I have a feeling that this is going to turn into a longer essay one day soon. Setting down some thoughts now…
Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies is about a dystopic world in which everyone is given surgery on their sixteenth birthday so that they can become pretties. Two friends, Tally and Shay, at Tally’s insistence, are experimenting with the looks they would like to have – although a committee will in actuality decide for them:
She tweaked the eyebrows, making their arch more dramatic, and added roundness to the cheeks. Shay was still too skinny, even after the morpho software had pulled her toward the average.
“And maybe a bit lighter?” Tally took the shade of the skin closer to baseline.
“Hey, Squint,” Shay said. “Whose face is this, anyway?”
Shay has olive skin.
This is one tiny moment in a long novel that otherwise doesn’t mention race, and it’s a significant for that. It’s chilling. I wonder what happened to the people with darker skin, and other “imperfect” features, as this dystopic system was being set up. If baseline is pale, what happened to the people who were nowhere close to conforming? If they were altered or killed or prevented from reproducing, whichever, it’s a nightmare conclusion.
In Uglies, it’s a forcibly all-white world that is presented as a dystopia, and I think Westerfeld maps that out well, if a little too briefly for my taste. But that’s not a universal for science fiction, where all-white worlds are regularly presented as the utopia. Sometimes, non-white people don’t even have to be explicitly killed off in order to make our exclusion from paradise obvious. I’ve read stories so clearly designed for white people, at the expense of people like me, that I’ve not taken the trouble to finish them. Why bother paying that kind of respect to a writer who thinks I don’t read and am worth nothing more than a sad rhetorical point?
Alternatively, a white writer may present non-white worlds as dystopic. There’s a story I love, published in 1969 by Suzette Haden Elgin, called “For the Sake of Grace”. It is about a young woman, Jacinth, who wants to become a Poet, which is a religious position on her planet. However, women who fail the examination – and women are denied training – are to be isolated for life. She overcomes other people’s narratives about what a woman can be, terrible danger, and indifference in order to achieve the dream of her heart. It is a magnificent story, full of pain and vision. But it is magnificent very much in spite of itself, because this is a world modelled on a falsified faux-Middle Eastern conglomerate culture. It relies on the reader’s having the idea of Those People being bent on restricting Their Women, according to a singular model of patriarchy. Elgin isn’t alone in this: white women, and white women working in science fiction, make points about patriarchy at the expense of their non-white sisters every day. I am sick, sick in the weight of my arms as I write this, sick in my gut, sick of being an example for white women to point to as their patriarchal past, even as I am their contemporary, an example of a non-white culture rotted with wrongness.
Ultimately, in these writings, it’s white anxieties about whiteness and perfection that are being placated. Non-white people are bad, and it’s a better world that does not have us in it. It’s a relief to have white utopias, because then white people do not have to confront difference. This is too close to our world. It is terrifying to think of all those writers thinking up worlds in which their false imaginings of our cultures are contained, terrible, to be acted against – or gone entirely.
I know you’re looking for lists of speculative fiction featuring/written by non-white people/people of colour. Are you familiar with the LJ community “50books_poc”? I know they tag things there by genre.
“I am sick, sick in the weight of my arms as I write this, sick in my gut, sick of being an example for white women to point to as their patriarchal past, even as I am their contemporary, an example of a non-white culture rotted with wrongness.”
Are you talking about oppressive patriarchy in general or examples of non-white oppressive patriarchy specifically? Can you give examples of this? I live in Finland and there’s been a very worrying movement towards very conservative social conservatism lately and all over Europe really mostly lead by “immigration critical” parties that hold the same values. Handling such topics with fiction seems like a natural way to ease one’s worries. I don’t mean this as a provocation but I honestly want to try and learn new ways on how to handle the topic so as not to point at non-white societies as bad or whatever.
I am. Thanks, Anna. :)
There’s a history, particularly among Western anthropologists, of pointing to non-white societies as examples of what white societies were like before. This means that non-white societies and people are not only placed as a white past – as though white people are the more evolved sort, and the rest of us primitive – but are denied our own narratives of historical change, and are placed as stagnant.
I have so many woooords and feeelings about this topic. I love dystopic futures the most but they are so overwhelmingly white (and also often very poly or orgiastic), and the Elgin story is an excellent example of using us non-white others to use as comparison in order to create the dystopic future.
Actually I am writing a post about dystopic futures right now (focussing a lot on movies)! It is mostly filled with my rage.
I’m glad I’m not the only person who struggles with this. As a in-the-closest writer (as in, it’s not my major or ‘chosen’ career), I always find myself trying to deal with things in ways that make sense to what I’m writing. The great thing about fantasy is you can say ‘fuck it all. I’m going to make a world that is nothing like my own but is still very much like my own.’ Being white, I find I have trouble describing different non-white races. You can say ‘black’ or ‘brown’, but what is the literary, appropriate distinction between someone who is Arab and someone who is Indian? How do you describe a pacific islander without saying ‘pacific islander’?
I recently discovered Octavia E. Butler, who is not only a female, African-American science fiction writer, but also manages to subtly and poignantly introduce racial issues in her writing. I love her work and it has really made me (a caucasion hispanic sci-fi enthusiast) think about how often race is removed from literature and how it is described when it is included.
Saw a similar post from the Angry Black Woman looking for similar recs here http://theangryblackwoman.com/2011/02/28/sci-fi-technology-heavy-books-by-poc-authors/#comment-70208
the comments have quite a few good suggestions.
I’m a sci-fi/fantasy lover but abhor the tendency for them to exoticise, over-sexualise or brutalise women of colour. I think since racefail a growing section of the community in the US has become more aware of these issues and their ignorance of them however again, it’s also an issue of visibility in publishing, why do we have to search to find POC authors and characters who aren’t merely serving as some kind of foil? When it’s done well I feel amazing strength in sharing the experience.
We need more Australasian POC scifi though, that would be awesome :)