumn, 1991), pp. 242–257; Naoki Sakai, Voices of the
Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Discourse. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1991, and Translation and Subjectivity: On ‘Japan’
and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997; Komori, Yōichi. Posutokoroniaru. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2001;
Murakami Fuminobu. Postmodern, Feminist and Postcolonial Currents in
Modern Japanese Culture. London: Routledge, 2005; along with the work
of Ukai Satoshi, Kang Sanjung, Carol Gluck, Harry D. Harootunian, and
others cited in this chapter.
160

Notes 161
3. There are some exceptions to this general judgment, such as Benedict

Anderson’s detailed discussions of several non-Western contexts of impe-
rialism, including Japan, in Imagined Commuities (1982), and Nishihara
Daisuke’s article “Said, Orientalism and Japan”, Journal of Comparative
Poetics 25 (2005): 241–256, the latter brought to my attention by my
student Natasha Dixon, to whom I am grateful. As well, Japan is often
mentioned in passing in articles, such as Anne McClintock’s “The Angel

of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism’” (1992), that have as
their primary focus discussions of Western imperialisms. But in general,
there is comparatively little discussion of non-Western imperialisms in
postcolonial studies. For instance, Callaloo’s 1993 special issue, “On Post-
Colonial Discourse”, included nothing about East Asia, and Social Text’s
1992 issue on “Third World and Post-Colonial Issues” included nothing
on Japan and only a sole article on Chinese Marxism (though this article
did make minor reference to Japan). Wasafiri, the excellent literary jour-
nal of postcolonial studies, has nevertheless published little on Japan and
only a handful of material on its former colonies.
4. I use the Japanese, Chinese and Korean naming convention of family
name first throughout this chapter, except where the name is provided
differently in the byline of the article or book (as is the case with Korean-
American scholar Jung-Bong Choi).
5. Kazu Horiuchi has provided essential assistance in translation and survey-
ing of Japanese-language literature, for which I am very grateful; I could
not have worked on these texts without her assistance.
6. Some critics would argue that, in its occupation by the Allies after WWII,
in the continued American military presence within its borders, and on
its economic dependence upon America which was engineered by the lat-
ter, it has also been subject to American neo-colonialism; however, it has
never been subject to “classical” colonization in the way that it subjected
others to such.
7. Okada Hidenori, Curator of Film at the National Film Centre, Tokyo, in
private conversation, 24 July 2007.
8. Although I realize that World War II was not by intent an imperial war
for America as it was for Japan, I maintain that America was at the time
an imperial power. It bears remembering that Hawaii, the site of Pearl
Harbour, was at the time not an American state but rather a colony; as
well, the Philippines were held as a colony by America.
9. The latter has only recently been rediscovered, and then only in part; the
first two volumes have been edited by Dominic Alessio and were repub-
lished in April 2008, and although early reviews of the novel suggest that
a third part exists, it has not been discovered and may not have survived.
10. According to Okada Hidenori of the National Film Centre in Tokyo (in pri-
vate conversation, 24 August, 2007), this film survived in abbreviated
form because it was imported into the United States before America’s
involvement in the war, most likely to be shown in a Japanese film theatre
in California. It was discovered in the archives of the Library of Congress

162 Notes
and returned to Japan in 1991. The surviving combined print, which con-
tains approximately seven minutes of footage from the first of the two
parts and twenty-seven minutes from the second, may have been con-
fiscated by American officials from an interned Japanese person during
the war.
11. For instance, documentarian Kamei Fumio was asked by the government
to make a glorifying documentary about occupied Shanghai, and made
one that was patriotic on the surface but deeply critical in form. Even this

was enough to have him thrown in jail. For a longer discussion of this and
of Japanese film censorship during the war, see Langer, Jessica. “Search-
ing for a Third Way: Mizoguchi Kenji’s Sisters of the Gion and Kamei
Fumio’s Shanghai as Responses to Early- to Mid-20th -Century Japanese
Imperialism”. Asian Cinema 16: 2 (Fall/Winter 2005): 221–228.
12. See the English version of Tsutsui’s official website, on which several
English translations of short stories are available for free, at http://
www.jali.or.jp/tti/en/index.htm; also Bradshaw’s translation available
at https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/6511/2/The%20Unseen%20
World%20-%20English%20Only.pdf.
13. It is worth mentioning that the Vietnam War was in fact the first war
in which television was a significant part of the media exposure; it is
often called the first “television war” (Rollins 429). The story, originally
published in 1967, may have been commenting as well on the novelty of
the suddenly wide availability of moving images of actual war, as well as
on the “entertainment” aspect of these images being put onto television.
Considering the advent of reality television in recent years, Tsutsui’s story
is in this sense quite prophetic.
14. I am grateful to Kazu Horiuchi for this insight.
15. For further detail, see Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society. Ed.
Jose Harris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
16. McClintock has referred to America’s practice in this regard as
“imperialism-without-colonies” (1992: 89). More recently, Patrick Lenta
has referred to America post-September 11 as having an “increasingly
defensive imperialist machine” (71).
17. It is interesting to note that Atwood herself disavows the term “science
fiction” for her work, as she associates realism with the novel as well as
the genre of SF itself, implicitly defining SF as “hard” science fiction exclu-
sively. In this study, however, I identify Atwood’s work as SF, because I see
SF as both a non-exclusive generic identity and as a porous definition
that includes Oryx and Crake, particularly as the narrative deals exten-
sively with genetic engineering. For Atwood’s view, see Margaret Atwood,
“‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘Oryx and Crake’ in Context”. PMLA 119: 3
(2004): pp. 513–517.
18. See Adam Roberts’ review of the novel in Strange Horizons at http://www.
strangehorizons.com/reviews/2007/12/the_terror_by_d.shtml.
19. All of these works, as well as this quote, can be found in David Cheater’s
unpublished bibliography of speculative fiction with Native American or
Native Canadian themes and/or by Native authors, held at the Merrill

