“Colonizing Space” is a Dirty Phrase: Stop Using It
The term “colonize” is not neutral. It’s an impossibly negative term. It immediately references an extensive socio-political, socio-economic, racialized, and vile process that still churns its wheels today. Colonialism always was and always will be an exploitative model which privileges dominant socio-economic groups (I hesitate to say “Western” here, though it would be fair to suggest that colonialism benefits the West more than other colonialist groups). We can thank colonialism for the massive growth of the slave trade in the Americas, the deliberate attempts to exterminate non-white groups across the globe, the irreparable destruction of native land, the theft and destruction of property, culture, language, etc. and so on. The fact that its engines still churn today in the form of the tourist industry, the continued denial of compensation for subaltern groups for damages rendered (and still rendering in places where U.S. imperialism led to the irradiation of indigenous land in the Pacific), and in foreign and domestic policy highlights the fact that to “colonize” is not to perform a neutral action, nor to imply a neutrality. To “colonize” is to subjugate, destroy, rape, murder, exploit, and so on. This is what colonialism looks like: fat old white guys exploiting the innocent. And so, when we use the term “colonize” to refer to things like human settlement in space, we are, in fact, playing into a socio-political game given to us by the Pulp and Golden Ages of science fiction (both of which were in the thick of imperialist and colonialist enterprises). This game is one which attempts, intentionally or otherwise, to redefine colonialism so as to dampen its political implications, which is another way of saying that colonialism really isn’t all that bad. In effect, when we say we’re going to “colonize space” we are trying to say something other than what the word means, which makes it possible to silence the collective history the term actually signals. To put it another way: our willy-nilly use of the term “colonize” is an extension of the colonial process itself, since you, in fact, are appropriating the legacy of colonialism for your own purposes. There is a duality at work here: the suppression of reality alongside the perpetuation of the old history that normalized such suppressive forces. The fact that to “colonize” cannot imply a neutral without playing into the legacy I’ve thus far described means we need to start thinking about human involvement in space within different terms. “Settlement” would be a much more effective term, since it has always signaled a multitude. Yes, to “settle” was always a part of the colonial enterprise, but it has also always referred to the process of settlement, which may or may not involve the settlement of spaces owned or occupied by others. For science fiction, this seems like a perfect term to use, since the genre often imagines human settlement as encompassing the varieties of the old forms of settlement. Humans in science fiction settle on uninhabited asteroids, moons, or planets, but they also sometimes colonize planets that don’t belong to them, which is a kind of settlement to begin with (albeit, a violent form). So, if possible, could we stop referring to our extension into the stars as “colonizing space” and instead call it “settling space?” It is a) a much more effective term for encompassing the varieties of human expansion, and b) a term which avoids the political implications of misuse. But maybe my endless study of colonialism and postcolonialism has tainted me. What do you think? (This post is partly in response to Nicholos Wethington’s post at Lightspeed about colonizing the solar system. I don’t disagree with the project, per se, but I do thing the term is a problematic one as indicated above.)
