Paradigms in Science Fiction

 In Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction, Darko Suvin argues there are three dominating paradigms of science fiction [3]. The first is the Asimov’s technocratic, wedded to the notional universe of nineteenth-century science, from thermodynamics to behaviorism, man as subject and the universe as an object of cognition. The second model is the classical stateless socialist vision of utopia as shown in Yefremov’s works; and the third is the cosmic/mystical spiritual technocracy of Lem [4]. While Lem might be the most sympathetic to the non-west, all three paradigms dramatically miss the other—the role of family, of woman, of the spiritual. They are unable to account for the worldview of the other within the knowledge categories of the other. Indeed the nature of the west is such that the other has no identity except as a people to be colonized, developed or appropriated—to be mapped onto the body of the west.

African, Asian and women’s identities often exist in other paradigms. First, they are concerned about their historical identity. Second, they are concerned about the collective, the family, as the individual here exists in a space alternative from the western version. Third, the spiritual, or the emotional, the softer side of what it means to be human is more important. This said, it is crucial to note that while there are deep structures, they are played out differently; it is in local specific conditions that structures are both created and expressed—it is history that creates identity. For example, in India and Islam, the historical struggle has been on the gendered nature of public and private space, while in the west, it has been between individualism and the collective, democracy and tyranny.

Yet most anthologies, encyclopedias and histories of science fiction take a universalistic view of science fiction and posit that non-western science fiction is non-existent. The authors they select are “nearly all white…[as well as]… nearly all male”. In addition, it is often thought: how could it be possible for non-western societies to develop images of technologically advanced future societies since they themselves are pre-industrial, pre-modern? For example, although even in the least technologically developed societies, we see ‘cyborgs’ walking on prosthetic legs—their flesh-and-blood legs having been blown up by land mines—cyborg as a category which explores the future (man-in-machine and machine-in-man) has not been imagined, envisioned, or dreamed of in these societies.

There is no conspiracy at work, it is simply that the lenses used by science fiction writers are those given by deep cosmological codes, in this case, those of western civilization. Science fiction, which almost by definition challenges conventional paradigms, has been unable to transcend its own epistemological limitations.

In today’s pre-modern societies, the imagination of the future has not played a part in creating a scientific-technological society, nor has it helped individuals prepare for it. Rather, technological and scientific futures come from outside with few warnings. On the other hand, societies that lead the way in scientific progress also lead the way in creating spaces where the consequences of that progress can be debated, in, for example, creating a public debate on the nature of science. Only writers in western countries, claims Philip John Davies “have had the luxury of being able to indulge in an orgy of debates over definition, form, and politics [of science fiction]”[5]. Thus, the current reality that Euro-American white authors dominate science fiction.  

Utopia: Past or Future

 Taking a paradigmatic view, to assert that science fiction exists only in the west is merely to favour one particular form of a much wider endeavor. Science fiction thus should not merely be about the technological as defined in forward time but the creation of plausible future worlds from a range of civilizational perspectives [6]. Science fiction is not just about debating the consequences of scientific progress. It is also about creating utopian or at least eutopian (the good, not perfect) societies of the future. This utopian tradition, either in the form of utopias (positive visioning) or in the form of dystopias (warnings) is highly developed in the west. However, such a need for utopian visioning does not exist in societies that have decided that they have already lived their utopia. For example, in Islamic civilization, there is no central need for science fiction because the perfect world already existed, this was the time of the Prophet [7]. There was a perfect democratic state guided by shura (consultation) and there was a wise, perfect, leader who could unify society. The problem has been to re-achieve this state, not create other worlds. In Indian civilization as well, there was Rama Rajya, the mythical kingdom of Rama, as well the time when Krishna ruled over Bharat (India) [8].

In African culture, as well, writes John Mbiti, utopia exists in the past. Time recedes toward the Golden Age, the Zamani period [9]. It is history then that has been and remained central. This does not mean these civilizations are not future-oriented but that the imagination of the future is based on recreating an idealized past [10]. Centuries of colonization have further influenced the central need to recover the past, as the past has been systematically denied to them (either completely erased as with African-Americans or given in a mutilated form as with western developmentalism, that is, as an inferior history that must be transformed). By recovering their own authentic pasts, these societies intend to articulate their own authentic visions of the future [11].

In “Black to the Future”, Mark Dery asks: “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, and set designers—white to a man—who have engineered our collective fantasies” [12].

Given the reality of fractured societies, can science fiction created outside the west be truly alternative or is it more likely to remain a poor imitation of western science fiction? Is there any other alternative to diminishing the influence of American frontier science fiction except by creating even more violent and even more virtual future worlds?

Can non-western writers, who are often concerned not with utopias but with eusychias—the search for the perfect self—make any sense in the futures and science fiction field? How can cultures that see the spiritual not as exotic or compartmentalized but as the foundation of life, implicated in every packet of consciousness, begin a dialogue with societies imagined in mainstream science fiction, that are replicas of individualistic, secular American/western visions? Thus not only is the future constructed differently (it is past, cyclical, spiral or ancestor-based) but instead of focusing on society, it is the imagination of the perfect self—the enlightened being—that is central to the non-west.

 The Fantastic

Another reason why non-western science fiction has not developed as a separate arena of writing because in some cultures the ‘fantastic’ is part of daily life. Myth has not been separated from lived history. There is science fiction but broadly understood, with a different space, meaning and importance. For example, for Indian mystics, other worlds are realizable through astral travel, and aliens do visit the planet—to learn meditation from Indian gurus. Moreover, we are all aliens since we take birth in different planets each life. Krishna lives on Vrindavan, not heaven, but a real planet in the cosmos [13]. What are considered miracles by those in the west (bringing someone back from the dead, walking on water) are simple occult powers one gains from years of discipline. There are numerous millennia-old stories about astral travel, aliens, repossession of souls/bodies, and even mechanical/artificial human beings [14].

Star travel is a common topic in as diverse literary traditions such as the Chinese, Japanese, Australian Aboriginal, Iroquois (Mohawk) Native American and African. In the Chinese tradition there is a tale titled, “Chang E Goes to the Moon” (by Liu An, 197-122 BCE) in which a woman flies to the moon after she steals an elixir of immortality from her husband [15]. Taketori Monogatari is a 10^th century Japanese “space fiction … in the genre of folklore” [16] and tells of the Princess Moonlight who first comes to Earth and then returns to the Moon [17]. According to Isao Uemichi, her popularity and the desire people have for her “may eventually turn into a yearning for the better world (the lunar paradise) to which she returned” [18].

A creation story from the Wong-gu-tha (by Mimbardda and re-told by Josie Boyle) tells of two Spirit men (from the far end of the Milky Way) and seven sisters (stars of the Milky way) who were sent to Yulbrada (the Earth) by the Creator Jindoo (the Sun) to shape it. Woddee Gooth-tha-rra (Spirit men) made the hills, the valleys, the lakes and the oceans. Seven Sisters beautified the earth with flowers, trees, birds, animals and “other creepy things”. Six sisters returned to the Milky Way but one of the sisters fell in love with the two Spirit men, and so their special powers were taken away. Two men and the woman became mortal and they became the parents of the earth, made laws and the desert people [Aboriginal Australians] [19]. In the Iroquois tradition there is “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” [20] and in Africa, Mrs. Onyemuru, ferrywoman at Oguta Lake, tells a story of Ogbuide, the Queen of Women who comes from the moon [21].

In technologically developed societies, spaceships have replaced golden chariots but desire and myth have remained foundational. Western literature and imagination—in terms of the fantastic—has moved from Earth, the mystical world and the past to the future. This desire for the stars eventually has transformed myth into the reality. It has entered public space, while in the non-west, tales of the mysterious, alternative worlds remain in private space, in the Indian tradition, as secrets revealed to the chela by the guru.

Alternatively, it can be argued that tales of space travel can, at best, claim to be “only as prototypical predecessors of science fiction because science fiction is a distinctly modern form of literature” [22]. Having said this, it is also important to note that while science fiction has becoming increasingly a popular genre all over the world, not only prototypical predecessors but also very early works of non-western science fiction writers are being forgotten or marginalized.

Thus, the history of science fiction is written almost exclusively from its Euro-American history. Indeed, even in two civilizations with their own indigenous roots, both Wu Dingbo in China and Koichi Jamano in Japan testify that the development of contemporary Chinese and Japanese science fiction has been based on western rather than traditional stories:

Japanese writers made their debuts deeply influenced by traditional western criteria of SF. Instead of creating their own worlds, they immersed themselves totally into the translated major works of Anglo-American SF. This is like moving into a prefabricated house; the SF genre has grown into out culture regardless of whether there was a place for it [23].

Non-western Science Fiction: Creating Alternative Worlds 

Such then is the blindness to tradition and the fascination with the west, that non-western writers do not use their non-western roots as a springboard for their creativity. It is crucial to remember that while conventional wisdom believes that it is Karel Capek “the man who invented robots” (the word robot derived from the Czech word robiti or robata—“to work” or “a worker”) [24] the ‘robot’ has been in the Chinese literary tradition since the fourth century.