Notes 163
Collection, Toronto Public Library, Lillian H. Smith Branch, Toronto,

Canada.
20. This is Darko Suvin’s term for a science fictional “new thing”, a fun-
damental difference between what he calls “zero world,” or consensus
reality, and the world of the science fictional work.
21. One significant historical example is the capture and captivity of the
Apache chief Geronimo, defeated in 1886 by American forces and exhib-
ited as a spectacle at several major exhibitions, including the 1904 World’s

Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. See Marez 338–339.
2 Diaspora and Locality

1. For a more in-depth discussion of this dynamic, see Spivak 1988.
2. Hopkinson consistently uses names in her work to signify and refer to
historical events and figures and to tie her future, science-fictional nar-
rative to its historical context; for instance, in this context, Toussaint
L’Ouverture, for whom the planet is likely named, was the leader of the
Haitian Revolution, which saw slavery abolished and control of Haiti
gained by black former slaves and the indigenous Taíno. The name
“Marryshow Corporation” is probably a reference to T.A. Marryshow, a
Grenadian newspaperman, politician and reformer of the early 1900s
who worked for West Indian governmental representation. Though his
goals remained within the context of the British Empire, he agitated for
West Indian rights and black rights in general. See Jill Sheppard, T.A.
Marryshow: An Introduction. Barbados: Letchworth Press, 1987.
3. Fanon writes about this at some length in The Wretched of the Earth (1967).
4. Jill Sheppard, T.A. Marryshow: An Introduction. Barbados: Letchworth Press,
1987. Quoted without page number on the following webpage created by
the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill: http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/
bnccde/grenada/centre/tam.htm (retrieved 4 May 2008).
5. This idea, of an ethnically or culturally homogenous and self-contained
space colony, has been deployed many times in science fiction: for
instance, Mike Resnick’s Kirinyaga (1998), about a Kikuyu space station;
Dan Simmons’ Hyperion (1990), about an interlinked network of culturally
specific worlds (it is worth noting that his depiction of the Muslim world
as violent and intellectually unsophisticated is intensely orientalist); and
Ursula K. Le Guin’s story “The Eye, Altering” in The Compass Rose (1974),
about a Jewish-settled world.
6. See Carretta, Vincent. Equiano, The African: Biogaphy of a Self-Made Man.
Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Carretta’s claims are sup-
ported by archival evidence but have been disputed, and Equiano’s origins
remain unclear.
7. Moritani’s film runs 143 minutes and was a success in Japan; however, the
English-dubbed release is retitled Tidal Wave and is cut to nearly half the
length of the original. The discussion in this book refers to the original
Japanese release of the film.

164 Notes
8. It is worth noting that this dynamic is a relatively common science-

fictional trope as well, though it is usually conceived of as a global loss
of geography (i.e. the entire world is utterly destroyed) as opposed to a
single nation being destroyed while others are spared. See, for instance,
Greg Bear’s The Forge of God and Douglas Adams’ A Hitchhiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy.
9. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Thomas Foster, “Franchise

Nationalisms: Globalization, Consumer Culture, and New Ethnicities”,
in The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 203–228; Mark Poster, What’s
the Matter with the Internet? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2001).
10. Nozaki’s name may be a bit of black humour on the part of Komatsu; the
collier Nozaki was the final Japanese ship to be sunk in 1944, and was one
of the last Japanese ships to be sunk in the Pacific War.
11. It can be argued that the Roma and Traveller communities are also perma-
nently diasporic, though these situations are somewhat different to that
of the Jews.
12. I refer here to the continuing debate, in both academic and Jewish
cultural circles, as to what, precisely, comprises Jewish identity.
13. Due to the idiosyncrasies of Japanese pronunciation, Komatsu’s novel and
the 2006 film are referred to as Nihon chinbotsu, while the 1973 version is
called Nippon chinbotsu, although all of the works use the same kanji.
14. This quote is displayed prominently on the wall of the Yad Vashem
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, Israel.
15. An unofficial bootleg translation of Moritani Shirō’s film Nihon chinbotsu
(2006) exists; however, I have used the official Japanese release for the
purposes of this chapter, with assistance from Kazu Horiuchi.
3 Race, Culture, Identity and Alien/Nation

