Browsing by Subject "Speculative Fiction"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Black Cyborgs: Blackness Narratives in Technology, Speculative Fiction, and Digital Cultures
    (2020-06) Gunn, Caitlin
    This project draws from the deep well of Black science fiction, original interviews with Black science fiction authors, and popular media case studies and analysis to generate new discourses about Black people and technology. Exploring the ways Black people have taken up both science fiction and technology, I argue that Black feminist thinkers can use both as blueprints for survival, joy, and community-building. Seeking to find strategies for effective communication within our shared political and technosocial lives, this project advances speculative fiction and cyborg theory as dynamic tools which we must utilize to build the future of feminist studies, Black studies, and digital political organizing. Beginning with Donna Haraway’s essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” and expanding to recent explorations of the cyborg from women of color theorists like Joy James and Jasbir Puar, I situate Black feminist cyborgs in the current field of feminist cyborg theory. I offer a “part-time” Black feminist cyborg theory, a practical aesthetic which aids Black people’s movement and theorizing in digital spaces, chronicled by hashtags and characterized by the fast-paced nature of digital communication. To illustrate the possibilities of such an aesthetic, I engage Chicana philosopher Maria Lugones’ theory of traveling to the metaphorical “worlds” of other women. I extend her work, envisioning a part-time Black feminist cyborg optimized for travel to and through the digital worlds of social media like Facebook and Twitter, asking how Black people arrive in these worlds and what they experience once there. Illuminating a tradition of technological engagement by Black communities and calling attention to dreams of futures free of oppression, my interdisciplinary project shapes the future directions of Black feminist theory, digital organizing, and political resistance to entrenched and renewed white supremacy.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Nowhere to Go But Forward: The Fiction of Octavia E. Butler
    (2016-05) Anderson, Emily
    This dissertation examines how Octavia Butler revises such speculative fiction generic conventions as the alien encounter, space exploration and colonization, utopia/dystopia, and time travel. I argue that Butler borrows heavily from classic science fiction, feminist utopia, and African American literature. In so doing, Butler both expands and critiques these genres, discarding elements that she finds limiting, and reshaping those that she finds valuable. Although Butler’s contributions to both speculative fiction and African American literature are many, among her most notable achievement is the reconfiguration of heroic power. Butler creates scenarios in which young black women, many of whom are mothers, and many of whom possess either physical or mental illnesses, find themselves “chosen” to lead in all manner of future worlds. While Butler does not suggest that there is anything essential in black female motherhood that equips her heroines to lead, their histories on the margins—centuries of psychological and physical violation—uniquely equip Butler’s heroines to thrive. Because of the compromises they have always been forced to make in order to survive, Butler’s protagonists are able to serve as messianic figures who serve as bridges between past, present, and future. Furthermore, Butler’s protagonists rely heavily upon their communities (while also being reluctant mothers), negotiate rather than demand, and collaborate rather than dominate. Additionally, Butler’s heroines are receptive to radical change even when that change comes at the partial loss of humanity. Because they have less of a stake in the world as it exists, Butlerian heroines are in ideal positions to usher in the unthinkable realities of Blochian utopian dreaming, envision new social organizing principles, and embrace initially destabilizing but ultimately beneficial forms of embodiment that problematize identitarian categories.