In Zhang Zhan’s “Tangwen” in Lie Zi (The Book of Lie Zi, written around 307-313) Yanshi a clever craftsman produces a robot that is capable of singing and dancing. However, this robot keeps on staring at the emperor’s queen. This enrages the emperor who issues an order to kill Yanshi. But then Yanshi opens the robot’s chest and the emperor beholds the artificial human [25]. Robot stories also appear in 7th and 11^th century China as well [26].

And while the Islamic tradition looks for its utopias in tradition, we have examples such as Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain who wrote Sultana’s Dream in 1905, a virtually unknown short story that is a predecessor of better known feminist fiction classics such as, for example, Herland(1915). Born in Pairaband, a village in what is now Bangladesh, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was a “courageous feminist writer and activist who worked all her life to remove what she called the ‘purdah of ignorance’” [27]. Given that most utopian imaging is political it comes as no surprise that in Sultana’s Dream, Hossain challenges the seclusion of women and their exclusion from political and economic life. In the far-off Ladyland, ladies rule over the country and control all social matters, while gentlemen are kept in the murdanas to mind babies, to cook, and to do all sorts of domestic work. Men are locked as they “do or at least are capable of doing no end of mischief” [28]. You can not trust those untrained men out of doors: it is unfair to shut in the harmless women and let loose the men, remarks sister Sara, Sultana’s conversationalist from the other world. Women in Sultana’s Dream have the difficult task of rebuilding all of society, which they do through education and science. In her utopia, Hossain builds the world without “crime or sin”, where science is used to service the society, where the Queen aims at converting the whole country into one grand garden, and where religion is based on Love and Truth. While Sultana finds herself in an ecotopia, the development of science is still seen as extremely important. The genius of this “unusual story” lies in the transformation of an issue—purdah—to represent “a whole range of patriarchal practices and ideas that shut out the possibility of another world, a world, … that could easily be realized if women were allowed to exercise the wisdom and skills they already have” [29].

Similarly, in Africa, in the continent locked in its ‘past’, Bessie Head creates through her novels better worlds, for women, for migrants, for blacks and ultimately all people. In her fiction she has sought to construct “her vision of the ideal human society—tolerant, accepting, nurturing” [30]. This vision of a harmonious and tolerant society focused on agricultural cooperatives [31] is a far cry from Bessie Head’s country of origin, South Africa during Apartheid. As a refugee in Botswana—having fled South Africa—she builds a vision of society where there is solidarity and cooperation between different genders, classes and races as an “antidote to the exclusion of tribe, race, class and gender that operates in Southern Africa” [32].

In Thai science fiction, we see in the film Kawow tee Bangpleng (Cuckoos at Bangplent, 1994, directed by Nirattisai Kaljareuk) [33] juxtaposition of the local Buddhist temple with the spacecraft. Writes commentator, Adam Knee: “ the image of an ancient statue of Buddha with the craft visible through windows behind it in particular stands as a striking and fertile emblem for the film, forcing a negotiation between Asian and alien, ancient and modern, static and mobile” [34]. The spacecraft sends out a beam that impregnates the local women. The children born are aliens. Over the length of the movie, writes Knee, it becomes clear that the goal is to take over the planet, since their home planet is dying. The local townspeople however remain sympathetic to the children since they have given birth to them and reared them. They are their’s, alien notwithstanding. Local monks—who are psychic like the alien children—as well intervene when the police are about to attack the aliens, once a series of troubling incidents begin.

Knee adds, and this is crucial in this dialogue between alien and Buddhism:

“The monk continues to try to convince Somporn [the alien leader], however, of the importance of keeping his emotions in check, as well as of ‘extending compassion’ to others, along the lines of Buddhist teachings. Somporn generally scoffs at these suggestions but… nevertheless grudgingly agrees to let some of the youths use their alien powers to help the humans when floods threaten the town. As an indirect result of their exertions, however, the youths start to fall ill and die; an autopsy reveals that another physical difference—a lack of a spleen—has rendered them susceptible to earthly diseases. The aliens realize that the planet will not sustain their race and that the survivors must return to the ship; [the alien] Somporn now comes to appreciate the monk’s message of empathy and bids him an affectionate farewell, as do the other alien children to their sobbing human parents, before ascending to the sky” [35].

Concludes Knee: “The emphasis in Kawow then—very unlike that of most western science fiction films–is on local adaptation to rather than expulsion of the alien,

which is met in turn by learning and adaptation on the part of the alien. This is made most explicit in the extensive scenes of interaction between the abbot and Somporn, the leader of the alien group and correspondingly the most recalcitrant, as well as the most disdainful of human habits and, more specifically, the Thai-Buddhist worldview” [36].

While this is partly about Buddhist notions of compassion, it is also intrinsic to some experiences of colonialism, of responding to othering by inclusion, instead of continuing the process and becoming like the dominator. The way forward then becomes an understanding of our mutual mortality, human and alien.

Science Fiction as a Marginal Genre 

While there is science fiction in all cultures, it is only the west that has systematized science and fiction, made it into an industrial endeavor, and created a particular brand of literature called science fiction. Part of this process has been the privileging its own from of fiction and seeing the dreaming of others as irrelevant, as duplication/ replica/extension (Japanese science fiction,manga and anime) or naive (feminist science fiction).

However, science fiction itself has also been a marginal genre. This marginality has allowed and been a cause of its ability to open spaces for thinking the unthinkable, and exploring unknown unknowns. The marginality of science fiction in society is in direct proportion with science fiction’s radicalism. As a marginal genre, science fiction has explored ideas otherwise not cherished by the rest of mainstream/conservative society. In Russia/Soviet Union, science fiction has often allowed spaces for powerful social critique, for dissent. However, in different periods, Russian/Soviet science fiction served important social control functions: for example, to spread Bolshevism among the young, skilled, urban workers prior to the revolution or to support industrial Five Year Plans during the Stalinist era [37]. In American movies, as cinema technology advances science fiction is increasingly losing its ‘edge’ and becoming entertainment that seeks to reinforce nationalism and the power of the nation-state. Contrast the 1980’s Blade Runner with the late 1990’s Independence Day or Starship Troopers.

While packaging itself as a ‘pure entertainment’ American science fiction continues to serve social control functions. One is to prepare and de-sensitise the populace for the consequences of post-modern global capitalism. For example, the movie Gattaca, created as a ‘what if this continues’ type of scenario still serves the social function of supporting continued eugenic efforts (present since the beginning of the colonisation) of excluding the different and creating a perfect (white) human being.

The other function is what Marx has called to “dull the blade of class (and gender and minority’s or postcolonial) struggle”. For example, movies like The Matrix, Deep Impact, Armageddon,Independence Day, Mars Attacks apart from using conservative and overdone man-the-hero-saving-the-world theme are there to teach us that we should be happy with our present (social) order as the future can be much worse. High-tech progress may lead to disaster. Catharsis and relief comes after the threat to our future-as-the-continuation-of-the-present has been successfully battled and defeated. The meteor, or the comet, or aliens, or artificial intelligence or any other ‘Other’ who threaten the powerful male elite (usually combining male scientists, brilliant male outcasts and government) are after combat defeated. Patriarchy, liberalism and statism win, claiming to have liberated all and everyone.

However, there are many levels to the discourses under operation. The Matrix, for example, can be read as a metaphor for our present lives and societies (focused on material advancement) and as a call for the spiritual, in which the veil of ignorance is removed and enlightenment revealed, with all limitations seen merely as Maya, illusion (similarly to Contact). Yet these subtle spiritual meanings are drowned by the masculinist focus on power battles. For example, Keanu Reeves can be read as a clever programmer within the western frame or from a non-western Tantric, Vedic or Buddhist frame as a bodhisattva, returning to liberate our selves trapped by technocracy and materialism. The medium becomes the message, massaging us into a light speed of violence. These movies certainly fail to become a tool that can “subvert the central myths of origin of western Culture with their longing for fulfillment in apocalypse” [38].Ultimately, Reeves or Neo becomes neither programmer nor bodhisattva, instead sacrificing self for the good of peace, becomes the Christ savior returned. The Matrix Revolutions – even as it challenges notions of life, machine, human and virtual – is foundationally Christian (sacrifice and Christ the savior) and Western technological (we make tools and thereafter they make us). However, it does attempt to challenge the ego of the West (linear, crisis based, technological) with the alter-ego of the West (feminine, green, organic).  The Oracle thus becomes the gaian shakti figure countering the male architect of the Matrix and hyper-masculinity of Machine city (and its sperm-line machines swarming Zion). Thus some layering is there. However, if other cultural myths had been used as resources, far more depth would have been possible. But other cultures are not seen as real unto themselves.