1. See, for example, Gotz Aly, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and
Racial Hygiene. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994 and
Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race. London: Verso, 2 vols,
1994–1997. As well, although this has not been a serious scientific
contention for many years, it continues to produce echoes in contem-
porary scientific discourse in terms of technologies such as DNA test-
ing. A worryingly recent example is the October 2007 contention
of Dr. James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for his co-discovery
of the double-helix structure of DNA, that black people are inher-
ently less intelligent than people of other races due to their genetics.
An account of the interview with Watson can be found at the website
for the Times Online at http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_
and_entertainment/books/article2630748.ece.
2. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, for instance, saw mythology-
based knowledge production as the precursor to contemporary science,

Notes 165
and within the same logical schema; however, this type of spirituality
was still situated by Levi-Strauss in the past, behind and beneath con-
temporary science. See Le Pensee Sauvage (1966). See also Chapter 4 in
this book, which investigates more closely the interactions and conflicts
between colonialist and indigenous methods of knowledge production
and scientific literacies.
3. In her introduction to the original edition, Le Guin wrote that the novel
was influenced by the Vietnam War.

4. Terry Eagleton identifies the change from modernism – “of which futur-
ism and constructivism were the logical cultural forms” – to postmod-
ernism as one that parallels the shift from empire to post-empire, and
from colonial to post-colonial (Regan 267). See Eagleton 1998; Regan
1998.
5. I draw my data on popularity from the official World of Warcraft Server
Status page at <http://www.wow-europe.com/en/serverstatus>.
6. See especially Lee 1996, Fong 2001.
7. Witness, for instance, the character of the sorceress Tia Dalma in Pirates
of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest (2006), in which black British
actress Naomie Harris plays a sexually aggressive witch-in-the-woods
whose straight teeth are blackened and whose hair is matted into a par-
ody of dreadlocks. The male crew find her simultaneously alluring and
disgusting.
8. Voudou as a distinct religious practice includes elements from several
older African religious traditions and is practiced more or less throughout
the Caribbean as well as by those of Caribbean descent living elsewhere.
For more information, see for instance Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 1997.
9. The word ‘voodoo’ is a popular spelling of the term Voudoun.
10. I refer here to Baudrillard’s critique of the substitution of semiotics for
authenticity in his Simulacres et Simulation (Simulacra and Simulation,
1984).
11. Many postmodern theorists and critics, such as Jean Baudrillard and
Fredric Jameson, have argued that the mass media has already caused
this to happen; in this case, video games such as WoW would be a
continuation of this dynamic rather than a catalyst for it.
12. This characterization does not extend to non-SF and fantasy video games,
at least not to the same extent: it is possible to play a Native American
chief in, for instance, Age of Empires III: The War Chiefs (2006), in which
players can direct the Iroquois or Sioux civilizations. There are also more
and more black characters in other games such as Beyond Good and Evil
(2001) and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004), in which the main
characters are black. In this vein, see http://insultswordfighting.blogspot.
com/2008/01/most-stereotypical-black-characters-in.html for an interest-
ing discussion of the use of stereotype in creating black video game
characters.
13. I am grateful to Farah Mendlesohn for the idea to include a discussion of
minstrelsy, and for this information on The Black and White Minstrel Show.

166 Notes
4 Hybridity, Nativism and Transgression

1. This is Darko Suvin’s term for a science fictional “new thing”, a fundamen-
tal difference between what he calls “zero world,” or consensus reality, and
the world of the science fictional work.
2. “Steampunk” is a term used to describe both a particular subgenre of
science fiction and a particular subculture that has grown up around it.
It might best be described as an intersection of the steam-powered tech-

nology and cultural aesthetic of Victorian England with science-fictional
generic elements such as robots, flying machines and space or dimensional
travel. In recent years the subculture in particular has gained popularity,
and in 2007 an online magazine devoted to the subculture, sensibly titled
Steampunk Magazine, was launched: see http://www.steampunkmagazine.
com/.
3. Pearson (2002) mentions Foucault’s assertion that prior to the nineteenth
century, physical hermaphrodites in Western societies were not seen as
reparable or remade into single-sexed persons, but rather as double-sexed
anomalies. However, they were still seen as disruptive in a dual-gendered
system, as opposed to Indian hijra, who were a third gender in a system
that accommodated it.
4. Ania Loomba (2003) provides a more detailed analysis of debates around
the practice, which involves a widow either throwing herself or being
thrown onto the funeral pyre of her husband. Loomba suggests that
colonial censure of the practice contributed to its being associated more
strongly with indigenous cultural tradition and therefore being retained as
a form of anti-colonial resistance where it might not otherwise have been.
5. “Yt” is the gender-neutral pronoun used for and by nutes in both texts.
5 Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science

