Black and Brown Planets

The Politics of Race in Science Fiction

Isiah Lavender III

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626743069
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Cultura popular

Black and Brown Planets embarks on a timely exploration of the American obsession with color in its look at the sometimes-contrary intersections of politics and race in science fiction. The contributors, including De Witt D. Kilgore, Edward James, Lisa Yaszek, and Marleen S. Barr, among others, explore science fiction worlds of possibility (literature, television, and film), lifting blacks, Latin Americans, and indigenous peoples out from the background of this historically white genre. This collection considers the role of race and ethnicity in our visions of the future. The first section emphasizes the political elements of black identity portrayed in science fiction from black America to the vast reaches of interstellar space framed by racial history. In the next section, analysis of indigenous science fiction addresses the effects of colonization, helps discard the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovers ancestral traditions in order to adapt in a post-Native-apocalyptic world. Likewise, this section explores the affinity between science fiction and subjectivity in Latin American cultures from the role of science and industrialization to the effects of being in and moving between two cultures. By infusing more color in this otherwise monochrome genre, Black and Brown Planets imagines alternate racial galaxies with viable political futures in which people of color determine human destiny.

PART ONE

Black Planets

THE BANNEKERADE

Genius, Madness, and Magic in Black Science Fiction

LISA YASZEK

We need to figure out, as a society, how to portray the work of an intellectual or inventor like Thomas Edison as really exciting…. Every now and then, in one of these science fiction films, there is a problem or something breaks down and the guy who is the computer nerd … is called…. He just seems like this jerk, but in the last twenty minutes of the movie … he helps them figure out how to get rid of the beast of whatever. We need to do better than that, and I think we can.

—Stanley Crouch, “Straighten Up and Fly Right”

Over the past decade, Afrodiasporic intellectuals have called for new images of black genius in relation to science and technology. Given science fiction’s status as the premier narrative of technoscientific modernity, it is perhaps no surprise that these same intellectuals have consistently turned to the genre for stories of black genius. For example, while African American artist and cultural critic Stanley Crouch suggests that black artists can capitalize and improve on the images of genius already found in SF film, his scholarly counterpart, Ron Eglash, shows that at least one such artist is already doing just that: “The development of technological expertise requires not only financial resources but also cultural capital. Nerd identity has been a critical gateway to this technocultural access.… The career of African American actor Samuel L. Jackson … illuminates the figure of the black nerd in popular media. During the 1980s Jackson played a series of drug dealers and junkies, but … he quickly switched to playing black nerds…. After confessing his geek love for the Star Wars films to producer George Lucas, he achieved the ultimate nerd fantasy of playing a Jedi Knight” (49, 55, 57). This essay provides greater context for the dreams of public intellectuals such as Crouch and Eglash by mapping the nearly two-hundred-year history of black genius in print SF. In particular, artists working both alongside and within genre SF have used a story type I call “the Bannekerade” to think about science, society, and race in novel and sometimes startling ways.

Stories about the technoscientific genius are central to SF and as old as the genre itself. There is even a specific story type dedicated to the adventures of the technoscientific genius: the Edisonade. Named after wildly popular nineteenth-century inventor Thomas Alva Edison, this kind of story “features a young US male inventor hero who uses his ingenuity to extricate himself from tight spots and who, by so doing, saves himself … his friends and [his] nation from foreign oppressors” (Clute). While the invention that saves the day is likely to be a weapon, it is also, more often than not, a “means of transportation” and a “certificate of ownership” that enables the boy inventor to claim the foreign oppressors’ territory for himself and for Earth as a whole (Clute). Tales in this vein include print SF stories such as Garrett P. Serviss’s “Edison’s Conquest of Mars” (1898), where the titular character responds to a Martian invasion by inventing a disintegration ray and an antigravity device that enables him to travel to the red planet, beat the Martians at their own game, and then take Mars as a colonial holding for the United States. Traces of the Edisonade also appear in the popular Flash Gordon film serials of the 1930s, as polo star turned quasi-military hero Flash uses devices created by his scientist father and the friendly Russian, Dr. Zarkov, to do battle with Ming the Merciless on the planet Mongo.

