#102 = Volume 34, Part 2 = July 2007
Isiah Lavender, III
Ethnoscapes: Environment and Language in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, and Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17
Introduction. The blunt thesis underlying Afrofuturism is that all black cultural production in the New World is sf. The forced transplantation of Africans to the Americas for the sole purpose of slave labor capable of producing wealth has been interpreted as the substance of sf for blacks. Alongside slavery's "systematic, conscientious, and massive destruction of African cultural remnants" (Delany, qtd. Dery 746) ran the (re)production of an ideological mythology featuring white Europeans as the best examples of humanity, God's chosen people, and Africans as "natural" slaves and inferiors -- attitudes evident even among the Founding Fathers.1 Historically, "people of color have been casualties of technologically enabled systems of oppression, from colonial expansion, to the racial sciences of craniology and phrenology, to surveillance and information gathering" (Hines et al. 3). These systems, combined with the belief that black people were technologically inept but able to perform and endure harsh menial labor, justified and enabled the institution of slavery. Status and power were derived from translating the black slave body into a technology -- a natural machine necessary for the cultivation of the physical landscape-just as access to new and developing technologies defined authority. Translation in this sense is a dehumanizing activity because an essential part of the black identity is lost by conflating race and technology.
The mixing of the physical and the metaphysical to confirm white identity by denying black identity is an exercise in and of power, a shaping of reality that Africans in the New World had no choice but to accept. Therefore black experience in America is defined by alienation: "Black people live the estrangement that science fiction writers imagine" (Greg Tate, qtd. Dery 768). As John Pfeiffer noted of sf and African-American literature over thirty years ago, both "could supply or reflect the altered content and perspective that social transformation requires. Science fiction sometimes does; Black American writing almost always has" (35). While sf and African-American literature can be seen to arise, respectively, from capitalist modernity and slavery-two key and intertwined factors in US history -- the longstanding association between race and sf has only recently attracted comment. It could be that sf's frequent assumption of a color-blind future -- whether an unintentional or deliberate privileging of whiteness -- has blinded critics to matters of race. After all, in the paradox noted by Richard Dyer, "whites are not of a certain race, they're just the human race" (3). Certainly, one solution to polarizing racial identities along a black/white binary would be to challenge the representational power of whiteness as the symbol of humanity per se, but while Afrofuturism is helpful in illuminating the ways that sf typically and unthinkingly reproduces white privilege in its representations of technology and social interactions, it is specifically about the experience of the African diaspora.
Despite those visions of a color-blind future, race has always been a part of, or lent itself to, sf, as Sheree Thomas's Dark Matter anthologies (Thomas 2000, 2004) demonstrate, even though decades of Civil Rights movements and racial consciousness in American culture have not produced a corresponding awareness of race in sf. In this context, it is worth noting the parallel critique of second- wave feminism's subsumption of all women into a single category without reference to race made by such women of color as Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Alice Walker.2 As Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" notes, this failure to address the issues of women of color produced an "embarrassed silence about race" because "there was no structural room for race . in theory claiming to reveal the construction of the category of woman and the social group women as a unified or totalizable whole" (160). Haraway's concern with labor and race in multinational capitalism connects her comments to the consequences of slavery within early capitalism as a system producing social exclusions and oppression. Challenging second-wave feminism's omissions, she confronts class, race, and gender difference with a feminist-coded cyborg derived from the work of various sf writers, including Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler. Elsewhere, she specifically talks about the degree to which her cyborg was imagined as both female and as a person of color, a "polychromatic girl" (Penley and Ross 20). To the extent that her cyborg is not even white, feminist sf might be credited with laying the groundwork for race reading in sf. Just as sf has been recognized as "feminist friendly," it is uniquely suited for the critical study of race because of its postcolonial depiction of aliens, artificial persons, and supermen in subordinate positions, as well as its imagination of exotic landscapes and alternate histories where our cultural memory of past events can be changed. For example, if the encounter with the Other constitutes the hallmark of Western experience, sf's alien Other stands in for the racial Other and vice versa. Social concepts such as miscegenation, passing, and the one-drop rule can be linked to sf motifs (aliens, androids, cyborgs, and so on) and thus display how we, as humans, fail to recognize our kinship to other humans.3
Customarily, discussions of sf reflect on various aspects of setting and characterization, while practically ignoring the dialogue on race and ethnicity evoked by the incredible backdrops envisioned, largely because sf lacks the critical vocabulary necessary to understand how race works within the genre. The lack of an appropriate terminology has fettered investigations of racialized sf. Historical overviews of the genre are still divided by racial assumptions, and sf story collections and histories by white writers and critics barely mention race as a category of interrogation or speculation.4 This is roughly analogous to the scant attention devoted to sf written by women or concerned with feminist issues before the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, the history of sf looks vastly different, if not barren, to scholars interested in racial issues because of publishing customs such as those practiced by John W. Campbell, Jr. while editing Astounding in the 1940s and 1950s.5 While Afrofuturism has proven to be an important map of this estranged territory, it still requires an expanded critical vocabulary. Therefore I propose the term "ethnoscape" as a new way to think about the various environments that sf describes, as well as a new way to think about characterization in sf semblances.