1. See Stark 1932; Marez 2004.
2. This account of the tale is paraphrased from Volume II of Edward William
Lane’s translation from the Arabic: Lane, Edward William. The Thou-
sand and One Nights, Commonly Called in England, The Arabian Nights’
Entertainments. London: Charles Knight, 1840.
3. For more on the Halabja massacre, see Hiltermann, Joost R. A Poisonous
Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007. For more on the Israeli use of white phosphorus, see
the Amnesty International website: http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-
updates/news/israeli-armys-use-white-phosphorus-gaza-clear-undeniable-
20090119
4. El-Mohtar’s full response to the publication of the issue can be found at
http://tithenai.livejournal.com/293621.html.
5. See, for instance, this recent Toronto Star article, in which David
Hulchanski is quoted referring to areas such as these as “large postwar
housing projects”: http://www.thestar.com/GTA/Columnist/article/308762

Notes 167
Scarborough in particular is often referred to in Toronto parlance as

“Scarberia”.
6. See also a more detailed discussion of free trade imperialism in Chapter 1
of this study.
7. I discuss the heteronormativity and gender norms of colonial Britain
specifically in Chapter 2 of this study, in relation to McDonald’s River of
Gods (2004).
8. See Methot, Suzanne. “The universe of Tomson Highway”. Quill and

Quire, November 1998. http://www.quillandquire.com/authors/profile.
cfm?article_id=1216. Accessed 17 December, 2007.
9. In fact, this seems to be the prevailing view at this point: see the legendary
astronomer Roger Penrose’s November 2010 paper with V.G. Gurzadyan
posted on arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3706.
Conclusion: Filling Holes, Breaking Boundaries

1. In 2007, Resnick left several comments on a blog post by SF writer N. K.
Jemisin – who has since, in 2011, been nominated for a Nebula award –
entitled “No more lily-white futures and monochrome myths”, addressing
Under African Skies. Resnick writes that he and his co-editor Dozois “had
planned to sell it as being entirely by black writers. Well, we got up to
two – and one of them had sold this one story and never wrote or sold
another – and ran out of black authors who had written science fiction
about black Africans. We still sold the anthology, but not with that tag,
and I think 12 of the 14 stories were by whites.” In fact, all of the writers
other than Judith DuBois – the only writer to have sold only one story,
to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – are white, and I have not
been able to find out if DuBois is black, though I take Resnick’s word on
it. Resnick also claims that, in terms of SF publishers’ openness to pub-
lishing work by black writers, “there is -no- censorship in science fiction
or fantasy . . . I think the fault lies with the writers,” presumably the black
writers who do not write SF. See http://theangryblackwoman.wordpress.
com/2007/04/21/no-more-lily-white-futures-and-monochrome-myths/.
2. There is some question as to whether The Secret Life of Saeed “qualifies”
as SF at all; although its premise is that its main character, Saeed, has been
taken into orbit by aliens and is telling them his tale, the story itself focuses
mostly on the endless frustrations of being Palestinian under Israeli occu-
pation. However, even this use of SF trope is remarkable in the context of
Arab writing, and so I have chosen to include it.

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Index
Note: Entries for material presented in endnotes are indicated with the letter
n. between the page number and the endnote number, e.g. Africa 167n.1.

abjection (Kristeva), 95–6 Bhabha, Homi
Adare, Sierra S., 45 ambivalence, 16–18, 34, 39, 118
Africa, 16, 33–8, 83, 127, 153–6, mimicry, 4, 91, 102–3, 118
167n.1 stereotypes, 96–8
see also South Africa; Zimbabwe subjectivity, 5–6, 36
African-Americans, 17, 31, 81, biological warfare, 135
156 biotech industry, 131
see also black science fiction black science fiction, 53
Ahmed, Saladin, 134–6, 152 see also African-Americans
aliens, 3–4, 26, 47, 81–96, 154 Blomkamp, Neil, 81–2
Amberstone, Celu, 46 bodies
ambivalence, 16–18, 34, 39, 52, in Brown Girl in the Ring
65–70, 118 (Hopkinson), 138–9
ancient astronauts, 47 and colonial desire, 29–33
Andersen, Hans Christian, 145–6 hybrid, 116–18
Anderson, Benedict, 16, 37, 57, and labour, 146–8
71–2, 132 racialized, 89–95
anthropology, 8, 47, 132–4, shape-shifting, 68
164–5n.2 torture and punishment, 50–2,
Arab science fiction, 134–7, 156–7, 139–40
167n.2 virtual, 89–104
Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) (film), Boehmer, Elleke, 7, 58–9
46 Books, see publishing
atomic bomb, see nuclear Borges, Jorges Luis, 135
weapons Branson, Richard, 156
Atwood, Margaret, 43–4, 162n.17 Braziel, Jana Evans, 56–7
Aubert de Gaspé, Phillippe, 43 British imperialism, 7, 15, 39–41,
Australia, 76 114, 122–4, 141
authenticity, 31, 36, 40, 98, 125, Burton, Antoinette, 108
133 Butler, Octavia E., 121
Avatar (film), 131
Canada
The Ballad of Crowfoot (film), 46 and British imperialism, 39–41
Balme, Christopher, 31, 36 French-Canadians, 12, 41, 63,
Behdad, Ali, 144 160n.1
Bekolo Obama, Jean-Pierre, 156 and French imperialism, 41
Benford, Gregory, 83–4 independence, 39
181