The Eaton Conference: Day Three — Idea Overload B
(You can read about Day One and Day Two here and here.) Day Three The third day of the Conference (technically the second and last day of the event, which only ran from Friday to Saturday) proved to be both intellectually exciting and terrifying. We first attended a panel called “Neocolonialism, Global Capitalism, and Monstrous Subalterns,” which included a presentation by Steven Shaviro on hyperbolic futures and a paper on River of Gods and Cyberabad Days (both interesting books I think you folks would enjoy reading). After that, we attended a panel on Polish SF, which I have some familiarity with through an undergraduate cyberpunk course I took at UC Santa Cruz (we read Imaginary Magnitudes by Stanislaw Lem). Both panels were interesting, though I suspect their early placement and my pending presentation impacted my note taking, as most of my notes for these panels are quite empty (I did find them interesting, but I didn’t see a need to take too many notes). The third panel we attended was actually mine. Most of you know that I was pegged to present a paper on the work of Nalo Hopkinson and Tobias S. Buckell. Nalo was present for the presentation (there were two of us, since the third person apparently couldn’t make it), which was quite alarming, but was also expected (thank you Twitter!). I didn’t get as many questions as I had hoped, but so be it. The person who presented alongside me talked a great deal about the cultural elements of Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, which didn’t figure as prominently in my discussion (I was largely focused on the broader picture and how that imagined outer space as liberative of the postcolonial condition). I took a lot of notes during the panel, which may prove useful when I put the next batch of changes into my Master’s thesis. This is Loopdilou’s WTF face… After that I had the pleasure of meeting Hopkinson (again) and having her sign my beat-up copy of Midnight Robber and the new one I bought specifically for her to sign. We had a nice, but brief discussion about her work, my paper, and Tobias S. Buckell. She told me that she was quite pleased that I was talking about Buckell’s work, since very few people are. That’s pretty much all the validation one needs, to be honest! Also, she is a coward. Following lunch, we attended the last panel of the day, which, oddly enough, happens to be a topic we intend to discuss on The Skiffy and Fanty Show. The panel was called “Religion, SF, and Otherness” and included a paper by one of the professors in the English department at UF (my reader for my thesis had to read the paper because she had an unexpected illness). Her paper discussed the Catholic legacies and allegories in Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and The Children of God. The other paper was actually quite funny. The author discussed at length the problems of religious representation in SF film–specifically, the representation of non-Christian/Catholic religion. The shortened version of his paper would read: they don’t represent them very well at all! We ended up having a good discussion with him after and hope to bring him onto to the show alongside John Ottinger. The “WTF, I’m coming out the public bathroom, jerk!” pose. The final event was the keynote, Mike Davis, and a discussion panel including Nalo Hopkinson, Karen Tei Yamashita, China Mieville, and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. Overall, the speech was interesting, although it was not as focused on SF/F as I had expected it to be. Still, his discussion of Ward Moore was amusing and I suspect I will do some research on what he called “counterfactual historiography.” The panel, however, was riveting. One of the issues I am interested in right now is the problem of access to publication and translation (there have been a few discussions already in the last month or so which have highlighted this issue). Peoples from outside of the western sphere of influence often have difficulty accessing the literary voice either because publishers don’t publisher foreign writers all that frequently or because publishers aren’t willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to translate works not originally written in English. While the panel didn’t come to any absolute conclusion, it was still awesome to see professional writers and critics tackling the issue of translation and Global SF in general. I may attempt to write about this issue for my U.S. Imperialism course. The Panel of Awesome! And then it was all over. They gave everybody wine, cheesecake, and other nibbly bits and we had one last riveting public gathering before we all disappeared into the night, never to be seen again until at least the following morning or the next conference. Before signing off (and recording the second half of the special Eaton Editions of The Skiffy and Fanty Show), I did have one rather embarrassing moment in which I asked China Mieville a rather silly question. I won’t tell you what it is, but I’m pretty sure he knew it was a silly question too. There will be one more edition of this series, but it won’t have much to do with the conference. Instead, it will deal briefly with other things that occurred on the following Sunday and Monday. For now, that’s all I’ve got. Now I will leave you with a page from my notes, which has nothing directly to do with anything we saw at the conference: Click for larger image. If you can figure out what we were talking about, I will give you an imaginary present.