An ethnoscape provides a symbolic transfer of meaning between racial/ethnic politics and the shifting world of the sf text, resolving the contradictions of homogeneity, and exposing the ways that sf unthinkingly reproduces white privilege. The writer constructs a socio-spatial environment in which to tell a story, but the reader can reconfigure those arrangements, draw out the assumptions and implications of the text to perceive its ethnoscape. Even if the fictional socio-spatial environment is constructed so as to foreground issues of race, it will nonetheless contain tensions, contradictions, and connotations beyond the author's control and in which the reader can discern the text's ethnoscape. The ideas and histories that the text uses, defines, discards, renovates, and invents define and situate the ethnoscape. The ethnoscape foregrounds the human landscapes of race and ethnicity as constituted by sf's historical, social, scientific, and technological engagement with the present. It both fabricates and reconceptualizes racial difference, enabling us to unpack sf's racial or ethnic environments and to think about human divergence in social behaviors.
In this article, I will look at three kinds of ethnoscape. Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972) both acknowledges and transforms sf through the revisionary power of black cultural experience as a "fabulist" ethnoscape. Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999) provides a counterfactual ethnoscape in which race and sf intersect in a vaguely familiar mid-twentieth-century New York City. Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17 (1966) constructs a unique linguistic ethnoscape that conveys the importance of communication in accepting and appreciating difference.
Three ethnoscapes. A fictional environment is the aggregate of perceived and lived space articulated through the author's imagination. The ethnoscape renders such environments unfamiliar, defamiliarizing the ordinary or conventional world and presenting it in a way that is exceedingly, and perhaps eerily, different from our own experience. In other words, a familiar environment is represented in a strange way to create a sense of the alien or unknown. While sf's conventional estrangements populate the fictional environment with, or structure it around, the presence of science, technology, mythology, aliens, androids, humanity, natural and artificial phenomena, politics, culture, language, religion, and so on, the ethnoscape reformulates that construction so as to create an alternative image that enables us to rethink the intersections of technology and race as well as their political, social, and cultural implications. Mumbo Jumbo's fabulist ethnoscape parallels sf protocols, including the disaster narrative and the android, and in doing so destabilizes sf's existing racist structures.
