Orientalism in Science Fiction: Persistence or Resistance?
NEMLA 2000: Buffalo, NY
April 7-8, 2000
Edward Said (in the opening page of _Orientalism_) has written that "The
Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a
place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes,
remarkable experiences."
These characteristics, though, seem equally descriptive of a typical
science fiction milieu; perhaps it is not coincidental to find Oriental
iconography permeating science fiction texts (literary and filmic). The
poetics and politics of a Western/Orientalist perspective on the East seem
to speak to science fiction's traditional concerns with colonization and
cultural contact with an alien Other (Said's comments that Orientalism
ultimately reveals more about the fears and desires of the _hegemonic_
culture also seems apropos of the allegorical capacity of science fiction's
extrapolations). The purpose, then, of this NEMLA panel will be to explore
this analogous (complicitous?) relation of science fiction with Orientalist
discourse.
While the panel will ask presenters to focus on specific, exemplary texts,
it will hopefully cohere into an account of the historical sweep, and
generic protocols, of science fiction. An Orientalist attitude/perspective
might be seen to extend from the founding texts of science fiction (e.g.
H.G. Wells' _The Time Machine_, where the self-avowed "Occidental" narrator
encounters the decidedly "Oriental look" of the Palace of Green Porcelain)
to contemporary manifestations in our popular culture (e.g. the _Star Wars_
films--Jabba the Hutt as Oriental despot, ruling his pleasure palace on the
desert planet of Tatooine). The panel, though, seeks not only to trace
instances where science fiction appears "guilty" of Orientalism (the goal
is not merely to charge science fiction with inherent racism but to
critique a perhaps lax imagination in regards to SF world-building); due
consideration will be given to examples of science fiction's resistance
of/response to Orientalism. What is/has been the cultural work of science
fiction? Has science fiction learned anything from the emergence of
postcolonial studies?
Please submit 1-2 page abstracts (and brief bio) by September 15 to Joseph
Nazare at the following e-mail address:
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