When Afrodiasporic authors write this kind of story, they follow the same general outlines but extrapolate from the life of a different scientist-inventor, revolutionary-era free black Benjamin Banneker. Born in 1731, Banneker is remembered for creating the first wooden clock in America and for working on the team that surveyed what would become the District of Columbia. In 1792, Banneker—who was also a self-taught astronomer—began publishing his own Almanac and Ephermis, which competed successfully with Benjamin Franklin’s Almanac.¹ Perhaps not surprisingly, Banneker used his technoscientific genius to fight what he perceived as the greatest evil of his own day: slavery. All proceeds from his publications went to abolitionist causes, and Banneker sent Thomas Jefferson copies of his almanac as “tangible proof of the mental equality of the races” (Bedini xx). Banneker spent his entire life studying, conducting scientific experiments, and hosting salons that brought together intellectuals from all races and walks of life.² Although Banneker was all but forgotten in the years immediately following his death in 1806, in 1844, abolitionists published “the first relatively comprehensive account of his accomplishments,” and in 1853, the Banneker Institute, “a large library and instruction society for young African Americans” opened its doors to the public (Russell loc 7292).

Appropriately enough, in Afrodiasporic versions of the Edisonade—what I call the Bannekerade—the hero is generally a young black male scientistinventor who uses the products of his genius to save himself, his friends, and his community from domestic oppressors who either are white Westerners or use the machinery of Western institutions as tools for black oppression. Either way, racial tension is an explicit force shaping the narrative at hand. This sustained interest in race leads to two other differences between the Edisonade and the Bannekerade. The Edisonade is usually cast in nationalistic terms, but the international scope of Western imperialism and the various attendant African diasporas lead black authors to cast the Bannekerade in global terms. Furthermore, while the Edisonadian hero usually completely eliminates the threat of foreign oppressors altogether by destroying enemies and appropriating their lands, the Bannekeradian protagonist more often wins a series of immediate battles only to find he is still in enemy territory and faces a drawn-out race war with an uncertain ending.

Key elements of the Bannekerade first appear in what is generally considered to be the first African American SF story, Martin R. Delany’s alternate history Blake; or, The Huts of America. Initially serialized in the Anglo-African Magazine (Jan.–July 1859) and then published in its entirety in the Weekly Anglo-African (Nov. 1861–May 1862), Blake revolves around the adventures of Henry Holland, a “handsome, manly, and intelligent” free black from the West Indies who is kidnapped and sold into slavery under the name Henry Blake (16). Blake suffers his fate in silence until his owners sell his wife, Maggie, to a Cuban slaveholder. Blake then devises a series of ingenious plans that allow him to escape captivity and travel through the American South to Cuba to rescue his beloved. Along the way, he liberates his immediate family, sows the seeds of revolution among other enslaved blacks, and gathers a group of like-minded men and women who dream of building a global black empire. In its broadest dimensions, then, Blake is very much the story of a young black male who uses his genius to liberate himself, his friends, and his community from domestic oppressors.

Delany does not cast his protagonist as an inventor but insists that scientific knowledge and technical ability are central to Blake’s emancipatory project. Early in his story, Delany describes Blake as “a man of good literary attainments” (17). Later, it becomes evident that Blake is also a man of good scientific attainments when he teaches Maggie’s family astronomy and compass navigation, explaining that this kind of knowledge is “all that’s necessary to guide you from a land of slavery and long suffering, to a land of liberty and future happiness” (134). In this respect, Blake functions much like a “creative engineer,” using his scientific and technical knowledge “for the good of all people, rather than the benefit of any individual person, business or nation” (Yaszek 387).

What is perhaps most interesting about Delany’s story as a proto-Bannekerade is his vision of a global black future built by collective technoscientific action. As one member of Blake’s Grand Council explains, “The African race is now the principal producer of the greater part of the luxuries of the enlightened countries…. They are among the most industrious people in the world…. [E]re long they and their country must hold the balance of commercial power by supplying … the greatest staple commodities in demand[:] rice, coffee, sugar, and especially cotton” (260). Furthermore, “Africans in all parts of the world readily and willingly [mingle] among and [adopt] all the usages of civilized life, attaining wherever practicable every position in society” (262). Working together, the Council dreams, Africans and Afrodiasporic people might leverage their native agricultural skills and acquired technocultural expertise to build a transcontinental empire that supplants the West— and especially the American South—as the engine of futurity.³

Although Delany’s heroes dream of a utopian black future, Blake ends on a rather different note, with members of the Great Council preparing for an all-out race war they seem unlikely to win. Despite his misgivings, the most vocal advocate of military action is Blake himself. As he tells the Council, “You know my errand among you; you know my sentiments. I am for war— war against the whites…. May God forgive me for the wickedness, as my conscience admonished and rebuked me…. But my determination is fixed, I will never leave you” (290–91). Thus Delany insists that black people have both the resources and talent to compete in a high-tech global economy. To deny them this opportunity is to halt the natural progression of capitalism, turning nonviolent economic and technocultural competition into apocalyptic military battle.