The fabulist ethnoscape entails world-building where racial myth can be told in a visibly subjective world. It is a combination of history, folklore, and sf that counters sf's racial assumptions about humanity's color-blind future and uses sf devices to confront the racial assumptions of American culture more generally.6 A fusion of historical figures, caricatures, jazz, minstrelsy, the occult, and Black Power, Mumbo Jumbo revolves around the conspiracy of a secret white- supremacist organization to maintain control of America's black population by stopping the spread of a seeming race pathogen, and around the HooDoo priest who tries to counteract the conspiracy by locating an arcane text. The novel reflects upon the operations of race in sf through its insistence upon the concrete nature of the fable of race: that difference is based on skin color's reality. Such racial thinking is refuted by the outbreak of "Jes Grew." A non-lethal plague of sorts that erupts in New Orleans and rapidly spreads north towards New York is symbolic of the inestimable inner quality known as SOUL. People infected with Jes Grew, both black and white, inexplicably become invigorated and express this newfound energy through song and dance as they struggle against the realities of racism. The concept of SOUL is a cultural myth rendered science- fictional by Reed's depiction of it as a plague. Roughly analogous to William S. Burroughs's viral language in The Ticket that Exploded (1962) or Neal Stephenson's pathological meme in Snow Crash (1992), Jes Grew infects people with freedom by fomenting cultural evolution. Needless to say, the novel's powerful white upper class is not thrilled with this turn of events. Mumbo Jumbo's ethnoscape addresses the past and present state of race relations in the US by parodying the world its readers occupy, literalizing fears and constructions of difference as a disease and of Otherness -- particularly black culture -- as a contagion that might reduce white rationality to bodily excess.
The story follows the epic struggle between PaPa LaBas, a practitioner of HooDoo at Harlem's "Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral" (23), and Hinckle Van Vompton, "a Knight of the Wallflower Order of Atonists,"7 as they come into conflict over Jes Grew (55). Von Vampton has successfully infiltrated the Harlem literary community as well as the black upper class, and thus is well placed to manipulate black artists and destroy the burgeoning outflow of creative expression caused by Jes Grew. He also attempts to stop the plague through the creation of a Talking Android:
The 2nd Stage of the plan is to groom a Talking Android who will work within the Negro, who seems to be its classical host; to drive it out, categorize it analyze it expel it slay it, blot Jes Grew. A speaking skull they can use any way they want, a rapping antibiotic who will abort it from the American womb to which it clings like a stubborn fetus.
In other words this Talking Android will be engaged to cut-it-up, break down this Germ, keep it from behind the counter. To begin the campaign, NO DANCING posters are ordered by the 100s. (17)
Von Vampton attempts to use this imagined technology to isolate and expel black culture, which he considers to be both primitive and evil. He controls the speech of his Talking Android to unduly influence the upper tier of black society, instructing them in the inferiority of blacks and black culture, though this is hardly a problem for the black bluebloods who would divorce themselves from their race if possible.
Much like a slave-owner, Von Vampton seeks to divide the black race by sowing seeds of distrust, and maintain white privilege through the Talking Android, which itself speaks to the alienated experience of blacks in the New World-it is, after all, an obedient machine whose ethnicity is technologically produced. When Von Vampton cannot find any black person foolish enough to become his Talking Android and participate in a plan designed to stop the outbreak and continue racial oppression, he selects his white right-hand man, Hubert "Safecracker" Gould, to be his mouthpiece. It is Gould who delivers the comical epic poem, "Harlem Tom Toms," to black high society (158), and through whom Reed lampoons the practice of minstrelsy. Appearing in blackface as the Talking Android, Gould tries to pass as an authentic black person-instead of merely exaggerating the black stereotypes that minstrel shows made famous-so as to undermine black culture. However, PaPa LaBas and his friends arrive just in time to break up the first Talking Android event by revealing Von Vampton's and Gould's trickery. LaBas grazes "a quick finger across lGould'sJ face, leaving a white streak" behind while displaying "the black paint on his finger" to the influential black audience (160). Shortly after this ruse is revealed, the Jes Grew epidemic peters out sixty miles short of New York because its arcane embodiment as a book, symbolizing a concrete register of black experience, has been destroyed.
With the image of a white person in blackface posing as an android, Mumbo Jumbo makes an unconventional connection between a traditional sf motif and African-American iconography. By doing this, Reed creates an alternate history and landscape of black/white contact that powerfully indicts the irrationality of racism in the United States through social satire. His use of sf devices produces a fabulist ethnoscape that questions existing racial power dynamics by asking for whom the crisis of racial difference is most threatening in a multicultural state. The counterfactual ethnoscape in Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist estranges our sense of history by emphasizing the importance of the technological development of elevators and how this impacts upon race relations. It is constructed with the sense that technology in the hands of a black person represents a dangerous situation.8 By rupturing the known timeline and postulating alternatives, the counterfactual ethnoscape is able to highlight the influence and consequences of racial history, and to offer estranged visions of the social, political, and cultural possibilities of race in other places and times. In a story that blends sf, hardboiled-detective fiction, and satire in a manner reminiscent of Philip K. Dick, The Intuitionist focuses on Lila Mae Watson, the first and only black woman to become an elevator inspector in the largest city in the world. By following her hunches, she has maintained a perfect service record on the job, but when a new elevator that she had recently inspected disastrously crashes, she becomes embroiled in a political battle between the Intuitionists and the Empiricists for control of the "department of elevator inspectors" (23). She goes underground to investigate whether the crash is a deliberate act of sabotage aimed at undermining her credibility as an Intuitionist.
