Hey folks,
Following up on my piece from last week, I’m posting links a few articles on race and sci-fi I’ve seen online in this past week by Noah Berlatsky from The Atlantic from last year.
The first piece makes some really interesting points about how often and how colonial narratives (and anti-colonial narratives) are used to recast whites and others (such as Americans) as oppressed, thus justifying whatever actions they may take to throw off that oppression, and as result, provide a fantasy where violence by those with social power in the real world is celebrated.
The second piece makes some good points around how sci-fi frequently mixes different ways of speaking about race, but that the defaults are usually tokenism and metaphor. While this choice doesn’t automatically mean that narratives that represent racial diversity in these ways can’t be disruptive to whiteness, the general approach of those creating such narratives is to minimize such disruptive potential.