Thus another role current mainstream science fiction plays in American and subsequently global society is to ‘other’ difference. This is most often done by projecting difference onto the alien. Our terrestrial differences are not owned, rather, they are exported into outer space (foreign space). The alien does not only help create our identity (in terms of the binary oppositions) but is also seen as a danger to us and should consequently be exterminated. The ‘othering’ of the difference can also be done through picturing the other in total submission. One example is The Handmaiden’s Tale, a powerful feminist critique transformed into voyeuristic feast for patriarchal males and serving a similar social function as the pornographic, The Story of O. It also encourages us to think that our current patriarchy does not look that bad after all.  Women are also the monsters of the future, writes Rosi Braidotti in her essay, “Cyberteratologies,” aptly subtitled, “Female Monsters Negotiate the Other’s Participation in Humanity’s Far Future.” [39] Argues Braidotti:” Contemporary social imaginary .. directly blames women for postmodernity’s crisis of identity. In one of those double binds that occur so often in regard to representing those people marked as different, women are portrayed as unruly elements who should be controlled – represented as so many cyber-Amazons in need of governance.” [40] Women as monster becomes the future, with the solution that of Superman and the Superstate taking over the role of birthing and caring.

Yet another way in which the othering of the difference is done is by ridiculing the Other. One example is in the highest grossing movie in 1999, Star Wars: Episode One, The Phantom Menace. One can get a sense of the worldview of Lucas and others by simply analysing the accents and sites of action. The Jedi Knights speak with western (a mix of British/West Coast American) accents (that is, in terms of today’s categories of accents, no accent at all). They are the highest of humanity. The lowest are those who live on the planet Tatooine. They are made to look like Muslim Arabs. But they are just uncivilized and not to be worried about. The danger comes from the Trade Federation. They speak with a mixture of an East Asian and Eastern European accent, the twin dangers to the west—East Asia in terms of creating a new economic system, and Eastern Europe as the (orthodox, not reinvented) traditionalism of the west. And what of Africans and Islanders? They are, of course, not quite real, as in all mythologies, friendly natives, slightly silly, happy-go-lucky (in Star Wars, the Gungans, the underwater race on Naboo). Of course, this typology was denied by Lucas, as it should be, how could he see the air he breathes, fish cannot deconstruct water, and the west is unable to see the world it has penned. But while it appears that the mythic brilliance of the movie is that real evil comes from within, from the west itself, in the form of the desire for more power, the emperor (Senator and later Emperor Palpatine); this, however, ends up being a jingoistic concern with democracy, with the American way of Life. Essentially it is a battle of democracy against despotism, with the good guys a mixture of Californian pop mysticism and true democracy, and the bad guys as foreigners and as those who engage in trade wars. The latest Star Wars installment thus even as if it appears that it is venturing into worlds far away, in fact, reinscribes present constructions of self and other, west and Non-west.

This analysis is not meant as a contribution to postmodern cultural critique but as a pointer of dangers ahead. Our collective imaginations become deadened as Star Wars becomes the naturalized form of science fiction. Other cultures see themselves as less, and either seek vengeance through religious extremism or create schizophrenic personalities in which they other themselves. Globalism continues it march onwards, reducing the possibility of alternative futures, particularly from others. Current science fiction forgets that we are all migrants to the future.

Frank Herbert’s Dune (the  2001 TV/video release as well as the earlier 1984 movie) appears to move away from this construction of the other, by empowering the freman, the others in the movie. However, at a deeper level, the other is either ridiculed or seen as the romantic warrior, the mystic—Orientalized. Removed from civilization, the freman are intimate with the desert, and develop a mystic bond with the spice. Their mystical power is countered to the technological prowess of the Emperor and the House of Harkonnens. And yet, they do not find their salvation through their own agency, but it is the ‘white’ Paul Atredis (as Lawrence of Arabia has done on this planet) who comes and saves them. He does go native, however, taking the freman name ofMuad’Dib. It is not in them to develop or be victorious, it takes the overlord, the ruling class to provide freedom. Their ‘humanity’ is denied to them. And, their freedom does not transform the structure of feudalism but continues class rule, however, it is now the kinder House of Atredis that will now rule Thus, what appears as victory for the warrior and mystical freman is in fact a continuation of colonization. It is traditional linear macrohistory—The Orient cannot develop through its own creativity, it must be developed by the civilized. The style of speaking, the clothes all make clear that this is a battle within Europe (the emperor versus the Harkonnes versus the Atredis) with the freman (Bedouins) merely the backdrop to their cosmic intrigue. And nature—the worms—they are of course conquered by Paul Muad’Dib Atredis. With nature conquered, the non-west liberated, the evil powers in Europe defeated—and the spice (oil) safe—humanity can once again prosper. The empire is dead. Long live the empire.

From Space to High Noon 

Far more obvious is how Star Wars and other science fiction functions to ‘push the western frontier’. Gregory Pfitzer claims that the most persistent myth in American culture, that of the frontier, has shown remarkable resilience since its firstly emerged in the 18^th century [41]. In our times, what was once projected westward is now simply projected upward and outward [42]. “Western cowboys [are transformed] into space cowboys, high-noon gunfights into celestial shootouts, and frontier expansion into the politics of space ownership on the high frontier” [43]. Pfitzer concludes that such outdated frontier mythologies are doing American society damage: they do not help shape beneficial cultural self-images, bear little relationship to present realities and threaten to bind people too tightly to highly conventional, form-bound ideologies. He believes that new mythologies need to be considered, mythologies that will serve the culture better, especially those that “reverse exploitation and racism while prescribing more realistic avenues for public action” [44]. More recently, the frontier has gone from space to virtuality.

Some examples of how this is being done exist even in American society. For example, recent versions of the popular series Star Trek (Voyager and Deep Space Nine) challenges many of our old mythologies and given identities.  And even more so is the work of African-American authors, for example, Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler.

Ways Out 

Labeled as “the only African-American woman writing science-fiction” Octavia Butler’s work challenges not only patriarchal myths, but also capitalist myths, racist myths, and feminist-utopian myths [45]. She also challenges “the binary oppositions of alien and non-alien, insider and outsider, masculine and feminine”, [46] undoing the essentialisms of tradition and modernity. Butler’s characters seem to face the same issue and dilemma: “they must force themselves to evolve, accepting differences and rejecting a world view that centers upon their lives and values, or become extinct” [47]. While in most science fiction the alien is seen as the (potential) destroyer of the human race, for Butler, aliens can save and improve the human race and also themselves. Cooperation is necessary, as often the only alternative is extinction. But the other is both external and internal. “The self and the other cannot exist separately. They are defined by one another, a central part of each other’s identity”, [48] and there is even the “desire for the alien, the other, for difference within ourselves” [49]. Butler’s work seem to suggest that old mythologies that produce “the hierarchies of center and margins, of colonizer and colonized, of alien and other, no longer provide an appropriate or adequate vocabulary with which to articulate the possibilities for change” [50]. In the words of Octavia Butler:  

Human Beings fear difference… Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization…when you feel a conflict, try to go the Oankali way. Embrace difference. [51] 

The Politics and Futures of Science Fiction  

“‘Fantasies’, of course, are never ideologically ‘innocent’ texts” [52]. But fantasies, including science fiction ones, can serve conservative ideologies that promote old divisions and interests of the dominant social/cultural/racial/gender group. Or they can serve ideologies which would unable us all to move forward and create truly innovative future societies. Science fiction images do not merely reflect our current anxieties and desires. Through their powerful visualisation they create the need for what is seen and encourage efforts to duplicate in the future, science fiction’sdéjà vu. The litanies of our lives crave for myths to give them meaning. In turn, myths help create future litanies, as either their extensions or their oppositions. Science fiction and how it ‘others’ us, how it continues a particular civilization’s domination by assuming others do not have a science fiction or defining itself in exclusive terms (such that other cultures visions are merely the naively impossible) becomes part of the naturalising discourse of domination. However, science fiction with its focus on creating alternative world, on liberating us from our own mythologies, limitations, plays a pivotal role in liberating us from our own slaveries.

The Political-Economy of Imagination 

If left alone, science fiction will continue its present role in supporting the cultural project of the only surviving ‘Empire’ at the beginning of the Third millennia (as time counted by the west).

Contemplating on the reasons for the explosion of science fiction and space fiction in our time, science fiction writer Doris Lessing claims that this explosion is happening because the nature of the human mind is undergoing an expansion process, it is being forced to expand [53]. She further states that science fiction and space fiction writers must explore “the sacred literatures of the world in the same bold way they take scientific and social possibilities to their logical conclusions…[We] make a mistake when we dismiss [sacred literature of all races and nations] as quaint fossils from a dead past” [54]. The rich traditions of many people of the world will make such science and utopian fiction of the future enormously exciting. It will be able to express the voices of peoples silenced by hundreds of years of western monoculture, of world capitalism. Science fiction can be a medium for not only subversion but also for the development of the authentic futures.

Writes Marge Piercy on feminist science fiction:  …” One characteristic of societies imagined by feminists is how little isolated women are from each other. Instead of the suburban dream turned nightmare in which each house contained a woman alone and climbing the walls, or the yuppie apartment house where no one speaks but each has perfect privacy in her little electronic box, the societies women dream up tend to b a long coffee klatches or permanent causal meetings. Everybody is in everybody else’s hair .. society is decentralized .. nurturing is a strong value .. communal responsibility for a child begins at home.” [55] The vision is certainly pastoral with Earth Rolling along. [56]

Of course, authentic futures are limited by the nature of the market. For example, in Latin America “most science fiction is brief, embodied in short stories rather then in novels…[which] … is due to the fact that it is more feasible to publish short fiction than to publish longer stories, as the editorial industry as well as the market is limited” [57].