While trying to avoid the clutches of the Empiricist chairman of the department, Frank Chancre, who is clandestinely backed by mob muscle, Lila Mae discovers several dangerous undisclosed facts about James Fulton. The deceased founder of Intuitionism and a vertical philosopher, Fulton was known at the time of his death to be working on “the black box,” an elevator that would revolutionize the world by ushering in the second elevation, unlocking the sky. TheIntuitionist is thus a step closer to sf, resonating with racial issues in a technosocial world evoked through alienated urban experience.
Although the conflict in The Intuitionist stems from a debate in technosocial philosophy -- Intuitionism versus Empiricism --Whitehead's ethnoscape is structured by the concept of verticality, both architectural and cultural, that governs the action of both camps as they vie to find the black box. Intuitionists rely on contemplation, instinct, and gut feeling to observe, remedy, and repair elevators, as when we first encounter Lila Mae at work. Whitehead describes her sixth sense, her "own set of genies," inspecting "geometric forms" in her head to uncover the elevator's shortcomings, rather than physically examining its mechanical parts (6). The building superintendent riding with Lila Mae calls her a "voodoo inspector" as well as a "witch doctor" before attempting to bribe her (7). This racialization of her philosophy and technique connects her to the long history of blacks being associated with the occult. She certainly is a worker of professional magic inasmuch as she relies on her perceptions to cure the elevator of its sickness in the primitive yet sophisticated urban society. In contrast, Empiricists depend on the cold hard facts of physical measurement to rigorously check the structural and mechanical details of the elevators. Whitehead carefully insinuates another racial stereotype by depicting whites as a no-nonsense, rational people who do not believe in the supernatural. This is reinforced by the fact that only one black person in the story, Pompey, is an Empiricist, and Lila Mae considers him a race traitor, an "Uncle Tom, the grinning nigger, the house nigger who is to blame for her debased place in this world. Pompey gave them a blueprint for colored folk" (239). Pompey is a black user of white technology, a black Empiricist cog who has conformed to an otherwise white machine. In this ethnoscape, whites own and control technology, while blacks respond to it either on a preconscious level or by learning the routines of their white counterparts. Understandably, there is significant animosity between the two factions, with Empiricist enmity towards Intuitionism manifested in racially charged monikers that hint at a primitive and Other magic: "some nicknames Empiricists have for their renegade colleagues: swamis, voodoo men, juju heads, witchdoctors, Harry Houdinis. All terms belonging to the nomenclature of dark exotica, the sinister foreign. Except for Houdini, who nonetheless had something swarthy about him" (57-58). While the narrator notes the dark, exotic, sinister, and foreign nature of the practice of Intuitionism, Lila Mae claims that the "reality" of Empiricism-"White people's reality"-is "built on what things appear to be" (239).
The Intuitionists and Empiricists are deeply divided on the issue of verticality because one group seeks transcendental answers to mechanical problems while the other is supremely doubtful of results garnered without rigorous and quantifiable exertion. From an architectural standpoint, verticality relates to the continual construction of higher and higher buildings in the novel. Humanity strives for the heavens. In truth, as the sky reminds us, there will always be something higher. The elevator marks the beginning of this rise because it is a technological conveyance that allows humans to build higher into the sky-the vertical ideal-but unfortunately there are also and always those people who are left behind. The concept of verticality creates a counterfactual ethnoscape because the social relations of race come together with the technological dreams of attaining the heavens in such a manner that blacks remain trapped in the basement. While the historical development of this fictional oppression is different from our own, it nonetheless shares the same essence.