The Eaton Conference: Day Two — Idea Overload A
As promised, here are my notes/thoughts about the Eaton Conference (part one). Day Two should go up tomorrow or the day after. Here goes: Day One The theme of the Eaton Conference this year (Global SF) proved to be an immensely informative one, not simply because I had the opportunity to be exposed to all kinds of non-Western literatures, but also because I have a fascination with SF from elsewhere, SF from diverse perspectives, and so on. Eaton, as such, was a perfect venue for my intellectual curiosities. The first panel we attended (my friend Loopdilou and I attended the same panels because we, oddly enough, were interested in the same things) was on China Mieville called “Politics, Aesthetics, and Post-Humanism.” It was not the first panel of the event, but as I mentioned here, we arrived quite late and decided that we could either get up for the first panel and fall asleep through it, or sleep in a little more and remain awake. In any case, the Mieville panel proved to be quite interesting, delving into trope-ological patterns in Kraken (Easterbrook), anti-utopianism and political economy in The City and the City (Carl Freedman), and amborgs — a.k.a. human/animal hybrids — and post-human identity in Perdido Street Station (Gordon). I took quite a lot of notes during this panel and expect the ideas presented will be very useful for any future work I write on Mieville or other New Weird-ies. The second panel we attended was called “Orientalism in SF and the Pulps,” which proved to be one of the few panels that exposed me to a whole range of fiction I had never heard of before. The second paper dealt with what is called “yellow peril fiction,” but from a completely different perspective: within the Orient itself. Apparently there is a wealth of literature from places like India, China, etc. where other Asian nationalities, races, etc. are presented as the bad guys in much the same way as Western literature tends to portray people from the Orient. The other papers were also interesting, dealing with Philip K. Dick’s orientalism and peripheral orientalism in Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist Gate.” We decided to keep things foreign throughout much of the conference. The third panel for the first day was on South African and Taiwanese SF, which was an odd mix, but proved interesting in terms of thickening up my future bibliography. The fourth panel was called “Labor, Transnationalism, and Trauma in SF Film,” which dealt primarily with Alex River’s Sleep Dealer and the fascinating African film called Pumzi, the latter of which we had the opportunity to see (and it’s quite good considering the financial limitations; I’m hoping that someone will do the same for Pumzi as was done for District 9). The last event of day one was actually a screening of Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a documentary on the infamous Harlan Ellison. It is, first of all, a hilarious film, but it is also a rather deep character study of Ellison: his attitudes, his motivations, etc. I recommend seeing it if you can, primarily because I think Ellison is an important writer (genre and otherwise) and because I think it’s important to learn who he actually is rather than relying on snippets from blogs and so on. That does it for day one. To conclude, I give you my “reading list” (i.e., stuff I discovered from these papers that I want to read, etc.): The City and the City by China Mieville Kraken by China Mieville Philip K. Dick on ethics and alterity Gramsci The Scar by China Mieville 50 Key Figures in Science Fiction Ursula K. Le Guin on fantastic literature Present Past: Modernity and the Crisis (pretty sure that’s the title) Interview w/ China Mieville by Rick Kleffel of The Agony Column (listened to it before, but I need to go back to it) Michael Moorcock on String Theory Raymond Chandler (crime novels) Empire by Hardt and Negi Donna Haraway on cyborgs The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick Descarte Ezra Pound Derrida on Chinese language as ideographic “The Merchant and the Alcehmist Gate” by Ted Chiang Derrida on “the future can only be predicted in terms of a danger” Richard Rive Alex Le Guma Can Themba Inherit the Earth, Recoil, and The Sky Trapeze by Claude Nunes State of Emergency by Jan Rabie Waiting for the Barbarians by Coetzee The Life and Times of Michael K by Coetzee Spiral of Fire by Michael Cope Probe (magazine of the SFSA) Welcome to Our Hillbrow by Phaswane Mpe Souvenir by Jane Rosenthal Horrelpoot/Trencherman by Eben Venter Poison by Henrietta Rose-Innes The Book of the Dead by Kgebetli Something Wicked (magazine) Summer’s End by Peter Wilhelm The Slayer of Shadows by Bregin The Heart of Redness and The Whale Caller (already read) by Zakes Mda Zoolin Vale and Chalice Ringtar by Craig Smith Deadlands by Heme Light Across Time by Learmont The Mall by S. L. Grey Science Fiction in South Africa by Deirdre Byrne Moxyland by Lauren Beukes The Literature Police by MacDonald The Uncanny The A.I. Chronicles “The Science Fictionalization of Trauma” by Luckhurst Borderlands by Anzaldua Third Cinema (film manifesto) Nnedi Okorafor And there you go. Will I read all of these things? Probably not, but I offer these things up in case you find something of interest in them. That’s all for now. One to the next piece…
The Good PhD News and the Lingering Eaton Bits
First, the good news: I just found out that I got into the PhD program at the University of Florida. Obviously I intend to stay and finish that whole schooling thing. I expect to continue studying and writing about science fiction at the scholarly level, though my PhD dissertation seems to be opening up more broadly to what I am calling imaginative and antihistorical literature. If anyone wants me to explain what those things are, feel free to leave a comment. Second, a note about my Eaton Conference stuff: I will be throwing up a few posts about my experiences at the conference this week at some point. Some of that has already appeared in the most recent episodes of the Skiffy and Fanty Show (here and here), but I do want to provide a list of potential reading materials and what not, which I have done with previous conference-related editions. The reason I’m not adding such things right now is because I left all of my notes in my checked-in luggage for the trip home. So that’s that. Expect more from me soon!