The themes that first emerge in Blake come together most forcefully in a group of texts published between 1880 and 1945, a period that saw consolidation of SF as a distinct popular genre and that marks peak popularity of both the Edisonade and the Bannekerade. Stories including Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1903), Edward A. Johnson’s Light ahead for the Negro (1904), Roger Sherman Tracy’s The White Man’s Burden: A Satirical Forecast (1915), and George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) and Black Empire (1936–38) all celebrate black technoscientific genius. Johnson and Sherman do so in a general way, treating black genius as the birthright of all black people; Griggs, Hopkins, and Schuyler express their ideas about the promise and perils of black genius through individual characters who are recognizable scientist-inventors. Furthermore, while these authors imagine that black geniuses might fight domestic oppression with a wide range of tools—including everything from scientific discoveries about the dangers of miscegenation and the possibility of raising people from the dead to the invention of new communication technologies and biological weapons—they agree that the systemic oppression of such genius can lead only to the devastation of the entire human race.

Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio, for example, revolves around an African American shadow empire that has existed within the United States since the nation’s birth. Griggs creates a deep history for the Imperium that would have been familiar to turn-of-the-century African American readers. While the Imperium includes hundreds of thousands of African Americans at the time the story unfolds, it is actually the creation of a single technoscientific genius: “There lived, in the early days of the American Republic, a negro scientist who won an international reputation by his skill and erudition…. Because of his learning and consequent usefulness, this negro enjoyed the association of the moving spirits of the revolutionary period. By the publication of a book of science which outranked any other book of the day that treated of the same subject, this negro became a very wealthy man…. [He] secretly gathered other free negroes together and organized a society that had a twofold object. The first object was to secure for the free negroes all the rights and privileges of men, according to the teachings of Thomas Jefferson. Its other object was to secure the freedom of the enslaved negroes the world over” (94). Griggs extrapolates from what is clearly Benjamin Banneker’s life story to imagine an alternate world where the great scientist uses the profits of his genius to ensure the liberation of his free friends, his enslaved African American counterparts, and the global Afrodiasporic community. Banneker himself thus becomes the first fully developed Bannekeradian hero in speculative fiction.

While Griggs creates a powerful history of black technoscientific genius, he is less sanguine about the possibility of such genius in either the present or the future. Imperium follows the adventures of two childhood friends who have very different experiences of America but who both end up as leaders in the Imperium. Belton Piedmont is a poor, dark-skinned educator who encourages African Americans to gain mastery over the mass media and the industrial arts so they will be recognized as the technocultural equals of their white counterparts. When he is almost lynched for these activities, Belton leaves his wife and child to go into hiding with the Imperium, where he quickly rises to the rank of Congressional Speaker. By way of contrast, Bernard Belgrave is a rich, light-skinned Yale graduate determined to make a name for himself as a lawyer. When Bernard’s fiancée discovers a scientific study suggesting that miscegenation causes black sterility and will eventually destroy the black race, she kills herself to avoid marrying Bernard. Half-crazed with grief, a newly militant Bernard joins the Imperium and eventually, as president, advocates violent action against the United States. When Belton protests, Bernard orders his friend’s death. As the novel draws to a close, Bernard stands poised to lead the Imperium into a full-blown race war.

By way of contrast, Schuyler’s Black Empire locates black technoscientific genius squarely in the present. Published as two interlocking serials in the Pittsburgh Courier between 1936 and 1938, Black Empire relates the tale of a global revolution masterminded by the brilliant Dr. Henry Belsidus and carried out by the cadre of equally brilliant Afrodiasporic men and women he has gathered from around the world. As Belsidus explains, white people might have all the money and power, but they “haven’t got all the brains. We are going to out-think and out-scheme the white people…. I have the organization already … scattered all over the world; young Negroes [who are] intellectuals, scientists, engineers. They are mentally the equal of the whites. They possess superior energy, superior vitality, they have superior, or perhaps I should say more intense, hatred and resentment, that fuel which operates the juggernaut of conquest…. You will see in your time a great Negro nation in Africa, all-powerful, dictating to the white world” (15). Belsidus’s plan is, in essence, the narrative trajectory of the Edisonade reversed and writ large. In the conventional story of technoscientific genius, one heroic young white man uses his talents to do battle against the dark foreign oppressor. Here, Schuyler revises that story to show how a heroic collective of young black people might use their talents to do battl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Coloring Science Fiction
• Part One. Black Planets
• Part Two. Brown Planets
• Coda
• Contributors
• Index