The spatialization of class in sf cities, such as the Los Angeles of Blade Runner (1982), helps to contextualize the spatialization of race in The Intuitionist's New York. Blade Runner's ethnoscape is layered with new technologies grafted onto old buildings, deteriorating slums oppressively packed by the masses of human waste (Asians, Latinos, punks, and midgets) unable to emigrate, deserted buildings, intrusively glaring neon signs and ads, white noise, ethnic restaurants, and of course a continual police presence. While the inner city is certainly a confined space in a blighted area where people live from day to day, it is also, in the middle-class imaginary, a bad and inferior place, a public space to be feared. Eldon Tyrell, the creator of the replicants and one of the remaining whites, escapes the city streets in the only direction left-upwards. In The Intuitionist, the counterfactual ethnoscape involves the ascension of humanity, particularly the black race, from the city as we know it, from the cramped spaces of inequality. The black box is important because it signifies the cultural implications of the second elevation in which "everything . will come down" (182). The second elevation, of course, refers to the buildings themselves, but also to the social changes necessary to modify our understanding of race relations. All of our beliefs would have to collapse to build the utopian ideal hinted at by the concept of the second elevation. In his Theoretical Elevators, Volume Two, Fulton writes, "Remember the train, and that thing between you and your words. An elevator is a train. The perfect train terminates at Heaven. The perfect elevator waits . liJn the black box, this messy business of human communication" (87). The black box is emblematic of communication between humanity and the lack of it between the races. We cannot comprehend the dark heart of the black box because our vision cannot penetrate the outside of the box.
It is no mistake that Fulton's theoretical elevator design is named "the black box." It symbolizes the plight of the black race. Blacks can ride up and down, but they are forever boxed in, enclosed, trapped by the racist ideals of an unchanging society, ensnared in a horizontal environment. The black box realizes America's vertical race hierarchy. The novel's black characters are restricted to horizontal movement by overt racism, politics, and mob activity. This lateral movement is clearly demonstrated by Pompey, the first black elevator inspector, who experiences "the difficulty of all colored 'firsts'" in having "an exceedingly hard time of things" in the all-white elevator community (25). While the novel concerns the vertical movement of humanity itself, it is also about the immobility in black uplift. Blacks are barred from the ascension by white racists like Chancre. Blacks cannot rise. This fact is the ethnoscape. The second elevation calls for the realignment of race relationships generated by the utopia it represents, but it will not be realized because of the vertical nature of a racialized Social Darwinism. The black box is a re-imagining of white flight, but instead of outward to the suburbs it goes upward. Rather than being locked in an inner city with blacks and other minorities, the whites (like Blade Runner's Tyrell) move upward to display their superiority and to separate themselves from contact with blacks permanently locked, motionless, in the lower class. After all, suburban whites still have to come into the inner city to work, but if whites are elevated, they can leave that "ghetto" behind permanently.
Fulton's black box is an impossibility because the races cannot or will not recognize their common humanity. We as readers only acknowledge this, however, after Lila Mae learns that Fulton was a colored man who passed as a white man, a mystery that directly contributes to the text's counterfactual ethnoscape. This secret is closely guarded because of its potential to disrupt society. Intuitionism is a joke on society because it is really about the black situation, not verticality, since Fulton must hide his race in order for his ideas to be accepted. Ironically, he is worshiped by white society for his ideas, which have shaped both Empiricism and Intuitionism. Lila Mae is trapped by this irony because she can tell no one what she knows, while the Elevator Guild wish only to find Fulton's designs for the black box so as to begin the second elevation, to get rich from it, and to stay in power. Fulton's attempts to communicate difference and racial uplift to society are unrealized. Only after learning Fulton's secret does Lila Mae slowly come to realize, while rereading his Intuitionist volumes, the meaning of his view that "horizontal thinking in a vertical world is the race's curse" (151, emphasis in original). The ambiguity of the word "race" is stunning because Whitehead is deriding all of humanity and its inability to transcend racism. Likewise, he is critical of American society's conformity to the past, its unwillingness to escape the accepted racial paradigms suggested by the black box -- the intersection of vertical and horizontal thought in diagonal notions such as a multiracial or post-race world.