182 Index
Canada – continued science fiction aligned with, 1,

neocolonialism, 39 3–4, 45, 83–4, 153–4
and postcolonialism, 11–13, settler colonies, 12, 38–43, 58–9
38–43, 59 and Western science, 9, 83, 86,
as settler nation, 12, 38–40, 58 127–52, 164n.1
Toronto, 137–40, 166–7n.5 Coney, Michael G., 44
and US imperialism, 39 Cowboys and Aliens (film), 82
Cronenberg, David, 44

virtual space, 86–7
see also First Nations; Inuit peoples Cube (film), 44
Canadian science fiction cultural memory, 20–1, 63–4, 80,
designation of, 43–4 129, 136
First Nations and, 44–53 cyberpunk, 44, 112
and Japan, 25, 46 cyborgs (Haraway), 122–3
monsters, 107
Québécois, 43 daikaiju (giant monsters), 26, 70, 77
television, 45–6 see also Gojira (film)
trends in, 12, 54, 155 Damer, Bruce, 100
see also Hopkinson, Nalo; Lai, Dayal, Samir, 71, 80
Larissa; Robinson, Eden; De Mille, James, 43
Ryman, Geoff decolonization, 4–8, 40, 109–10,
Card, Orson Scott, 132–4, 154 158
the Caribbean, 64–70, 89–92, 105, Delany, Samuel, 121
138, 140, 163n.2 detective fiction, 22–3
Devarjan, Sharad, 156
Carl Brandon Society, 2, 160n.3
diaspora
Carr, Brian, 99
in Canada, 12, 58–9
censorship, 18, 23, 162n.11, 167n.1
definitions of, 56–60
Chakraborty, Mridula Nath, 58–9
and double consciousness, 71, 80
Cheater, David, 162–3n.19
Japanese, 70–80
Cheyne, Ria, 125
Jewish, 56, 74, 76–7
China, 18, 20, 24, 78–9, 156
and literature, 58–60
Choi, Jung-Bong, 11, 13
in science fiction, 59–80, 145,
Chopra, Deepak, 156 164n.8
Christianity, 51, 66, 123, 127, 144 white settlers, 58
cities, 110–16, 137–40, 166–7n.5 Dillon, Grace L., 10, 47–9, 52, 130,
Clarke, Arthur C., 128–9 158
class, 4–5, 15, 115, 160n.5 Dirlik, Arif, 3, 45
Clute, John, 22, 43, 155 disaster films, 77–80
Coelho, Paulo, 135 see also daikaiju (giant monsters);
Colombo, John Robert, 47 Gojira (film)
colonialism discourse analysis, see
“collaborators”, 52 materialist/discursive divide
cybercolonialism, 87 District 9 (film), 81–2
decolonization, 4–8, 40, 109–10, double consciousness, 71, 80
158 Douglas, Christopher, 104–5
desire, 28–33, 50–1, 65, 115 Dozois, Gardner, 153–4, 167n.1

Index 183
Dua, Enakshi, 12, 42 Foucault, Michel, 49, 113, 118, 125,

DuBois, Judith, 154, 167n.1 139, 166n.3
Freedman, Carl, 8–9
Eagleton, Terry, 96, 165n.4 Fukuda Yasuo, 20
East Asian stereotypes, 89,
97–9 Gandhi, Leela, 84–5
see also Orientalism Gandhi, Mohandas, 108

East Asian studies, 13–14 Gattaca (film), 53
El-Mohtar, Amal, 136–7 gender, non-binary, 121–5, 166n.3
Endhiran (film), 156 genocide, 39–42, 66–7
Equiano, Olaudah, 67–8, George Alec Effinger, 114–21
163n.6 Geronimo, 163n.21
event horizon, 49–50 Ghose, Aurobindo, 7
Gibbons, Luke, 108
fan cultures, 12 Gibson, William, 44
Fanon, Frantz, 36, 84 Gide, André, 34–5
female beauty, 29–30, 32–3, 91–3, Gluck, Carol, 20–1
165n.7 Gluckman, Janet, 154
Fernandez, Maria, 86, 100 Gojira (film), 22, 26
Filiciak, Miroslaw, 100 Goldie, Terry, 40
Findlay, Len, 86–7, 141 Gordon, Joan, 112–13, 125
First Nations Gotlieb, Phylllis, 44
Christian schooling, 42, 51 Goto, Hiromi, 107
Cree traditions, 146 The Great Romance (anonymous
differences among, 48 novel), 21, 161n.9
film-making, 46 Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity
genocide, 39–42 Sphere, 16–17
Haisla Nation, 48 Guerra, Pia, 159
identity, 40–2 Gundermann, Christian, 130
Mohawk Nation, 48
Oka Uprising, 48 Habibi, Emile, 156–7, 167n.2
postcolonialism, 39–40 Hall, Stuart, 5
relegated to history, 42–3, Haraway, Donna, 85, 123
45, 48 Harootunian, Harry D., 14
“salmon wars”, 48 Harris, Christie, 47
in science fiction, 44–7, 89–91, Harris, Naomie, 165n.7
102, 162–3n.19 Harris, Townsend, 15
science fiction by, 12, 44–53, Hayakawa’s SF Magazine, 25
162–3n.19 Heinlein, Robert A., 3, 8
spiritual beliefs, 47, 49 heterotopia, 112–13, 125
television, 45–6 Highway, Tomson, 146
in Toronto, 138 Higuchi Shinji, 70
see also Inuit peoples; Native see also Nihon chinbotsu (Japan
Americans Sinks) (novel and films)
folktales, see oral traditions Hinduism, 52, 108, 140–4
Foster, Thomas, 96–7, 112 Holden, Phillip, 25, 38