There is also a great danger of producing “fragmented and inconsistent images … from the modern and premodern eras … interwoven with new and surprising cultural elements” [58]—of becoming cultural and “literary imposters as New Age Pipecarriers for any and all of The Nations” creating colonising visions that would surpass even the traditional ones.

Even lumping all non-western science fiction into one entity means submerging it into the category of ‘the Rest’ as defined by the Empire. It is therefore also important to remember that even within the category of ‘the Rest’ different others have different status, role and image being ascribed to them. The best science fiction undoes the defining categories it begins with.

Also, apart from ‘responding’ to dominant future images produced in the west as well as looking at possible prototypes or cultural predecessors, non-western science fiction writers need to fill in the empty spaces, create alternative histories and imagine past visions of the future as if they had been written.

Still the reality is that “Black Women do not have time to dream”, argue Miriam Tlali and Pamela Ryan [59]. While we should look at the conditions that have prevented Black Women from dreaming, black women of today can reinvent these past future images for their foremothers. Some of those visions have been expressed in traditional cultures, some in past and present grass-root women’s movements in the Third World; movements that are simultaneously challenging poverty, racism and colonisation as well as gender subordination. While indigenous history has been often erased and the technocratic visions of tomorrow reign supreme it is never too late to rediscover one’s own original direction.

Science Fiction and the Future of the Other  

Generally mainstream science fiction has not done so well writing the other, even though ultimately everything it is about is the other. This precisely because science fiction has largely become framed by one culture. And this is why it is important (while acknowledging the danger of being lumped into ‘the Rest’) to encourage the search, valorization, and publication of science fiction (in its broadest sense) around the world.

It is also important to see the future, science fiction, within the historical and cultural terms of other civilizations, not merely rescuing them within the dominant themes of the west, but also developing the process of an authentic conversation and dialogue about self and other; space and future; alien and human.

To do this we must rescue dominant science fiction from its own paradigmatic blinders, showing how it continues the project of one-culture hegemony. What must be encouraged is a dialogue of visions of the future and past across civilization, such that authenticity from each civilization can lead to a new universal of what it means to be human and not human.

This of course holds true not only for science fiction but also for futures studies (utopian studies, etc) as well as scholarship in general. Nothing could be more important as we create a world for future generations for all of us. The desire to dream is the universal endeavor of us, humans, appearing all over the globe, even at the most unexpected places (for example, woman writing science/utopian fiction in Bangladesh at the very beginning of the Twentieth century). To culturally appropriate this desire and submerge into not only one genre, but also one history and a few themes is to deny the realities of our terrestrial past, present and future lives. We can dream otherwise.

Notes:

1. Butler O. quoted in Wolmark J. Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press; 1994:28.
2. Ibid.
3. Suvin D. Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction. London: Macmillan Press, 1988. See especially chapter 8: “Three World Paradigms for SF: Asimov, Yefremov, Lem”. For a website devoted to definitions of science fiction, see:http://www.panix.com/~gokce/sf_defn.html. The site states: Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together. Accessed, October 12, 2000.
4. Ibid.
5. Davies P J. Science fiction and conflict. In: Davies P, editor. Science Fiction, Social Conflict, and War. Manchester: Manchester University Press; 1990:5.
6. Discussion with Frederik Pohl over lunch, April 15, Seattle, Washington, Foundation for the Future symposium on Humanity in the Year 3000. See: www.futurefoundation.org. Also see, Pohl F. The Politics of Prophecy. In: Hassler D, Wilcox C, editors. Political Science Fiction. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina; 1997.
7. El-Affendi A. Who Needs an Islamic State? London: Grey Seal, 1991.
8. See Inayatullah S. Indian Philosophy, Political. In: Craig E, editor. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge Press; 1998.
9. Case F I. Negritude and Utopianism. In: Jones ED, African Literature Today. New York: African Publishing Company; 1975:70.
10. See Inayatullah S. Toward a Post-Development Vision of the Future: The Shape and Time of the Future. In: Slaughter R, editor. The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies: Directions and Outlooks. Vol. 3. Melbourne: DDM Publishers; 1996:113-126.
11. See Galtung J, Inayatullah S, editors. Macrohistory and Macrohistorians. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1997. Also see, Sardar Z, Nandy A, Wyn Davies M. Barbaric Others: A Manifesto of Western Racism. London: Pluto Press, 1993, and Sardar Z, editor. Rescuing All Our Future: The Futures of Futures Studies. Twickenham, England: Adamantine Press, 1999.
12. Dery M. Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.The South Atlantic Quarterly 1993; 92(3-4):736.
13. See, Back to Godhead. The magazine of the Hare Krishna Movement. PO Box 255, Sandy Ridge, NC, 27046, USA.
14. For example, the first known description of the ‘robot’ comes from fourth century China. From: Wu Dingbo, Chinese Science Fiction. In: Dingbo W, Murphy PD, editors. Handbook of Chinese Popular Culture. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press; 1994:258.
15. Ibid.
16. Uemichi I S. Japanese Science-Fiction in the International Perspective. In: Bauer R, et al., editors. Proceedings of the XIIth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association: Space and Boundaries in literature. Munich: International Comparative Literature Association; 1988.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Stories of the Dreaming: http://www.dreamtime.net.au/seven/text.htm
20. Gunn Allen P. Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989:65.
21. Umeh M. Signifyin(g) The Griottes; Flora Nwapa’s Legacy of (Re)Vision and Voice.Research in African Literatures 1995; 26(2): 114.
22. Dingbo W:259.
23. Jamano K. Japanese SF, Its Originality and Orientation (1969). Science-Fiction Studies1994; 21(1): 70.
24. Moskowitz S, Capek K. The man who invented robots. In: Moskowitz S. Explorers of the Infinite Westport, Connecticut: Hyperion Press Inc.; 1963:208, 211.
25. Dingbo W:258.
26. Dingbo W:259.
27. Tharu S, Lalita K. Women Writing in India. New York, The City University of New York: The Feminist Press, 1991:340.
28. Hossain R. Sultana’s Dream. In: Tharu S, Lalita K:344.
29. Tharu S, Lalita K:167
30. Kibera V. Adopted Motherlands: The Novels of Marjorie Macgoye and Bessie Head. In: Nasta S, editor. Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press; 1992:315.
31. Head B. When Rain Clouds Gather. London: Heinemann, New Windmill Series, 1968:22.
32. Kibera V:326.
33. Knee A. Close encounters of the generic kind: a case study in Thai sci-fi. At:http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/current/cc1100.html.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Rosenberg K. Soviet Science Fiction: To The Present Via the Future. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alumni Association, 1987.
38. Haraway D. Cyborg Manifesto:175. Quoted in Miller J. Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler’s Dystopia/Utopian Vision. Science-Fiction Studies 1998: 25(2):338.
39. Rosi Braidotti, “ Cyberteratologies: Female Monsters Negotiate the Other’s Participation in Humanity’s Far Future,” in Marlene S. Barr, ed. Envisioning the Future: Science Fiction and the Next Millennium. Middletown, Ct, Wesleyan University Press, 2003, 146-172.
40. Ibid, 163.
41. Pfitzer GM. The Only Good Alien Is a Dead Alien: Science Fiction and the Metaphysics of Indian-Hating on the High Frontier., Journal of American Culture 1995;18(1):51. The animated film Toy Story is one example of how the similarity and tension between Woodie the cowboy and Buzz Lightyear is worked out.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Pfitzer GM:65
45. Miller J. Post Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler’s Dystopian/Utopian Vision. Science-Fiction Studies 1998; 25(2):337.
46. Wolmark J. Aliens and Others. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994:28.
47. Green ME. There Goes the Neighborhood: Octavia Butler’s Demand for Diversity in Utopias. In: Domawerth JM, Komerten CA, editors. Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press; 1994:169. The best of south Asian fiction as well portrays these dilemmas. See the works of Saadat Hasan Manto.
48. Miller J:346.
49. Peppers K. Dialogic Origins and Alien Identities in Butler’s Xenogenesis. Science-Fiction Studies 1995; 22(1):60.
50. Wolmark J:35.
51. Butler O. Adulthood Rites. Quoted in Green ME:189.
52. Pearson J. Where no man has gone before: sexual politics and women’s science fiction. In: Davies PJ, editor. Science Fiction, Social Conflict, and War. Manchester: Manchester University Press; 1990:9.
53. For the works of Doris Lessing, see, http://lessing.redmood.com/
54. Ibid. Exact quote citation missing.
55. Marge Piercy, “Love and Sex in the Year 3000,” in Marlene S. Barr, ed. Envisioning the Future: Science Fiction and the Next Millennium. Middletown, Ct, Wesleyan University Press, 2003, 137
56. Ibid.
57. Kreksch I. Reality Transfigured: The Latin American Situation as Reflected in Its Science Fiction. In: Hassler DM, Wilcox C. Political Science Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997:178.
58. Willard W. Pipe Carriers of The Red Atlantis: Prophecy/Fantasy. Wicazo Sa Review: A Journal of Native American Studies 1994; X(1):25.
59. Ryan P. Black Women Do Not Have Time to Dream: The Politics of Time and Space. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 1992; 11(Spring):95-102.

