At 9 a.m. on a bright Saturday morning, I found myself surreptitiously hunting down a seat in the back corner of Collins Cinema as a tweed-jacketed professor began his lecture. As he tossed about such terms as “Culture with a capital C” and “the hegemony of the ‘one world,’” an image of the iconic “Blue Marble” – Earth as seen from outer space – lit up the projection screen.
Was I taking an anthropology/astronomy/international relations weekend course? Not really (though the event was academic in nature). I was attending Wellesley’s first* Global Science Fiction Conference, which aimed to “engage critically with science fiction from a broad range of national and cultural traditions” — essentially, serve as a crash course on comparative speculative literature.
The conference had opened on Friday afternoon with a reading and keynote speech by Andrea Hairston, a fantasy author and Professor of Theatre and Afro-American Studies at Smith College. Hairston read — or, more accurately, performed — a few excerpts from her alternative-history fantasy novel, Redwood and Wildfire, which, to my understanding, centers around a young African American hoodoo conjurer and a Seminole Irish man in the burgeoning age of film (here is the link to the jacket copy).
Then Hairston took questions, and a whole new universe of possibility in the speculative fiction genre unfolded before me. In response to the first questioner about differentiating between sci-fi and fantasy, Hairston declared, “Science fiction is a fantasy,” arguing that the distinction was often more of a masculine-feminine one than anything else.** She went on to upend and blur other boundaries: between intuition and the scientific mind, between truth and fact, between the perception of fantasy as the genre for the bizarre and the expectations of readers that sci-fi/fantasy stories conform to certain scripts.
She also brought up the idea of the “monoculture.” “Globally, a group of people*** infect the world with their mythology,” said Hairston. “Our reality is being mediated by them; these images are colonizing our future.” As one example, she cited the common Hollywood-based misconceptions of Haitian voodoo, which have apparently influenced world policy against the practice.
Another consequence of this monoculture is that unconventional stories such as Redwood and Wildfire have difficulty getting accepted in the traditional publishing world. “My books don’t center on the people you’re supposed to center on, the ‘heroes,'” she said. According to Hairston, many authors rely on a master narrative and have their audience fill in the blanks for them; unconventional stories not only need to actively recast stereotypes, but also entertain the audience (without, I take it, alienating them too much).
As depreciatory as her analysis of current sci-fi/fantasy seemed, the keynote ended on a positive note with Hairston praising the ability of science-fiction to “let us imagine that we can make a different future.” “I wouldn’t have been standing in front of you three generations ago,” she told the audience as we cheered and applauded her. “That is science-fiction/fantasy from my grandparents’ time.”
Hairston’s brilliant theatrical reading had misled me to conceive of her as an eccentric of sorts, a stereotype of the fantasy novelist. However, the subsequent Q & A session also revealed a sharp, incisive side to her. She defied categorization, calling herself at various points a physics major, a theater person, and an academic, as best suited the situation. Her presence served as a good introduction to the focus on the unusual in the next day’s symposium.
The next day consisted of a whirlwind of speakers introducing us to glimpses of the transgressive ideas explored in science fiction works around the world. One theme that connected the speakers’ topics seemed to be the conclusion that there was no unified or truly “international” definition of science fiction, even though the Anglo-American sci-fi tradition is perceived as the most dominant today; also, that science fiction authors (including the Americans and the British) cannot fully escape their cultural/historical perspectives in shaping the thematic arc of their stories. These would probably appear to be self-evident truths to the introductory anthropology student, but the speakers at the conference added color and depth to these ideas by examining specific authors and stories.
The weekend’s symposium attracted a modest audience: far fewer attendees than I’d expected, although it’s true that this was no fan convention and that Wellesley was a little out of the way, especially considering the recent snowstorm. I couldn’t help noticing, however, that the audience was largely older and male (apparently reflecting the demographics of more conventional sci-fi conventions), even though the conference was taking place at a women’s college. Yet in an unusual twist, most of the panelists were women and spoke as representatives of various national literatures in Latin America, Europe, and Asia. The often-invisible issue of gender roles and cultural stereotypes came up quite often during the panel discussions.
Having attended the Global Science Fiction Conference, I now realize how reductive my blog’s mission statement was in assuming that the vast majority of sci-fi/fantasy conforms to an Anglo-American narrative. I hope to expand my perspective in future blog posts by considering works in the context of different national and cultural traditions.
The Global Science Fiction Conference, held on March 8-9, was organized primarily by Professor Mingwei Song of the East Asian Languages & Literatures Department and hosted by the Susan and Donald Newhouse Center for the Humanities.
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*As far as I know. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
**The official distinction is that sci-fi purports to deal with the probable and not the outright impossible (and therefore is considered more credible than “soft” and “feminine” fantasy, which does not try to anchor unnatural occurrences in the logic of our reality), but Hairston pointed out that writers often use devices like wormholes and other hand-waving tricks to explain their “science.” She went on to cite British writer Arthur C. Clarke, who has said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
***(by which I think she means filmmakers and other media corporations)