184 Index
hooks, bell, 132 Jansen, Marius, 70

Hopkinson, Nalo, 1, 55, 145, 153–4 Japan
Brown Girl in the Ring (novel), anti-colonialism, 17
61–2, 64, 128–9, 137–40, 152, atomic bombs, 18–19, 26–7,
154 29–31, 37, 77
Midnight Robber (novel), 60, 64–70, “comfort women”, 20
80, 163n.2 diaspora, 70–80
Hull, Elizabeth Anne, 153 “Economic Miracle”, 35

Hulme, Peter, 6 fascism, 18–21, 24
hybridity, 4, 107–27, 141 identity, 71–80
and divinity, 140 imperialism, 13–18, 24, 34, 71–3
and genre, 2, 22, 64, 136 internment camps, 73
and language, 69 Meiji period, 15, 19–20
in Salt Fish Girl (Lai), 144–8, nationalism, 16–18, 78–80
152 natural disasters, 70–1
Orientalism, 16, 27–8
Ibuse Masuji, 19, 30 and postcolonialism, 11–21
identity tourism, 86–8, 101–6 postwar national memory, 20–1
Inayatullah, Sohail, 141 postwar occupation, 19–20, 25–6
India Tokugawa period, 35, 70
comics, 156 and US imperialism, 13–20, 31, 34,
film, 155–6 78, 161n.6, 161n.8
hijra (third sex), 123–4, 166n.3 war crimes, 20–1
Hindu nationalism, 52 see also Pacific War
history, 7, 108, 114, 123–4 141, Japan Sinks (Nihon chinbotsu) (novel
166n.4 and films), 67, 70–80, 163n.7,
science fiction, 1, 114, 122–6, 164n.10, 164n.13
140–4, 155–7 Japanese science fiction, 1, 12,
Indian Association for Science 21–38, 54, 70–80, 155
Fiction Studies, 155 and atomic bomb, 26–7, 29–31,
indigenous peoples, 39–40, 59, 84 33, 36–8
see also First Nations; Inuit and detective fiction, 22–3
peoples; Native Americans films, 18, 22–3, 26, 161–2n.10,
Internet, 2, 86, 155 162n.11
see also online gaming; World of Western influences on, 23, 26
Warcraft (WoW) (online game) Jeffress, David, 5
Inuit peoples, 39–40, 45–6 Jemisin, N. K., 167n.1
see also First Nations; Native Jews, 56, 74–7, 81, 83, 89, 94–5
Americans Jonas, Gerald, 137
Iraq, 39, 135
Ireland, 7, 122 Kaidenpa satsujin kōsen (Murderous
Israel, 74, 76–7, 135, 167n.2 Scary Radio Wave Ray) (film
series), 23
Jackson, Ronald L., 102 Kaidenpa senritsu (film), 18,
Jameson, Fredric, 110–11, 158 161–2n.10
JanMohamed, Abdul, 5–6, 11 Kajola (film), 156

Index 185
Kamei Fumio, 162n.11 McDonald, Ian, 114, 122–5, 140–4,

Kang Sang-jung, 16–17, 19–20, 72 157
Kapur, Shekhar, 156 McGonegal, Julie, 5
Kessel, John, 154 Mehan, Uppinder, 153–4, 157
Kitajima Akihiro, 22 Melzer, Patricia, 121
Komatsu Sakyō, 26, 70–80 Memmi, Albert, 125
Korea, 15, 17, 20 mermaids, 145–6
Kotash, Myrna, 58 Merril, Judith, 25, 44