The Eaton Conference: Day One — American Airlines Sucks
Packing is (usually) easy enough, unless you forget something. I suppose you can guess where this is going: I forgot something. And not just any something. It’s the kind of something that isn’t exactly easy to replace, especially if you are traveling through Miami to Los Angeles. What did I forget? My cell phone. I didn’t discover this until my friend had dropped me off at the airport and left, which is wonderfully ironic. It also turns out that the wireless Internet at the Gainesville airport was on the fritz, despite having been quite reliable in the past. Without any way to get back to my house in time, I was left with the daunting task of relaying my predicament to my other friend on the other end of the journey in Los Angeles. This is the story of how Barnes & Noble and Facebook saved the day. With no cell phone and no memory of the numbers of the various people I would have called in that moment (I have terrible memory to begin with, so a cell phone makes it quite easy to avoid memorizing long strings of numbers), it came to me to figure out how to get a message to the appropriate party. In comes the Nook. For some reason, the wireless worked remarkably well on my Nook, but not on my laptop. Anyone who has a Nook knows that the device has a little browser. It’s not very good in terms of its ease of use (the Nook is an eReader, not an iPad, after all), but I managed to get on Facebook and relay a message to my friend. Wonderful. Having averted that crisis, I got on the plane and headed towards Miami, where I would catch a flight to Los Angeles. I should mention that during this flight, which was on a plane with propellers for some stupid reason, the Captain decided that it would be a lovely idea to intentionally fly through a storm. On top of that, he actually announced it to us, which was a tad annoying. He could have easily gone around it. In any case, for a good five minutes the plane was doing the equivalent of skidding back and forth, along with huge drops and other terrifying things. Planes should not have propellers anymore. It’s insanity. Thankfully, we made it to Miami in one piece, but not without a little soiling on my part… The sea of white fluffy things… I realized when we landed that I only had about 20 minutes to get to my next flight, though, and so scrambled out and went to the giant board…only to discover that my flight had been cancelled and I had been moved to a flight that wasn’t leaving for another three hours. Lovely! Nobody warned me when I checked in, and I highly doubt that American Airlines cancelled the flight between check-in and arrival. And, of course, I didn’t have a cell phone and the free wireless Internet in MIA wasn’t working. Convenient? I think so. It was a grand plot by airports against me, I think. Worse still was that my Nook couldn’t get into the wireless, so I was left with either paying a ridiculous amount of money for a few hours of Internet service, or leaving my friend hanging in the wind on the other end (oddly enough, there are no AT&T stores in MIA, which meant that trying to get numbers or a new phone were out of the question). This is how I calm my nerves: Häagen–Dazs So, I paid for the Internet. It sucked. I’m not happy. But that’s how life is. From there I went to Facebook and finally had to get a friend I met at another conference to call my other friend to give her the new flight information. It was insanity. The plane, boss, get in the plane! In any case, I managed to get the information to the appropriate parties, got some food, wandered around like a chicken with its head cut off, and eventually made it to Los Angeles and had a wonderful two hours talking to my friend while we ate at a Denny’s, drove the hour and a half to Riverside, and so on. Needless to say, the trip over was a long one, and we ended up missing the entire introductory greet-and-meet at the conference (to be fair, this might have been a good thing, since I spent half the conference bumbling like a moron). Look, it’s a Loopdilou Monster! So that was the first day of my trip to the Eaton Conference. More to come soon!