Whitehead's novel works on several levels as a counterfactual ethnoscape, skewering human stupidity and challenging us to think outside the "box." First, it suggests that ideas will change the world. At the end of the novel, Lila Mae uses Fulton's name and notes to write the third volume of Theoretical Elevators, which contains the black box designs. This volume anticipates possible alternatives to the choices humans are making and has the potential to bring down the prevailing social structures of racism. An ethnoscape built on one of the principal themes of sf -- perception -- takes us beyond our normal thinking on racial subjects. Second, the counterfactual ethnoscape renders highly visible Whitehead's unusual perspective regarding the social and political constraints of race operating now. Well-constructed sf stories such as this one dissolve the borders between us and the fabricated reality of the text. Third, Whitehead measures racial history on a counterfactual timeline that creates a unique repetition of cultural memory within sf, and fourth, he questions and counterbalances the facts underlying race matters as they have been historicized in sf literature.
In The Intuitionist, black people can be users of technology, but only if they use it as whites have allowed. Whitehead challenges conventional thinking on this subject that suggests that "crude preconceptions of mental inferiority went well beyond simple tool using to include almost any aptitude for technological competence and these notions flowered in the basic conditions of forced servitude" (Sinclair 1-2). As an Intuitionist, Lila Mae is able to make quick judgments independent of any conscious reasoning process while fixing elevators. This ability, this spiritual technology, makes her dangerous, however, because it is outside the application of science. Her work methods cannot be understood by her white supervisors, thus making her an object of suspicion because she threatens existing power structures and cannot be controlled. In contrast, Pompey, who also has direct access to elevators, has been victimized because of his color. As an Empiricist, he uses a scientific means to gain knowledge for the practical purpose of fixing the machines. He functions like a machine "inside the machine" (Ellison 217, emphasis in original), and he is not feared because he unquestioningly serves his white employers, like a good slave, actively participating in the technological oppression of his race. In this vertically-racialized, counterfactual New York, blacks are revealed as the real inventors of technology. As such, they are dangerous because this suggests that they are equal in status to other humans and have the right to challenge their domination. Technology has historically been conceptualized in ways that emphasize racial difference and limit employment opportunities for non-whites in regard to one criterion, the "capacity for advanced intellectual accomplishment" (Sinclair 1), traditionally attributed to the white race alone. Sf has largely shared this conceptualization. The Intuitionist overturns it.
While the physical/geographical settings of Mumbo Jumbo and The Intuitionist construct distinctive ethnoscapes, language itself is capable of being the basis of other ethnoscapes. Language is a technology that allows intelligent social beings to express and record the events of their lives with a system of symbols that may be verbal, alphanumeric, formed of lights, colors, smells, pictures. It is a method of coding knowledge. It marks the differences in values, perceptions, and behaviors of conscious life forms. It can erect the inflexible boundaries characteristic of prejudice just as it can free us from the conventions of discrimination. Language maps the ever-changing landscape the novel attempts to fix. In sf, it constructs and reveals the invented world, and within it language often functions as a plot device or as a meditation on the difficulties of interspecies communication or as a representation of a culture and its beliefs.9 While language plays a secondary role in much sf, a number of sf narratives are primarily concerned with the nature of language and its power to affect the nature of reality, among them Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17.10 Delany's novel tells of an intergalactic war that is ultimately stopped by Rydra Wong's intuitive understanding of language and meaning. A famous poet of ethnic origin, she is enlisted by the Alliance military to battle the invasion of alien humans by translating the Babel-17 language, transmissions of which are believed to coincide with acts of strategic sabotage. She figures out that Babel-17 is a nearly perfect and concise analytical language that has no word for "I" and that is used as a means of thought control.