Researcher and pedagogue Ivana Milojevich and political scientist and futurist Sohail Inayatullah together host the website metafuture.org, which is dedicated to Futures Studies. This field of research includes studying alternative futures and their underlying worldviews and myths.

The internet’s emancipatory potential is unmistakable. The role of bloggers, tweets, videos and Facebook during the Arab Spring has once again made this abundantly clear. Criticism of regimes found its way through online channels, helping populations find out they were not alone. It inspired people, encouraging them to take to the streets and gave the world at large an incredibly diverse impression of what was going on. In Syria activists not only monitor the repression and enable people to view the protests they also post really satirical, humorous videos that reveal the uprising’s creative side.

Of course the internet is not a panacea. It primarily facilitates change and emancipation and can also be used as a tool of repression. As was made apparent by the many bloggers who disappeared, were arrested and murdered during the Arab Spring. Users are all too easy to hunt down online, every action leaves digital traces. Regimes are becoming increasingly good at censoring, blocking and spying using new media. They are getting smarter. For example, in Syria, a virus was used that passed all sorts of data from the user’s computer on to the security services: passwords, contact details, etc. The dastardly thing about it was the fact that it masqueraded as software aimed at securing connections against spyware!
Iran has been developing its ‘Halal Internet’ for years now. No more online contact with the rest of the world, no more variety of sources of information, no more the ability to blog about everyday niggles that are, for some reason, viewed as sensitive issues. The Iranian people are being cut off from the World Wide Web and will only be able to access a local, supervised internet.

While governments learn to use software to repress their people and deprive them of their freedom of speech, dissidents are learning how to use software to beat the repression. There is digital arms race underway with the regimes engaging supported from specialised Western software companies and the bloggers and activists creating networks, exchanging tips and tricks and supporting one another. A new generation of activists has arisen with their own flourishing infrastructure of smart activism, with a network like Global Voices Advocacy, which provides, among other things, a manual for anonymous blogging with WordPress. Work is also underway on inventive, smart solutions in the field of online video. The video for change organisation Witness has developed the ObscuraCam. An app for mobile phones which makes it easy to anonymise faces in videos. If necessary, this allows the identities of those involved to be protected in videos posted online. These small, practical tricks and tools make a world of difference. They are as easy to use as possible, very low threshold and anyone can use them, not just geeks.

These small, practical solutions created by innovative bloggers are crucial to allow voices to flourish online. Especially at this time, it is very important for people to have the means to arm themselves against censorship and control, to be able to reclaim their space online because if the regimes in Syria and Iran have their way there will be no more demonstration videos or satirical productions on YouTube. That would be bad news particularly for the younger generation as, among other things, they found out they were not alone online. They sent messages to the world that touched people in ways reports on the nine ‘o clock news never can. If the governments and companies get their way we won’t hear much anymore from Syrian or Iranian bloggers or civilian journalists and that would be a damn shame. Not just for them, but also for us.

It is for all these reasons that Hivos supports initiatives such as Global Voices Advocacy or Witness, blogger conferences and training sessions, and we would like to call on every internet user to support bloggers around the globe. Join the fight for net freedom – Delete Control.

Ravi Naidoo is the founder of the International Design Indaba – an African design institution and the biggest design conference and expo in Africa. He’s also behind the First African in Space Mission and Cape Town’s budding IT cluster. He’s reshaping the cultural landscape of a country. Here we talk to Ravi about a south-south global design axis, the romance of new democracies, building a new global south design language, and the birth of an African futurism.

You’ve highlighted the so-called BaSIC countries - Brazil, South Africa, India, and China – as rising producers of world-class creative content, rather than mere consumers of Hollywood movies and Western fashions. Do you see these countries developing definitive new design languages?

When we looked at this thing we called BaSIC, it was more from the point of view of these countries having similar socio-economic contexts or economic realities. It occurred to us, maybe what we should be doing is a greater amount of sharing between us because all too often the discourse in design happens on a London-Paris-New York-Tokyo axis. We discussed shifting that axis or introducing a southern parallel, a Sao Paulo-Cape Town-Mumbai-Shanghai axis.

It’s in doing this that we might find a more apt design language for emerging economies than the one we see in Milan for example – but it’s less about the language and more about the methodology of how to give life to objects in our context. We need to design for a different socio-economic reality where design is about more than consumption – it has to be part of the toolkit for development on the ground. I find this kind of design activism more prevalent in developing countries than in Europe, to quote Obama, design here is about ’the fierce urgency of now’.

This makes me think about a statement by the organisers of the upcoming Istanbul Design Biennale regarding design having a new kind of urgency in emerging economies  - because it’s a solution-based practice, and these are places that are looking for solutions.

Precisely. So the Design Indaba itself, which is a conference that invites designers from around the world, is a 3-day think tank that is converted into real-life projects over the rest of the year. Its much more interesting when you present some of our seemingly intractable problems to creative people instead of to politicians and start to develop hyper-local solutions. The designer moves out of the realm of being a peddler of beautiful confection and becomes a change -–agent. I’m interested in galvanising a creative army to help find the solutions we need.

You also speak about giving Africa ‘new stretch’…

All of our projects since 1994 have been about re-imagining Africa, about giving Africa new stretch. We are optimists, we aren’t apologetic about our circumstances or South Africa. As Interactive Africa, the media company we’ve founded, we’ve project-managed the 2002 mission putting the first-ever African in space – that’s stretch.  We worked on the FIFA World Cup – that’s stretch. As CITI - the Cape Town IT Initiative, we’re developing an African Silicon Valley in the Cape Town CBD. We’re not part of the crew that sits about having a whinge over a cappuccino. We have an outstanding opportunity here with the means and the ideas to make a difference. We’re a fresh democracy still going about the world as incurable romantics.

You mentioned your assistance in sending the first-ever African into space; the potential for a global south design axis and South Africa’s optimism regarding its technological future – there’s a tangible sense of anticipation, perhaps the birth of an African Futurism…

The concept of futurism fell on fertile ground in South Africa since the ’90’s.   South Africa owes a lot of the success of the dawning of our democracy to scientific, co-ordinated future analysis. A key part of South Africa finding its way in what everybody considered to be a completely hopeless situation was about a sense of futurism and about scenario analysis.  The Mont Fleur Scenarios happened in the early ’90’s in a room where the ANC, Union leaders, businessmen and futurists ran through different scenario analyses for South Africa given certain eventualities – this a bunch of leaders and futurists sitting around a table and technically negotiating a revolution. Now, there’s the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope, the largest telescope in the Southern hemisphere, being awarded to South Africa. This will inextricably link us to those big, stellar questions about our future because the theatre in which it’s going to happen will be the Karoo, a desert in the central part of South Africa.

Ravi Naidoo is the founder and managing director of Interactive Africa, a Cape Town based media and marketing company. One of the company’s more recent projects has been project managing the First African in Space Mission. He also directed the African Connection Rally, which promoted telecommunications investment in Africa.

While much of my meanderings through Chinese pop and porn culture usually originate from conversations with friends and colleagues, occasionally I receive a message from an anonymous party whose motivations are unknown. I once received a zip file attachment with DIY photos of a young couple “caught in the act”, photos snapped outside the window of a university dormitory. To receive such a gift, from an unknown and untested source,it made me a bit paranoid, but I also realized that I had to take it at face value, as it was saying” We do have sex in China. Please include us in your collection”.

These videos have been archived and labeled as Doors or Gates (门 men … after the USA Watergate scandal) and carry the name of the exact location where the scene was shot—e.g. East Building Kappa Female  (東樓女), Metro Gate(地鐵門); Shanghai Wash Gate(上海洗手門), or Hunan Elevator Gate (湖南電梯門). The popularity of these DIY videos is explained by an interviewee: “These videos are now a novelty and are slightly in competition with the Japanese pornography. Of course it is important to make our own videos even if they look  quite bad. Since everything is officially banned, then these videos fill the gap”.
   These online collections create the impression that people are making DIY porn all over China, in all these widely dispersed “gates”, bathrooms and alleyways. In some cases, it looks as if people were voyeuristically caught in the act, as if their carnal desires were captured by a security camera or a government spy and/or uploaded by a peeping tom. In other cases, the camera is so close to the scene of action that the couple must be aware of its presence and insistent gaze, but they decide to ignore it in pursuit of their own sexual bliss.

The video “East Building Kappa Female” follows a group of school boys undressing a girl in a classroom. While the video at first portrays a scene of callous bullying, the boys then start caressing and kissing the girl at great length. She gets aroused and is then seen laughing and frolicking with her partners. One of the boys further manipulates the scenario by using his hand-held camera to tease  the Kappa female into responding to its very presence. The young woman is in fact very good at imitating a Japanese porn star who whimpers in pain and joy while being bullied into sexual action.

