Isiah Lavender III
Autor de Race in American Science Fiction
Sobre El Autor
Créditos de la imagen: from University of Georgia faculty page
Obras de Isiah Lavender III
Obras relacionadas
Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction (2022) — Contribuidor — 6 copias
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Género
- male
- Nacionalidad
- USA
- País (para mapa)
- USA
- Educación
- Southern University and A & M College (BA)
Louisiana State University (MA)
University of Iowa (PhD) - Ocupaciones
- English professor
- Organizaciones
- Louisiana State University
University of Georgia - Premios y honores
- IAFA Distinguished Scholarship Award
Miembros
Reseñas
También Puede Gustarte
Autores relacionados
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 6
- También por
- 4
- Miembros
- 76
- Popularidad
- #233,522
- Valoración
- 3.8
- Reseñas
- 1
- ISBNs
- 17
Isaiah Lavender III writes about Octavia Butler’s story “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” which is ostensibly about an illness that makes people harm themselves (and sometimes others) but he argues also serves as a metaphor for race, for example by depicting the effects that segregation has on both the healthy and the ill (driven to self-destruction). I didn’t know that Butler resisted readings of “Bloodchild” as being about masters and slaves; as Lavender points out, it is obviously “at least” about masters and slaves, as well as other things—love, coming of age, or pregnant men.
Patrick B. Sharp’s piece on Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony argues that it’s actually science fiction, set in the past. By setting her story on an Indian reservation with a nuclear waste dump, he contends, Silko challenges the conventional idea that the US has yet to experience a nuclear catastrophe. Matthew Goodwin reads several narratives about Mexico/the Mexican-American border, including the film Sleep Dealer, arguing that they challenge the coloniality of the “frontier” in sf. Traditional dystopian fiction involves a privileged protagonist who loses that privilege (e.g., Orwell’s 1984 or Bradbury’s Farhrenheit 451), but the protagonists in these narratives are already “maquiladora workers, minorities, and migrant laborers.” There’s also a reprint of an older piece by Edward James, as well as his subsequent reflections on that piece (where he points out, for example, that he talked about general assumptions of sf writers when he should have added in “white”). The older piece examines sf’s common implication that racial problems have been solved, somehow, by the disappearance of minority groups. Prejudice is for rural folk, not the city of the future; aliens sometimes operate as metaphors of race without the awkward intrusion of actual nonwhites, or if nonwhites do appear they instruct us that prejudice is over. Because of this desire to promote tolerance within an assimilationist framework, James suggests, much sf is only ambiguously “about” race even as it deals with the alien. In some sense, like the economist who assumes a can opener, white American sf has posed an easier problem for itself and then tried to solve that.… (más)