Week 12 Post
Author Mark Bould addresses the disconnect between SF and race in his work The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF. He begins this piece by addressing the common theme of “colorblind future” present within SF universes. Bould goes on to describe the foundation of the theme as a universe of people living peacefully with a bad past. Bould asserts that SF writers often present the colorblind theme by taking on a multiculturalist perspective. Taking the multiculturalist perspective was described as acknowledging other cultures while observing from a pedestal and placing one’s own culture above the rest. Bould argues that removing the issue of race relations from settings of SF stories the writers are able participate in “racism from a distance”, ”By presenting racism as an insanity that burned itself out, or as the obvious folly of the ignorant and impoverished who would be left behind by the genre’s brave new futures, SF avoids confronting the structures of racism and its own complicity in them” (Bould 180).
By not addressing the themes and issues within black and african culture the members of these communities are left without representation in future depictions fabricated by sci-fi writers. In the words of Mark Dery, the man who coined the term afrofuturism, “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out imagine possible futures?” Bould would argue no. Bould goes on to address the lack of balck representation within sci-fi by saying, “Only one-third of these (SF) stories [reference to 16 stories published between 1949 and1961 that presented race as an issue] addressed the position of African Americans with anything like directness; only two or three of them could be seen to have black viewpoint characters, despite the growth of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s..” (Bould 178). Afrofuturism provides the black community a view into futures where black people and their societies are successful. By showing people of the present these futures the treatment of black communities today can see improvement. SF is not actively representing black themes and characters (unless it’s Will Smith) and therefore are not participating in the critique of today’s treatment of black and african peoples. Here lies the complicity that Bould was referencing in the first above quote and how it translates into passive racism.