These DIY productions are circulated despite government warnings, but it is clear that the trend is a sensitive  and potentially explosive topic when I attempt to solicit reactions from various interviewees. Still, some people agree that DIY pornography can potentially act as a powerful and important incentive for social change. Yang, an interviewee, explains it this way: “We have a common saying that if virtue rises one foot, vice will rise ten. The government will always have its policies against sex but we always know how to find it”.

Yang is deeply attached to his manner and pursuits of “Jumping the Great Fire Wall” (翻牆) and searching for sexually explicit materials on illegal peer-to-peer downloading sites such as Emule and Bittorrent. Rather than hoping that the central government will legalize and organize his online pleasures through a regulated e-commerce, he is devoted to the supplies he receives from these shadowy, black market industries. He states that he even gains an educational benefit from these movies, as he learns, for instance, how to properly kiss and caress women. Most studies on youth and pornography have a sex-negative bias and do not understand that young people now have the power to change pornography itself—to make it more classy, more humorous, more female-friendly,more diversified.  These DIY archives are important as they contribute to a “will to knowledge”-not only a way of knowing something about sex techniques, but also a way of belonging to and embodying the Internet age.

Katrien Jacobs is a scholar and media artist. She investigates the role of digital networks in people’s experiences with the body, art, and sexuality. Her latest book “People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet investigates mainland China’s immersion in new trends in sexual entertainment and DIY media.

This essay was appeared earlier in People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet, published by Intellect Books in 2012. 

“Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20^th centaury technoculture — and more generally, African-American signification that appropriated images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future — might, for want of a better term, be called Afrofuturism”.

At its origins Afrofuturism like Cyberfeminism uses science fiction and cyberculture in a speculative manner, in the case of Afrofuturism to escape a definition of what it means to be black (or exotically African) in Western Culture. Cyberculture and the rise of turntables and remixes as an instrumental form opened the gateway for redefinitions that led to dealing with the concerns of identification.  By placing the black man in space, out of the reach of racial stereotypes, Afrofuturism allowed for a critique of both of western culture and techno-culture.

Dery’s Afrofuturism however was a product of the nineties, and where it may reflect the seventies futuristic fetishes of P-Funk, Afrofuturism through literary criticism had a different agenda.  The notion of alien and other are aesthetically explored in Afrofuturism as a way to address identity, marginalisation and issues of identification. Mark Dery in “Black to the Future” quotes Erik Davis the author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, he states: “This loosely gnostic strain of Afro-diasporic science fiction emerges from an impoverished confrontation between modern technology and the prophetic imagination, a confrontation rooted in the alienated conditions of black life in the New World”.  I see Afrofuturism addressing the similar critique as cyberfeminsim; a critique of the centralised and outward looking view of technology and its power associated culture in the west, which was having an increasing impact on a new form called Globalisation.

Afrofuturism of 90’s musical techno-culture extended it in a twofold manner by celebrating the release from the earth as a mechanism to question notions of identification and proposed decentralisation in its aesthetic. In an interview with Kodwo Eshun the Ghanaian/British writer and musician and author of More Brilliant than the Sun, with the Dutch Media Theory Professor and Writer Geert Lovink titled “Everything was to be done. All adventures are still there.” A Speculative Dialogue with Kodwo Eshun (2000, Netime Archives) – Eshun states:

“We found that we could use all this material as speculative playground and have an adventure of concepts…Afrofuturism as a transversal tendency running through popular culture, acting to destabilise what people thought black identity was, what pop identity and culture identity were. There was not only a compulsory pessimism in theory when I started. There was also a compulsory ghetto-centricity of black popular culture. Always this hermeneutics of the street.”

In 2010 I wrote a paper titled “Rephrasing Protocol: Internet Art in the Global South”. The paper addresses a trend towards decentralisation in South African and South America Internet Art and Art concerning global networks. In it I indentify Digital and Networked media as a learnt and adopted medium, one that is created on a western protocol of technology development and information exchange.  In the attempt to be understood in this realm, Global South artists rephrase this protocol, as a form of destabilisation.  The mechanism of the black man in cyber futuristic space in Afrofuturism breaks an imposed notion of black identity, but more importantly Afrofuturism shows us that within techno-culture the medium at its very nature grants us an opportunity for decentralisation.  To quote Eshun again, “Identity as intermittent fluctuation, the epiphenomenon of convergent processes”. This however is not as potentially fluid when the location itself is geographically, not only ideologically, orbiting a Western centralised worldview.

Afrofuturism is not the science fiction of Africa, but a critical engagement with technology and the power ideals of “the other”. The aesthetic that has emerged from Afrofuturism still flourishes its critical head in various contemporary African iterations, even though its origins are located elsewhere.

Tegan Bristow is a media artist and full time lecturer at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. Most of her projects are aimed at educating and developing an understanding of the creative use of technology and interactive digital media practice.

I’m fascinated by the frame-breaking possibilities of turntablism and sampling; but at the same time, I’m starting to view sampling as a very lazy gesture—innocent at best, creepily segregationist at worst. For example, if you’re sampling a sitar CD, it generally means that you can’t find—or can’t be bothered to look for—someone who actually plays the instrument. Sampling maintains cultural distance; collaborations require closeness. The difference is huge. It’s the difference between one-way cultural flow and the kind of dialogue that could lead to real community.

Proper collaborations offer much more than sampling, but even they aren’t untroubled. World music festivals love “fusion” groups whose members draw on diverse backgrounds to produce an anodyne sound seemingly intended to reassure the predominantly Western, middle-class festival audience: world music as foreign music with its distinctive features rubbed off, now suitable for mass consumption anywhere on the globe; difference with a jazzy backbeat you can groove to; the exotic but never the extreme.

Mainstream pop, reggae, and R&B offer an interesting solution: go synthetic. Star producers like Timbaland and The Neptunes have been inventing wildly creative pop songs for artists like Missy Elliott and Justin Timberlake with a decidedly eastward lean. Yet there is, refreshingly, zero reliance on a veneer of authenticity. These are the few producers who can afford to legally clear all their samples, yet more often than not they choose to fabricate a prosthetic North African beat, or to replay a quarter-tone violin harmony line on a cheap synthesizer. Brilliant or lazy or both? Does pop’s self-replicating, amoebic logic wipe out all others? Suffice to say that The Neptunes song I played in Dubai received the best crowd response.

A glance in the other direction reveals an incredible culture of bootlegging, versioning, and westward exoticism in Arabic pop. At any Moroccan music store you’ll find endless cassettes such as HipHop Ray 2002!: a bootleg compilation that alternates rai hits with misattributed mainstream American rap. Or, a recent favorite of mine, the bootleg rai CD Compil Santana: the cover and CD artwork sports images of seven Moroccan vocalists . . . and Victoria’s Secret supermodel Laetitia Casta. Glamour becomes a universal glue.

Musical influence spreads like wildfire, wafting across borders of nation, language, and religion. Yet, controlling notions of authenticity police virtually all genres. Leatherbound anarchists are quick to classify what is and isn’t punk rock; “keeping it real” is a constant refrain in hip hop; talk of “pure” flamenco abounds in Spain although Arabic influences are clearly audible in the vocal ululations and sinewy guitar style of Spain’s cherished “national” music. So how do we keep it real if our mission is to adapt multiple traditions into an idiosyncratic unity? All music springs from multiple roots, yet the history of the hybrid is no history at all, just an X on the map where the border-crosser left both lands.

This is an excerpt. Click here for the complete essay on the website of the New York Foundation of the Arts.

Jace Clayton is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His work is built around core concerns for how sound, technology use in low-income communities, and public space interact, with an emphasis on Latin America, Africa, and the Arab world. He also developed Sufi Plug Ins, a free suite of audio software tools based on non-western/poetic conceptions of sound and alternative interfaces.

China is managing a technological revolution on a scale unprecedented in human history. In just a few decades it has navigated stages of technological development that proceeded over centuries in Europe. As is well documented, it now challenges in economic and industrial might that other behemoth of high-speed technological development – the United States of America. So it’s not entirely surprising that among the many models for development China has imported from America, is the cultural influence of science fiction.

In October 2012 the World Chinese Science Fiction Association will award it’s annual Xingyun (Galaxy) Awards for SF. The Xingyun are similar to the American dominated Hugo awards, and will be given in Beijing, at a convention only slightly smaller than the WorldCon at which the Hugo awards will be announced just two months earlier. But in other regards Chinese SF fandom dwarfs its American counterpart. SF World magazine claimed at its peak a circulation of over 300,000 copies, with millions of readers receiving the magazine second hand from friends. It’s a scale no American SF publication has reached since the Golden Age of magazine fiction publishing in the 1950s, when Amazing Stories defined Science Fiction as a genre.

Liu Cixin is unarguably the leading voice in Chinese science fiction. An eight time winner of the Xingyun award, his work has been celebrated for setting the positive, forward looking character of Chinese SF. It’s another notable echo of America’s Golden Age, when writers like Robert Heinlein expressed America’s post-war future as a global super-power. By the 1980′s with the emergence of cyberpunk authors including Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, American science fiction reflected a far darker vision of technologies impact on the human condition, one dominated by hyper-capitalism and political corruption. Will Chinese SF take a similar turn in to darkness and cynicism? For now it is content on the whole to explore the manifold wondrous possibilities technology holds for our future.