Kristeva, Julia, 95 Metropolis (film), 11–13
Miéville, China, 112–14, 117–18,
Lai, Larissa, 60–4, 80, 144–8, 120–1, 125
155 Milojevic, Ivana, 141
language Milz, Sabine, 5
and colonial power, 132 mimicry, 4, 91, 101–4, 118
creole, 68–9 minstrelsy, 102
and diaspora, 62, 68–9, 80 Mishra, Vijay, 57, 109
First Nations’, 41, 48–9 Mitsue, Ry, 25
and racial stereotypes, 91 Miyoshi, Masao, 109
Sanskrit, 149 monsters, 47, 107
see also translation see also daikaiju (giant monsters);
Latin America, 153–4, 157 Gojira (film)
Lawrence, Bonita, 12, 40–2, 58 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 5, 16–17
Le Guin, Ursula K., 8, 83–4, 121, Moritani Shirō, 70
157, 163n.5 see also Nihon chinbotsu (Japan
Lee, Kyung-Won, 40–1 Sinks) (novel and films)
Leggatt, Judith, 40 Moses, Daniel David, 46
Lenta, Patrick, 162n.16 Mudimbe, V. Y., 127–8
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 164–5n.2 Mugabe, Robert, 52
Loomba, Ania, 7, 107, 166n.4 multiculturalism, 45, 49
Lorde, Audre, 24–5, 61 Murakami Fuminobu, 16–17
Murphy, Sheila C., 100–1
magic, 86, 93–4, 128–9 Muslims, 163n.5
see also spirituality see also Arab science fiction
Maki Itsuma, 22
Malik, Nesrine, 156 Nakamura, Lisa, 86–7, 97–9,
Malmgren, Carl, 132 101–2
Manchuria, 17, 24 Napier, Susan, 75–7
Mannur, Anita, 56–7 Natale, Antonella Riem, 59–60
Marez, Curtis, 44–5 Natali, Vincenzo, 44
Marryshow, T. A., 163n.2 nations, 37, 57, 71–5
Maruyama Masao, 15 Native Americans, 89–91, 102, 131,
materialist/discursive divide, 5–6, 8, 163n.21, 165n.12
11, 57 see also First Nations; Inuit
Matthew, Robert, 21–2, 24, 28 peoples
McClintock, Anne, 12, 43, 49, 129, nativism, 6, 36, 109–10, 117–18,
162n.16 125, 133

186 Index
Newhouse, David, 42–3 Rabkin, Eric S., 128

Nicholls, Peter, 22, 43, 155 racial categorization, 41–2, 58,
Nihon chinbotsu (Japan Sinks) (novel 81–106
and films), 67, 70–80, 163n.7, Ransom, Amy, 43
164n.10, 164n.13 Rape of Nanking, 20
Nivedita, Sister (Margaret Noble), 7 Resnick, Mike, 153, 163n.5,
Northern Ireland, 122 167n.1
novum, 49, 116, 121–2, 163n.20, Rieder, John, 3

166n.1 Robinson, Eden, 46, 48–53,
nuclear weapons, 18–19, 26–7, 144
29–31, 34, 36–8, 77 robots, 23
Roma, 164n.11
Okorafor, Nnedi, 156 Rose, Mark, 8
online gaming, 82, 96–8, 100–1, Rosenthal, Nicolas G., 45–6
104–5, 128, 165n.12 Rubin, Jay, 18
see also World of Warcraft (WoW) Russell, Mary Doria, 157
(online game) Ryman, Geoff, 157
oral traditions, 46–7, 54, 69, 128–32,
134–7, 149–52 sati (widow-burning),
Orientalism, 16, 27–8, 71–2, 92, 166n.4
163n.5 Saunders, Charles R., 2
see also East Asian stereotypes Sawchuk, Joe, 40
Ow, Jeffrey, 98, 101–2 Sawyer, Robert J., 44
Schnellbächer, Thomas, 71–5
Pacific Movement of the Eastern Schwartz, Leigh, 100, 105
World, 17 science, 9, 49–50, 83, 127–52,
Pacific War, 18, 26, 28, 72, 79, 164–5n.2, 164n.1
161n.8, 164n.10 science fiction, definitions of, 2–3,
Padmanabhan, Manjula, 156 8–9, 162n.17
Parry, Benita, 52, 109 Science Fiction Writers of America
Patel, Niti Sampat, 103 (SFWA), 2
Pearson, Wendy, 121, 123–4, Scott, Melissa, 121, 124
166n.3 Second World War, see
Perry, Matthew, 15–16 Pacific War
Phondke, Gajanana Bal, 155 Sekai SF zenshū (World Science Fiction
Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Anthology) (journal), 22
Chest (film), 165n.7 sexual violence, 20, 65
Pohl, Frederik, 153 Shapiro, Jerome, 19
Pordzik, Ralph, 113 Sheffield, Charles, 154
postcolonialism, definitions of, 3–8, Shichiji rei sanfun (7:03 Hours)
11–14, 40, 58–9, 108, 161n.3 (short story and film), 22–3
postuhuman, 99–100 Shin’ichi Hoshi, 25
publishing, 1–3, 38, 153–4, 167n.1 Shinseinen (magazine), 22
punishment (Foucault), 49–51 Shiva, Vandana, 131
Shohat, Ella, 5
Quayson, Ato, 4–6 Simmons, Dan, 45, 163n.5

