6 - Home of the Extraterrestrial Brothers: Race and African American Science Fiction

Summary

The sf community frequently sees itself as a ghetto, a term which has racial connotations, especially in respect to Jewish people. There has been a significant contribution to the field by Jewish-American writers – Jack Dann's anthology Wandering Stars (1974), with contributions by Isaac Asimov, Carol Carr, Avram Davidson, George Alec Effinger, Harlan Ellison, Horace L. Gold, Bernard Malamud, Pamela Sargent, Robert Sheckley, Robert Silverberg, Isaac Bashevis Singer and William Tenn, demonstrates their diversity – but their ethnic or racial identity is not necessarily identifiable within the presumed socio-economic location of most sf readers, editors and writers. Nor have critics sufficiently examined the notions of whiteness as an ethnic identity and white privilege that underpin the assumption that the majority of science fiction's audience is Caucasian. One group perceived to be largely absent from American sf is African Americans, a demographic of immigrants who were brought to America against their will. Mark Dery suggests that ‘African Americans […] are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements’ (1994: 180). It might be that if their everyday experience is science-fictional, African Americans have comparatively little need to write sf. More likely is that the cultural productions of African Americans are not recognised as being sf by the readers and critics of the field. Some of the novels by the two most significant African American sf writers from the 1970s, Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, will be discussed in this chapter, as will some of the African American sf music and film of the period.