Libraries, Socio-economics, and the Ten Million People March
Plenty of big name folks have come out in defense of libraries lately. For example, the wonderful Wil Wheaton has talked briefly about his love of libraries here and author Philip Pullman has written an extensive defense and political rebuttal here. They’re certainly no the only ones talking about the problem libraries are facing in the U.S. and the U.K. Massive budget cuts in the U.S. have left many libraries struggling to keep doors open or services available; the same seems to be true of U.K. libraries (though I willingly profess my ignorance of the U.K. library system and will refrain from speaking directly about their services in this post). The one thing I don’t see people talking about, however, is the socio-economic problem that library closures and cuts represent. Most defenses have given a nod to the value of libraries to middle class and poor families, but few have actually dug into why libraries are essential, if not indispensable, to those with the greatest need. You see, libraries are an immense access point for information and crucial social services. In the U.S., a great deal of libraries (though not all, sadly) offer Internet services, job search and resume help, daycare in the form of storytime and book clubs, research aid, and many other things that I can’t think of at this moment. We can pretend all we want that everyone has Internet at home, but the reality is that many don’t, even people who have big fancy college degrees. Why? Because some of those fancy people are unemployed. Some of those people might have been scraping by before the recession, and are now cutting back on the luxuries they once had so they can keep feeding themselves. Libraries make it possible for these people to look for jobs, to research, and even to get access to materials that they once bought from a bookstore (i.e., books). But here’s the kicker. Because libraries are access points for all kinds of information (including “regular” knowledge), the removal of libraries from public access (i.e., closing them through budget cuts) means denying people without financial power from access to the knowledge that would liberate them from ignorance. Ignorance is, as such, a powerful political tool. The longer you keep the people blind to reality (either by destroying public education by making it impossible to teach critical thinking skills or simply denying them access to national news sources and so on), the longer you can maintain power. Closing libraries is never about cutting down on government spending. It is always about power. Why? Because the only people who will be affected by library closures (with rare exception) are those without a great deal of disposable income. They are the ones who suddenly lose access to the services and knowledge that libraries provide. Those with disposable income won’t be affected in a negative way unless they are of the crowd who uses libraries or understands their value (but such understanding folks are not the people who are the problem, since they too are defending libraries, like Pullman, who is far from being Mr. Poor). In fact, those with disposable income will see nothing but benefits as their taxes (theoretically) go down or remain the same. The rest of us will be left with a gap. That gap will damage generations to come. If we allow libraries to be closed, then we are allowing the power dynamic to shift ever more unfavorably against us. That balance is already tipped at a disturbing angle towards those who already have financial power. The wealthy have all the money and the rest of us are scrounging for scraps. Libraries are just one more assault by those with power (and financial security) on the ability of everyone else to keep themselves from the peasantry. They are the lords on high, basking in their green glow while the executioner hangs our libraries. We can’t stand by in the crowd and watch that happen. That’s our future being hung from the rafters. It’s even worse for those who can’t afford to buy the Internet for themselves and use the slightly-crazed Google to search through our literary history, because they are already losing hope that the future will hold anything good for them. If we let people take away libraries, what kind of hopeful, American dream-y future are we proposing to give our children or the children of others or the people who most need those places of informational worship? Libraries are a part of the American Dream, even if it’s all a mythic fantasy we tell our children when they are young. What we really need is a Ten Million People March for libraries. The U.K. has it right. There are people protesting there, and more power to them to use their voices to tell the government to screw itself. More power to Philip Pullman for laying straight that nasty bag of snakes that is politics. More power to Wil Wheaton and all the librarians and bloggers, here and elsewhere, whose posts I haven’t read yet, all of whom have written about why we need libraries — because the children need them to have those wonderful experiences of discovery or to learn or to become lovers of books… We need a march in the U.S. Lots of them. All at once. With celebrities and authors and politicians and poor people and middle class people and those few powerful people who believe that libraries are the gateway from peasantry to something slightly better. Maybe I missed those marches. If so, we need to have them again. Because if I ever have children, I want to be able to take them to my local library and look up at the big sign over the door and say, “This place is going to change your life.”