Gregory Rutledge suggests that "reading Babel-17 without reference to Du Bois's double consciousness, and hence ethnicity . will lead the reader away from much of the subreality Delany has incorporated into his plot" (132). This double consciousness is articulated through the alien language that infects and possesses its victims. Babel-17's aliens from another galaxy are bent on conquering a galaxy similar to ours; the only difference between them and us is semantic. That they are human aliens is evident from Rydra's thoughts about being born in Alliance territory: "Born a galaxy away, she might as easily have been an Invader. Her poems were popular on both sides. That was upsetting"
(72). Regardless of this revelation, Delany figures the aliens as white through their desire for power and territory. This is reflected in the Babel-17 language, a weapon that forcibly initiates people into the alien culture and controls them by eliminating their identities. As Rydra explains,You can program a computer to make mistakes, and you do it not by crossing wires, but by manipulating the "language" you teach it to "think" in. The lack of an "I" precludes any self-critical process. In fact it cuts out any awareness of the symbolic process at all which is the way we distinguish between reality and our expression of reality. (214)
Once the individual's self-awareness -- the "I" -- is gone, the Babel-17 language overlays his or her reality with an alien perception and compels acts of sabotage. The personality thus sublimated is robbed of vital memories and cut off from his or her culture. Consciousness splits as the perception of the self is replaced with an alien, external perception. As Jane Weedman argues, "when a person is exposed to two cultures, double consciousness evolves. To survive, the person must be able to function in both cultures; this means mastering both languages" (133). Simultaneously articulating a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and double consciousness, Rydra remarks that "when you learn another tongue, you learn the way another people see the world, the universe"
(23) and tells the Butcher, when she frees him from the Invaders' influence, that "there are certain ideas which have words for them. If you don't know the words, you can't know the ideas. And if you don't have the ideas, you don't have the answer" (150).Rydra Wong's astounding ability to communicate allows her to overcome all manner of prejudice between the various communities in the text as she socializes with generals, doctors, government officials, space crews, wrestlers, dead people, pirates, and ultimately the aliens. It is amplified by exposure to Babel-17, forcing her "mind ... to sudden growth" (113). This awakens her fledgling gift of telepathy, the ability to read minds, "the nexus of old talent and a new way of thinking. It opened worlds of perception, of action" (146), exposing her in a less threatening way to other perceptions that might overlay her own. The study of language informs her opinion of race, which, to borrow Paul Gilroy's view, is "an active, dynamic idea or principle that assists in the constitution of social reality" (57). She functions as a multicultural broker of acceptance, tolerance, open-mindedness, and difference, who "will enable humanity to bridge the gap between Self and Other, healing the breach of isolation and alienation" (Malmgren 12). While humanity apparently cannot escape the Darwinian struggles of existence, Delany demonstrates that language and perception can break through the historical conditioning of a racialized America. He shows how the actions of people can be shaped by words themselves as well as how words and their meaning gain significance through life, and his novel functions as a metafictional guide to reading an ethnoscape, bringing the language of one world, the fictional world, into collision with the language, experience, and perception of an extratextual reality in which race functions as a technology of oppression.
Conclusions. While Afrofuturism is primarily concerned with the relationships between New World blacks and technology, ethnoscape criticism focuses on the racial elements of individual sf texts, offering not only new ways to understand them but new ways to imagine our world. The emergence of Afrofuturism as a literary and cultural aesthetic and mode of critique seems to suggest that sf has changed enough to incorporate readings of race and ethnicity within its curious history and production. But the color line, identified by W.E.B. Dubois as the greatest problem of the twentieth century, has yet to be explored convincingly in sf criticism. We can foreground the color line in sf by drawing to the surface the way race is typically buried in the background, but mostly we do not. Race has always been of concern to sf, even-maybe especially-when it does not know that that was what it is talking about. By refiguring sf milieus so as to reveal their ethnoscapes, we will not only transform our understanding of specific texts but perhaps also be encouraged and enabled to refigure the world in which we live, to perceive its ethnoscapes, and maybe even change them.
NOTES
- For example, as Bruce Sinclair notes, "White Americans, including those as committed to Enlightenment ideals as Thomas Jefferson - -even as he corresponded with Benjamin Banneker, the African-American astronomer and almanac maker -- believed the black people among them were mentally inferior, and by that they didn't just mean a capacity for advanced intellectual accomplishment" (1).
