Shaun Duke

Shaun Duke is an aspiring writer, a reviewer, and an academic. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric and Writing at Bemidji State University. He received his PhD in English from the University of Florida and studies science fiction, postcolonialism, digital fan cultures, and digital rhetoric.

On Politics

Donald Trump is a Fascist, and It’s Time We Stop Pretending Otherwise

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The U.S. military has begun appearing on U.S. streets in response to protests against police brutality and murder. The president has threatened more aggressive action, and fears abound about whether Trump can use the Insurrection Act to override the Posse Comitatus Act (an 1878 law that limits the president’s ability to deploy the military on U.S. soil). Meanwhile, in his latest tantrum, Trump has issued an executive order to attack the lawsuit protections granted to social media companies under his false belief that a notification of a fact check on a publicly available tweet constituted censorship. Lawsuits challenging the order have already been filed, and we wait now to see what will be the next step in the increasingly unhinged rants and flails of a president who too often seems to live in an alternate reality. In all of this, I’ve pondered a question I asked my students in a college writing class in 2017: is Donald J. Trump a fascist? Throughout the semester, they read non-fiction and literature ranging from Umberto Eco’s “Ur-fascism” to Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here to better understand what fascism is and the influence it had on U.S. culture. Back in 2017, the answer was a definitive “no, but.” No, he’s not a fascist, but he is an authoritarian. No, he’s not a fascist, but his behavior is unsettling. No, he’s not a fascist, but we should still be concerned. The question is one that the nation has struggled with since Trump’s election. There’s a good reason for that: fascism is, for most U.S.-Americans, an ill-defined concept. Much like the phrase “science fiction,” most of us are only equipped to identify it when we see it, and even then, not very effectively. I sought to combat that in my fascism course, and I’ll turn to some of that knowledge here to once more consider that infamous question.

On Politics

“Protest. But Not Like That. Or Like That.”: U.S.-America’s Self-Imposed Riots

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To suggest that protest in the United States is in its blood would be an understatement. Even a flippant view of the creation of this nation would require a recognition that the very founding of the United States was predicated on a string of protests. The casual references to the Boston Tea Party of 1773 and other events in the decades leading up to the American Revolution would have to recognize the train of events as inevitable stepping stones to violence. The founding American story is an easily discernible hill that one must climb, fall down, and climb again: peaceful protest, destruction of property, looting and rioting, rebellion, and revolution. Yet, in the grand scheme of U.S.-American culture, we have often segregated our favorite variations of the pattern from the less comfortable ones. U.S.-Americans can joke about the Boston Tea Party or raise their fists over the Revolutionary War, but the same fervor and pride is noticeably absent when it comes to the same patterns concerning racial injustice, as in the case of the Slave Insurrection of 1741 or Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831. U.S.-Americans during the era of slavery responded to possibility of slave revolts not by recognizing the immorality of the slavery system but by stifling dissent, increasing their control on slaves, and preserving white society. Later, U.S.-Americans would split their views on the institution of slavery while preserving a segregated society — by law in the South and by design in the north. Later still, U.S.-Americans were split again on the Civil Rights movement, with far too many supporting the use of police violence to stop dissent (with the help of the FBI). And today, that familiar response is here again.

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On Politics

The Lie of Resisting Arrest

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In the last four days, Minneapolis has been on fire, literally and metaphorically. On Monday (5/25), George Floyd was strangled to death by a police officer who placed his knee on Floyd’s neck for a total of seven straight minutes. The officer was white. George Floyd was black. In the wake of the murder, the officer (and three others who were with him) was fired and Police Chief Medaria Arradondo has called for an FBI investigation; to date, no charges have been filed. Protests followed. Those protests soon became two straight evenings of riots; protesters turned from peaceful demonstration to destructive rage, lighting buildings on fire, looting stores, and creating mayhem. Minneapolis is just one fire burning in the United States, a country that has struggled and sometimes fought tooth-and-nail to preserve its racist history. A history that lives today in the apparent racist SWATing-style attempt against an NYC Central Park bird watcher, the apparent lynching of a black man who was simply jogging, the systemic inequality contributing to a disproportionate number of deaths in black communities from COVID-19, and the rise of anti-Asian racism partly fueled by Trump. Minneapolis has its own unique racist history, from the destruction of the predominately black Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul during the construction of I-94 to the history of racism within the Twin Cities police forces — the same area in which Philando Castile was murdered. And just like the the country it resides in, Minneapolis is burning.

...in the Histories of the United States, Finding Hope

“Finding Hope”: The History Reading List

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Not too long ago, I announced a little project called “Finding Hope in the Histories of the United States.” I set as a goal to begin with a series of general histories of the United States to see if understanding the full line of this country’s history can change how I understand the concept of “hope.” And now that project can finally begin! For the past few weeks, I’ve been waiting on the books I selected for the project to arrive. More particularly, the first two books in the chronology (listed below and shown at the top of the image). All the others got here in record time, but for some reason, the books I needed to even begin took a little extra time. But now the wait is over. Here’s the magic reading list for the first phase of “Finding Hope”:

Anime TV Reviews, SF/F Commentary

The AI Says It’s an Enemy: Relinquishing Control to the Machine in Yukikaze

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There is no shortage of television shows and films which place at center the question of human importance in the era of artificial intelligence. In film alone, the roots of this central question go back at least to Franz Lang’s expressionist film Metropolis (1927), with Maria’s robotic double wreaking havoc upon the titular city, a theme found in literature stretching back beyond even Frankenstein (1818). Film and television have, as such, been long interested in artificial intelligence, whether in computer form, as in Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) or 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), or robot form, as in The Invisible Boy (1957) or The Day the Earth Stood Still (1957). One common feature in Western (especially U.S.) cinema is the threat of such technologies to human life, whether for sadistic or noble purposes. Our machines develop a mind of their own and turn on us, either because we plan to oppress them or because machine interests and human interests do not align (see The Matrix (1999)). When machines aren’t determined to kill us, they may require us to relinquish control, as in our contemporary fear of automation, which means restructuring society to find new things for humans to do while machines (artificially intelligent but not sentient) can continue to produce for us. U.S.-American science fiction, in a sense, has always been wary of our technology even as we allow it to bleed into our everyday lives and even when that “bleed” results in some truly creepy moments.

The Bookening

The Bookening: New Reads in the Pyramid of Plenty

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Alternate subtitle: A Bear Sits in My Woods! For those that don’t know, I’m a pretty big fan of Elizabeth Bear’s writing. So, too, apparently, my cat, who has spent a goodly portion of the time I’ve spent writing this post sniffing all the books. If my cat approves, then the books must be good, right! Needless to say, I bought a bunch of her books (in some cases, again). So here’s the list:

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