Liu Cixin shares a background in the hard sciences and computer technology with the majority of the readers of his stories and of Chinese SF as a whole. As a literary genre SF does little to please the reactionary audience for contemporary literary fiction. But through the 20th century it emerged as the culture of choice for the people doing the hands on work of making the future happen – the engineers, programmers, designers and various creatives most exposed to future-shock. It’s the geeks who love SF, in books, comics, films and video games. And as geeks have taken over the world, geek culture has become inextricably part of mainstream culture, so that now ideas born in SF, of space travel, intelligent machines and cyber-enhanced humans, have become common place.

What in the West evolved as an outsider culture has in China been embraced as an essential component of technological development. In a 2011 talk at the British Library world famous author Neil Gaiman explained his perspective on the transformation of science fiction from subversive outsider art to government approved culture in Chinese society. China has established itself as the powerhouse of global manufacturing. But it also wants to invent and design the products it manufactures, and to capture the creative ingenuity that still resides primarily in the United States. The geek culture that powers that creativity is a culture in love with science fiction, and to encourage one means implicitly to encourage the other.

The century ahead of us promises to deliver only more and faster technological change. And China is, all agree, where that change will come fastest. The culture of science fiction will undoubtedly become a culture influenced and perhaps dominated by Chinese creators. The role of science fiction then is to continue to communicate the accelerating rate of change shaping the world we all share.

Damien Walter is a writer of weird fiction, Guardian columnist and activist for reading and literacy. His stories have been published in genre and literary publications including the Hugo award winning Electric Velocipede and broadcast on BBC Radio. He is course director of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.

Japan’s modernization, however, was always an ambiguous operation. In great irony, the leaders’ impetus for rapid Westernization was fundamentally anti-Western: that is, they hoped to adopt the best practices of the imperialist West to protect themselves from becoming a ravished colony like nearby China. A slogan of the day was wakon yousai, meaning “Japanese spirit, Western technology.” Japan could adopt the armaments and accouterments of the West, but Japanese psychological internality and morality was best to stay in line with Japanese tradition. National progress was linked to the successful balance between these two elements, and even today, the binary provides an important creative tension for society.

The photos in the exhibition Meeting Modernity beautifully illustrate the moment when Western technology and modern commercial life surged into the “pre-modern” culture of Japan. This miscellaneous batch of photos was unearthed in a small market outside of Sano in rural Tochigi Prefecture. Mostly commercial portrait photography from the early 20th century, the pictures show families in a mix of traditional kimono and yukata as well as imported dress designs and Western looks for men. Young boys dress in formal hakama but hold school- boy caps clearly cribbed from European designs. Women show traditional “up” Japanese hair styles and fashionable “down” Western bobs. Some of the photos are staged portraits and some feel spontaneous, but they both suggest that the very act of picture-taking was a momentous event for its subjects.

The photographs offer a few important reminders about Japanese culture, first that this period of rapid change resulted in cultural elements now protected and cherished as key components of social continuity. Many of the “new styles” of the period — especially the Prussian- influenced schoolboy uniforms — continue strongly in our present era. Elementary school boys of today still dress in suits with short pants and that distinctive military-style hat. But instead of being viewed as quaintly “modern,” as being the product of a distinct era, Japanese conservatives are wont to hold up these styles as the pinnacle of “Japanese tradition” — protecting them from the threat of even further Westerniza- tion. In a similar way, all the venerable school anthems from the top private-universities echo late 19th century European military marches, rather than Japanese pentatonic composi- tion, and yet, these songs could not be more “Japanese” for the public at large. At every point in time, “Japan” is the product of cultural synthesis between native and foreign forces, and the photographs in the collection demonstrate the antithetical elements that form the base of all traditions.

W. David Marx is a writer and musician based in Tokyo, Japan. He is a former editor of The Harvard Lampoon and has provided writing for such publications as GQ, Brutus, Harper’s, Nylon, The Japan Times, and The Fader. He is the founder and chief editor of the webjournal Néojaponisme.

Jugaad is one of those words that have taken off in the past two years in the global lexicon. My foreign friends have used it increasingly to describe India’s innovation quotient in the past few months and it used to irritate me until recently. My rationale was – why should we think that an attitude of frugality or the ability to do things out of poverty or under desperate constraints as jugaad suggests, as something to be celebrated as a part of India’s DNA? Why shouldn’t we create conditions of non-scarcity or non-desperation instead, in our country or in our lives? Why shouldn’t we remove the need for jugaad so that we can innovate on a level playing field with the rest of the world?

However, I changed my perspective on the subject after hosting the three authors of the book Jugaad Innovation at the Godrej India Culture Lab. As they told me, rather than dismissing jugaad as a poverty based phenomenon, or being embarrassed of it, I should see how jugaad principles might be formalized and used to spur innovation. I then began to frame the book as a compliment to Banerjee and Duflo’s Poor Economics which tries to understand poverty and adversity, or Sheena Iyengar’s The Art of Choosing, which tries to understand why some people make certain choices while others don’t.

The book Jugaad Innovation (and indeed India itself) is full of case studies of people and organizations that sought opportunity in adversity, or did more with less, or chose flexibility over rigidity, with powerful results. These include individuals like the potter Mansukhbhai Prajapati, the inventor of MittiCool, a 30-Euro clay (called mitti in Hindi) refrigerator that uses no electricity and is 100% biodegradable. After he began to get international acclaim and his order book started filling up, he started training the other villagers in pottery and devising processes by means of which he could mass produce his clay products in a factory in his village Today, besides MittiCool his village also makes other products with clay like non stick frying pans that retain heat longer but cost only 1.5 Euros each.

In another case from the book, a person called Kanak Das from Morigaon village in India’s Assam state invented a bike that actually runs faster on India’s bumpy, crater filled roads! A shock absorber fitted on the bike’s front wheel compresses and releases energy into its back wheel as a propulsive force. Das’ innovation has been patented with the support of India’s National Innovation Foundation, and may soon find its way into automobiles, courtesy a bunch of engineering students at MIT.

Jugaad is something that companies from emerging markets like India have been successful at recently. In response, Western companies have begun doing their own kind of jugaad, both in their home countries as well as in their operations in emerging markets So GE has created the MAC 400 in India in 2008, a portable ECG machine that costs one tenth of its Western equivalent.

Jugaad is now also being taught in universities. Santa Clara University has a Frugal Innovation Lab. Stanford University has an Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability program. Cambridge has an Inclusive Design program. In fact many world governments like that of the UK, US and the Netherlands as well, are embracing jugaad, with a slew of efforts, either online, or through physical contests or challenges, that urge citizens to collaborate and solve real-world issues.

In this context, I’m fascinated by Startup Chile. This is an accelerator program of the Chilean Government to attract world-class early stage entrepreneurs to bootstrap their startups in Chile and use it as a platform to go global. During the six months program, the participants must live and work Chile and for this, they receive US$40 thousand of equity-free seed capital, a 1-year work visa, and access to local financial and social networks. Start-Up Chile has gained impressive international recognition. The hidden agenda though is more powerful. Can a constant supply of imported ideas capital eventually make local Chileans more entrepreneurial from within? It will be worthwhile to watch this jugaad experiment over the years.

In my chat with the book’s authors, they also urged me to think of jugaad as open source. They mentioned Ladyada Fried, the pioneer of the Open Source Hardware movement (that enables engineers to put up the source code of their products up on the web for free, for others to download and build their own products) and Khan Academy, which has puts up thousands of videos explaining math and science concepts on the web for free.

I hadn’t thought of it until Jaideep, one of the authors pointed out to me after having read my book Gay Bombay, that jugaad is also something that we do in our own personal lives. In my book, I quote Sunil Khilnani from The Idea of India, where he writes: “What is ‘distinctively Indian’ is ‘a capacity…an ability to improvise, a kind of cunningness at historical survival, a knack for being able to respond to any question that may be asked. In the musical forms of India, as in its literary traditions, it is not fixity—the dogma of the singular text—that is valued, but rather the skill of improvisation and variation’.” Isn’t this also jugaad, Jaideep asked me?

I agreed with him. In my book, I write how gay people in India constantly negotiate their lives, hopes and dreams; balancing expectations from families and society along with their own desires and aspirations. Their innovativeness comes in choosing one over the other, but in the accommodation of all, in strange and myriad ways, sometimes positive, and sometimes negative. In the 4 years since the book has been published, several changes have taken place in our country with regard to the social and legal environment around homosexuality. The main thing is that it is no longer illegal to be gay in India, courtesy the Delhi High court judgment of 2009. Thus many gay and lesbian community events, which used to be underground, are now coming into the mainstream spotlight, like Kashish, the country’s first LBGT (Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender) film festival.

I will talk more about this particular personal jugaad during my time in Utrecht as an Impakt Fellow. For now, I will end by telling you how I felt while watching the many different films, back to back, at this year’s Kashish festival.