- See Anzaldua and Moraga (1983), Davis (1983), hooks (1988), and Walker (1984).
- According to Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall, the one drop rule dictates "that any person with even a single drop of Black blood would have the same legal status as a pure African" (The Color Complex 14).
- Of the twenty-six stories collected in the first volume of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (1970), none are by African-American writers, and none are explicitly about race. The same can be said of the thirty-two stories in the 1992 Oxford Book of Sctence Fiction Stories. Among its sixty-seven stories, the 1993 Norton Book of Science Fiction has two by black writers (Delany and Butler), and one explicitly about race (Mike Resnick's "Kirinyaga" 1988]). Brooks Landon does not even index race in his otherwise excellent 1997 study Science Fiction After 1900, though he discusses the work of Delany. In 1994, Edward James acknowledged that "one problem that critics have had with classic science fiction stems from their desire to find social relevance therein" even if "it is difficult not to see Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1954), with its robots who take ordinary people's jobs and even 'pass for human,' as a comment upon relations between whites and blacks in America" (89).
- Campbell's often inflammatory editorials sometimes belittled the intelligence of other races, particularly blacks, and proved his inflexibility in the face of certain social currents in mid-twentieth-century America. For example, in his October 1963 Analog editorial on the subject of segregation and the Brown vs. the Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954, Campbell declares that men are not created equal by God, that they are separated by intelligence, that the white race has a higher allocation of intelligence and ability compared to that of the black race on a distribution curve, and that he is therefore "strongly in favor of rigidly segregated schools, and ... that it is absolutely necessary for the continuation of the United States" (12). Campbell, although known for his support of "technological change," was vehemently opposed "to civil rights for African-Americans" during the 1960s, going so far as to support the infamous presidential bid of Governor Wallace of Alabama (Berger 187).
- Nalo Hopkinson's debut novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) likewise presents a fabulist ethnoscape, combining the supernatural, the inner city, myth, and advanced medical technologies in a dystopian setting, and introducing spiritual and linguistic themes to offer a unique perspective on the matter of alienated people.
- And a caricature of white author and photographer Carl van Vechten, a patron of many black writers during the Harlem Renaissance. His controversial roman à clef Nigger Heaven (1926) is often credited with making Harlem a vogueish destination for white tourists.
- See also George Schuyler's Black No More (1931), which concerns a black scientist who invents a skin-whitening process and the chaos that ensues as the black population vanishes into the racially segregated United States. Schuyler tackles the complex social, political, and economic relationships developed through the construction of the American race paradigm. His critique of the American racial hierarchy remains largely accurate because of the continued preoccupation with the absurdities of skin color that continually generate concepts of racial purity and white supremacy.
- Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds" (1983) demonstrates how the power of language creates a racialized world. The story depicts the total social collapse of the world symbolized by a Los Angeles devastated by an incurable global contagion initially and perhaps falsely attributed to the Soviets. Aside from killing many people, the sickness adversely affects all forms of communication between people. Some of its victims lose the ability to speak, read, and/or write. A largely incomplete and poor form of language, often misinterpreted, remains. Body language --gestures, motions, signs -- usually culminates in violence, the only universal language.
- In Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao (1958), different races comprehend reality according to the language they speak. The submissive nature of the people of Pao is transformed by teaching isolated children one of three languages, each of which has a specific purpose: "Valiant" is the military language, "Technicant" the engineering/industrial language, and "Cogitant" the trade language (57). Ian Watson's The Embedding (1973) utilizes the concept of transformational grammar, derived from Noam Chomsky (see Meyers), in a plot that entwines an experiment involving children being taught artificial languages, the psychotropic drug use of a Brazilian Amerindian tribe resulting in a transformative split of their native speech, and alien observation of human communication. Linking language with perception, it implies that language use continually changes as the speaker experiences the volatility of life, and hearers must be able to adapt to the various meanings thus produced. Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue (1984), set in a twenty-second century future in which women are treated as property, is concerned with the creation of a women's language known as Laadan, in which words are used to project simultanously what one feels about what one is saying.
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