Index 187
Singh, Vandana, 110, 148, Toussaint Louverture,

155 François-Dominique, 163n.2
skin colour, 29–30, 32, 91–2, 102 translation
see also racial categorization and Canadian science fiction, 12
slavery, 66–8, 84, 94, 163n.2 of folktales into science fiction,
Smedman, Lisa, 47 134
Smith, Anthony D., 71 and Japanese science fiction, 12,
“social science” fiction, 8, 86

14, 21–2, 25, 27, 70, 155,
see also anthropology 164n.13
South Africa, 81–2, 154 and literary discourse, 1–2
South America, 153–4, 157 Travellers, 164n.11
space, 53 Treaty of Amity and Commerce
spirituality, 86, 128–52, 158, (Harris Treaty), 15
164–5n.2 Treaty of Kanagawa, 15
see also Christianity; Hinduism; Treaty of Versailles, 16
magic; Voudoun Tsutsui Yasutaka, 26–38,
Spivak, Gayatri, 43, 71, 104 162n.13
Star Trek (TV show and films),
49, 85 Uchūjin Tokyo ni arawaru (Warning
steampunk, 120, 166n.2 from Space) (film), 26
stereotypes, 96–106, 116–17, Ukai Satoshi, 13
165n.12
United States imperialism, 39,
Suehiro Tetchō, 21 162n.16
Sun Ra, 53
and India, 141
suture, 101
and Japan, 13–19, 31, 34, 78,
Suvin, Darko, 4, 8–9, 128, 163n.20,
161n.6, 161n.8
166n.1
Unno Juza, 23–4
Ushiyama Ryosuke, 21
Tarvidel, Jules-Paul, 43
Taylor, Drew Hayden, 46
van Belkom, Edo, 47
Teppo, Mark, 144
Vaughan, Brian K., 159
Tetsu Yano, 47
Thomas, Sheree R., 154–5 Verne, Jules, 21
Thousand and One Nights (folktales), Vietnam, 28–33, 162n.13
134 Vint, Sherryl, 2
time Virgin Comics, 156
and colonial conflict, 133 Voudoun, 92, 165n.8, 165n.9
cyclical, 140–4, 146, 152
futurism and history, 49 Warning from Space (Uchūjin Tokyo ni
and progress, 129–30, 140 arawaru) (film), 26
“time-capsule” novels, 21–2 Watson, James, 164n.1
Tölölyan, Khachig, 59 windigo, 47
Tönnies, Ferdinand, 35 Wolfe, Gary K., 111–12
tourism, 28, 31–2, 35–8, 115, Woodman, Tom, 128
134 World of Warcraft (WoW) (online
see also identity tourism game), 82–106

188 Index
World Science Fiction Convention, Yoshida Shigeru, 16

155 Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro, 5, 11
World War II, see Pacific War Young, Robert, 4, 10, 83, 108,
125
Y: The Last Man (graphic novel), Youngquist, Paul, 53
159 Yumeno Kyusaku, 24
Yamano Kōichi, 25, 28, 61
Yasukuni Shrine, 20 Zimbabwe, 53

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com - licensed to McGill University - PalgraveConnect - 2012-07-31

10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

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10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

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10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

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10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

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10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to McGill University - PalgraveConnect - 2012-07-31

1 A Question of History: Geographical/Historical Context 11

2 Diaspora and Locality 56

3 Race, Culture, Identity and Alien/Nation 81

4 Hybridity, Nativism and Transgression 107

5 Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science 127

Conclusion: Filling Holes, Breaking Boundaries 153

10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

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10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

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10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to McGill University - PalgraveConnect - 2012-07-31

10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

Untranslated literature is not unread literature, and the modes of

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10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

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The Stranger and the Strange Land

Most readers will be familiar with the classic oppositional SF

10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to McGill University - PalgraveConnect - 2012-07-31

The definition of postcolonialism is notoriously problematic. Let

The postcolonial is a dialectical concept that marks the broad his-

Ato Quayson’s “possible working definition” echoes Young’s. Though

10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

distinctions within colonized societies which contribute to a tem-

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to McGill University - PalgraveConnect - 2012-07-31

In my view, postcolonial criticism can still be seen as a more or

Often, however, in place of a definition of what the term is, theo-

10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

metaphoric caricature but an accurate representation of a profound

. . . postcolonialism has to take account of two seemingly contra-

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Though it addresses history in a way that Bhabha’s pure theory does

10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

outside a strict temporal or historical limitation; rather than being

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to McGill University - PalgraveConnect - 2012-07-31

10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

similar and different, occurring in different postcolonial societies. It is

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to McGill University - PalgraveConnect - 2012-07-31

Science fiction’s role

As with postcolonialism, there is a constant debate in the field of

10.1057/9780230356054 - Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer

on Suvin’s concept of science fiction as “cognitive estrangement”,

The science fictional world is not only one different in time or

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This claim, however, suggests that everything in science fiction fol-

This book consists of five chapters, each of which represents both a