The films were from Europe, South America and India, feature films documentaries and even gay cartoons. After seeing them all, I began to think that despite our differences, among the many things that unites queer people all over the world is the desire to be happy and the jugaad that we do to achieve this happiness. The same kinds of negotiations. The same kind of working on the margin, or in making constraints work for instead of against, that the authors of Jugaad Innovation discussed with me. Maybe at some level, we are all like this only? Western or non-western, gay or straight; jugaad innovators at heart?

Parmesh Shahani heads the Godrej India Culture Lab – a space that aims to interrogate the textured nature of Indian modernity by cross-pollinating the best minds working on India from across the academic, creative and corporate worlds. In addition, he is also a TED Fellow and MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

It’s a generalisation, granted, but on the balance of evidence it can probably be made anyway: the publishing industry, unlike Hollywood, gets some decent mileage out of products that have an unhappy ending. In the last few years, if one new species of non-fiction book has arisen in the Anglo-American market to prove this claim, it’s the sub-genre that prognosticates and explains the rise of the East and demise of the West. Of course, these books only end unhappily for readers in America and Europe who’ve been brought up to believe in their own cultural and economic superiority (translated into Mandarin, they sell as comedies), but the fact that each of the major international houses throws huge resources at their packaging and marketing seems to suggest that the thinking is kind of similar to newsprint – if it bleeds, it leads.

While by “bleeding” we may be talking metaphorically, there’s no doubt about the “leading” part. Starting with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who’s won three Pulitzers and whose books have been known to dwell for years atop his newspaper’s best-seller lists, China-loving (and its requisite corollary, America-bashing) appears to be the new cash cow. In 2009, he upset a lot of people with an article that praised China’s autocratic leadership as “reasonably enlightened” for “boosting gasoline prices” and “overtaking [America] in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.” That line has since been parlayed into the book That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, which is garnering the usual rave reviews from the usual sources (has Friedman ever gotten a bad review in the New York Times?), and which is sitting comfortably at or near the top of a slew of Amazon best-seller categories.

Needless to say, the above title, released late last year, isn’t the first time China has received big play in a Friedman book. His 2005 smash-hit The World Is Flat, currently at 2-million copies sold and counting, included many ominous observations about China’s  “offshoring” capabilities in a globalised labour market, and urged the American workforce to become more adaptable. Mercifully, the obviousness of Friedman’s thesis in that book was pounced upon by the redoubtable Matt Taibbi, who wrote at the time of publication: “On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country.”

Niall Ferguson, who doesn’t have near as many haters – clearly, he just isn’t as proficient at attracting epithets like “The Imperial Messenger” or “Schmuck of the Year” – has also been adding to his considerable royalty statements by mining the topic. In his book Civilisation: The West and the Rest, published in 2011, the British celebrity academic argues that there are six “killer applications” that enabled the West to get the lead on the Rest, namely – competition, the scientific revolution, the rule of law and representative government, modern medicine, the consumer society, and the work ethic. The East has been rapidly catching up in these six areas since the 1950s, he argues, and what we are living through now is the end of 500 years of Western predominance.

So far Ferguson’s sales have been way more positive than his reviews, with some pointing out that the book is nothing more than a cynical accompaniment to a shallow TV show, and that his real strength is – and ought to remain – economic history. Writing in the London Review of Books, Pankaj Mishra, whose latest book is an extended reflection on modern Asian thinkers, noted: “To explain the contingent, short-lived factors that gave a few countries in Western Europe their advantage over the rest of the world requires a sustained and complex analysis, not one hell-bent on establishing that the West was, and is, best. At the very least, it needs the question to be correctly put. To ask, as Ferguson does, why the West broke through to capitalist modernity and became the originator of globalisation is to assume that this was inevitable, and that it resulted basically from the wonderfulness of the West, not to mention the hopelessness of the East.”

Notably, it was Ian Morris who put the above question a little better. Following loosely in the footsteps of Jared Diamond, Morris, in his book Why the West Rules – For Now, starts with the dawn of man in murky prehistory and methodically pulls together the latest theories from disciplines as diverse as archaeology and neuroscience to explain why East and West have each been dominant (in developmental terms) at different periods. For the British-born Stanford professor, it is geography above all else that determines a civilisation’s fate – East and West to him are not value judgments, but geographical labels. “Geography,” he writes at one point, “explains why it was western Europeans, rather than the 15th century’s finest sailors – the Chinese – who discovered, plundered, and colonised the Americas. Chinese sailors were just as daring as Spaniards and Chinese settlers, just as intrepid as Britons, but it was Christopher Columbus rather than the great Chinese admiral Zheng who discovered the Americas – simply because Columbus only had to go half as far.”

Still, for all its merits, implicit in the title of Morris’s book is the marketing friendly unhappy ending. He reluctantly acknowledges that Western “rule” will cease in the early 21st century, and then quickly goes on to his true conclusion (of which more shall be said below). But whether we’re talking Morris or Ferguson or Friedman – or any other big-selling English-language writer on the topic of hemispherical competition – there’s a point that the American and UK publishing industries seem loathe to advertise right now: the final day of Western dominance may not be as close as we think.

For instance, in the winter 2012 edition of City Journal, a quarterly published by the Manhattan Institute, writers Joel Klotkin and Shashi Parulekar draw together data from, amongst others, the International Monetary Fund and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis to argue that “the decline of the English-speaking world has been greatly exaggerated.” They contend that although citizens of the Anglosphere – defined to encompass the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand – have been pushed by the financial crisis into a widespread belief that the West has already lost the race, the numbers don’t align with the despondency.

The article starts with some top-line economic stats: “Like Germany in the 1930s or Japan in the 1970s, China has found that centrally directed economic systems can achieve rapid, short-term economic growth – and China’s has indeed been impressive. But over time, the growth record and economic power achieved by the free-market-oriented English-speaking nations remain peerless. A little-noted fact these days is that the Anglosphere is still far and away the world’s largest economic bloc. Overall, it accounts for more than one-quarter of the world’s GDP – more than $18-trillion. In contrast, what we can refer to as the Sinosphere – China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau – accounts for only 15.1% of global GDP, while India generates 5.4%.”

Of course, these stats need to take into account annual growth rates, and most forecasts place the US’s at under 2% for 2012, against China’s 7.5%. That is certainly a significant difference, but not only is the latter the lowest forecast to come out of the People’s Republic in eight years, it’s also very persuasive evidence that the Chinese economy has come to a crossroads—the country either makes a successful transition from a manufacturing economy to a consumer-based one, or the growth keeps on slowing.

And a critical question is: does China have enough “rich” people of the right age to keep this new consumer economy going, even if the immediate transition is a success? As highlighted by the City Journal piece: “[China] now has a fertility rate of 1.6, even lower than that of Western Europe. Over the next two decades, its ratio of workers to retirees is projected to rise from 11 to 23. Other countries, such as Brazil and Iran, face similar scenarios. These countries, without social safety nets of the kinds developed in Europe or Japan, may get old before they can get rich.”

The article then continues: “These figures will have an impact on the growth of the global workforce. Between 2000 and 2050, for example, the US workforce is projected to grow by 37%, while China’s shrinks by 10%, the EU’s decreases by 21%, and, most strikingly, Japan’s falls by as much as 40%.”

Immigration is obviously the key factor in this somewhat surprising set of stats, with the United States, even in the “border-paranoiac” Bush years, consistently leading the pack: in 2005, as Klotkin and Parulekar observed, the country swore in more new citizens than the next nine countries combined. Not coincidentally, in 2012 it was the second-largest power in the Anglosphere, the United Kingdom, that recorded the highest immigration numbers in its history.

What these figures mean to issues of “nationalism” and “identity” is a different subject, and one that Ferguson and Friedman have been known to sensationalise to their peril (in critical terms, anyway). For the purposes of the current argument, all that needs be stated is this: the race between West and East – a race that both are running flat-out, no matter whose cultural sensitivities are offended in the process – is far from decided.

But there are smaller races within the great sweeping race that have clear-cut leaders, and here Morris’s contention that West and East are geographical judgments before they are value judgments would appear to apply. One example: after 9/11, when the West turned its attention to the Middle East, China’s eyes became more focused on Africa. And in 2009, as we’re all aware, China surpassed the United States as Africa’s largest trading partner.

Who’ll ultimately “win” on the continent? The answer is not nearly as important as the implications of the contest for humankind. Africa, as the last continent on Earth with an abundance of untapped resources and the potential for sustained and real development, is in many ways the stage where our species’ destiny will play out. As Morris wrote in the final pages of Why the West Rules – For Now: “Rising social development has always changed the meaning of geography, and in the twenty-first century, development will rise so high that geography will cease to mean anything at all. The only thing that will count is the race between a Singularity and a Nightfall.”

Is a South-African author/journalist. He is currently working on his second book, on how Chinese are changing the African continent. Together with Richard Poplak he started a project called Africa 3.0, which is how they would describe the continent’s latest iteration, where Africa 1.0 was the era of European colonialism and Africa 2.0 the years of post-independence.