In Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, Jordan S. Carroll turns to science fiction and its fan communities to explore the speculative imagination of the contemporary right, from white nationalists to Silicon Valley techno-libertarians and beyond. Qualifying the genre essentialisms that lead some readers to approach sci-fi as innately progressive or left-utopian, Carroll anatomizes the narratives of “alt-victimhood” and “geek ressentiment” that have suffused sci-fi cultures, and he rereads key sci-fi novels and films through their reception among leading right-wing thinkers, including internet trolls of the alt-right. Schematizing how the Right reads science fiction by stripping it of “speculative indeterminacy,” Carroll teases apart the ambivalent political status of ideals typically associated with sci-fi, including innovation, imagination, and speculation itself, with an eye toward a future that belongs to everyone.
Keyword: science fiction
Watchmen, Copaganda, and Abolition Futurities in US Television
Through this article, we examine the history and conventions of copaganda in the United States, and critically consider how HBO’s Watchmen has responded to and represented the historical relationship between policing and white supremacy. We argue that while Watchmen works to explicitly critique the history of white supremacist violence in US policing, the show reproduces several copaganda conventions. Watchmen depicts central law enforcement characters who commit violence as heroes, uplifts the main police character as an eventually almighty arbiter of justice, portrays white supremacist law enforcement characters as anomalous individual infiltrators (a.k.a. “bad apples”), and was created in collaboration with various members of law enforcement. After presenting this case study in contemporary copaganda, we consider how science fiction series can more meaningfully respond to the movement for police and prison abolition through representing abolitionist futures.
Review of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction by André M. Carrington (University of Minnesota Press)
André Carrington’s ‘Speculative Blackness’ is a novel approach to the consumption of race representation in media. Carrington explores how Blackness is manufactured, consumed, and transformed through the speculative fiction genre across multiple 20th and 21st century mediums. Traditional media of comic books and television shows reveal the marginalized status of Black figures however, these media do not exist in a vacuum. The consumption of speculative fiction is a transformative process for the original content, which consequentially produces amateur media due to a long-established history of fan interaction. Black representation is characterized as the exception, not the rule, in traditional production, but fan consumption reconfigures these notions. Ultimately, Carrington’s work is an innovative dialogue regarding a genre that creates worlds speculating on what could be. Speculative fiction breaks down preexisting notions of our reality and creates worlds with entirely new expectations and interactions. With the creative liberty of the genre, Carrington casts Black representation as a consumed media but also an imaginative effort.