This study will focus on Settler Colonial Theory , a newly delineated branch of Postcolonial studies. SCT is at its core aligned with the basic tenets of postcolonial theory, and takes as its point of departure the fact that, as famously stated by Patrick Wolfe, “settler colonization [is] a structure rather than event” . A settler colony entails the permanent settlement of a group of people, who appropriate land and have at least some degree of local governance based on a shared ideology, often informed by religion and/or ethnic or national identity. Land ownership is of paramount concern. In contrast, a franchise colony is one centered around resource extraction, where government administrators generally are not permanent residents; usually, they establish an administrative class of Indigenous peoples, such as the colony the British imposed in India. These aspects sometimes overlap, but the key factor is that settler colonialism rarely ends, that is, the United Kingdom , the United States, Israel, and Australia, were and still are settler colonizer countries. SCT is further defined by foundational theorist Patrick Wolfe as having the following essential characteristics: it is premised on the idea that the land to be settled is empty, or “terra nullius,” and ready for colonization, despite the fact that this perceived “natural” land was actually developed by Indigenous peoples . The logic of elimination of the Native is crucial in the settler colony as opposed to franchise colonies, and it is to be achieved through a variety of means, including by enslavement, removal from land, and assimilation. Further, Wolfe shows through a comparative study of settler colonies, including the US and Australia, that processes of racialization of non Europeans are paramount in settler colonization, and vary based on the needs of those Europeans who administer a particular area. Also important to this study is the way that European settler colonizers espoused “manifest destiny,” or the idea that God meant them to expand Westward from Europe, not only to the Americas but beyond, and to dominate “inferior races.” We can see manifest destiny and the idea that Europeans are superior as an underlying ideology behind globalization. But for Wolfe,vertical gardening in greenhouse manifest destiny is not the end of racialization but accounts for the continuing unequal distribution of global power: he demonstrates that post-frontier and post-emancipation societies intensify racialization because settlers must rationalize inequality when slavery and the “outside” of the frontier no longer delineate racial boundaries.
Racialization is thus a colonial and a postcolonial process. Wolfe also highlights the ways that all “modalities of settler colonialism … come back to the issue of land” . That is, the settler deploys various ways of elimination and assimilation — forced labor, forced removals, homicide, parceling community land into family holdings, miscegenation, religious conversion, boarding schools, and so forth — to take land from Indigenous peoples. Land is a central issue for colonizer and colonized alike. To the settler colonizer, land is viewed primarily as a resource for profit and expansion/perpetuation of European society. By contrast, for Indigenous peoples, especially in North America, land is of paramount importance as the spiritual home of peoples. Cajete explains the “spirit of place,” defined as the “ecological relationship borne of intimate familiarity with the homeland, and the homeland became an extension of the ‘great holy’ in perceptions, heart, mind, and soul of the people.” Cajete goes on to cement this relationship in terms of loss of land during colonization: “It is easy to understand why Indigenous people around the world lamented the loss of their land for it was a loss of part of themselves” . For Cajete and others, land is part of the way Indigenous peoples perceive the world, a central aspect of their epistemologies; because this importance is reflected in decolonized conceptualizations of utopia, land and land use is also a central aspect of this project, in particular in Chapters 2 and 3. I focus on SCT in part because “utopia” as a blueprint society has strong settler colonial implications that I draw on for this study: both historically and contemporarily in countries like Israel, the colonizer comes to build utopia on Indigenous land, through violent dispossession. Western utopian imaginings tend toward the homogenous, privileging Whiteness and European culture, and erasing cultural difference by great hope for both preventing climate change, and for surviving in an already changing climate. Indeed, Little Bear, in his forward to Cajete’s Native Science, espouses the powerful potential of uniting Western and Indigenous sciences to combat the urgent problem climate change, and offers a ray of hope in such uncertain times that is nothing if not utopian at the level of global collectivity.Speculative fiction imagines our world differently in order to grasp the complexities of the human condition. Darko Suvin, in discussing science fiction specifically, famously calls this “cognitive estrangement:” sf it is not so much about technology itself, or aliens or time travel, but rather uses these tropes to think about culture, politics, the nature of humans as tool users, etc. — this definition generally extends to speculative fiction, a term more suited to encompassing future-oriented works that may not focus on science and technology. Sf author Samuel R. Delany argues that sf is not even about the future, but that it is usually set there to ponder the future implications of society’s present problems.
Utopias are by definition speculative in nature, and utopian fiction can be considered a subgenre of speculative fiction. Utopian Studies revolves around the central question: What do we mean by “utopia?” It is a term much maligned across the Western political spectrum, though it is still a fundamentally Western concept, and the field of Utopian Studies is dominated by Western theorists. In Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, Ruth Levites summarizes contemporary utopian scholarship of the last half-century or so, which has generally been critical of capitalism in a Marxist tradition. She rejects the idea, commonly touted by detractors, that “utopia” is a static, totalitarian society, or a “blueprint.” Instead, she argues that utopia is a method, a way to “develop alternative possible scenarios for the future and open these up to public debate and democratic decision—insisting always on the provisionally, reflexivity and contingency of what we are able to imagine” . Utopia in other words is fluid, emergent. Levitas argues that we have an imperative to first refuse that this capitalist, globalized world is the best of all possible worlds; to then imagine a better world ; and finally to actively work toward implementing that imagination, through, to begin with, a number of socialist programs. As Jameson argues forcefully in “Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?”, utopia cannot be imagined from within Western culture; it is so totalizing on a global scale, so limits our thinking that it is impossible. Still, as utopian scholars like Robert Tally argue, building from Jameson’s work,greenhouse vertical farming the postmodern era is the most important time to imagine utopia, even if it is also the most impossible, because we must imagine radical alternatives to the capitalist world system. Further, Tally argues that if utopia is a literary process of mapping the world around us and a guide for operating within it, rather than simply an “ideal society” of another place or time — we then find that “[u]topia is everywhere today” . We find utopia where communities — especially communities of color, as Imarisha highlights — self-organize in ways that resist power. And it follows, I would argue, that if Western thought is so totalizing that we can’t imagine utopia, then people outside Western hegemonic power structures would likely be well-placed to transform the utopian imagination, to decolonize it, in ways that Jameson does not account for. This “utopia from below” is indeed everywhere today. Utopian Studies defines “utopian fiction” loosely as well, though its historical connotations are distinctly colonial.
While the term “utopia” predates Western thought, it was popularized in the West through what is arguably the first science fiction book of the Western world, Thomas More’s Utopia . More inaugurated the “blueprint utopia” format; he took advantage of the excitement Europeans felt over early explorations of the New World to imagine an explorer discovering a society that, while in some ways better than our own, is not perfect . However, rather than define utopian fiction stringently as a blueprint society, as most early utopias were, utopian fiction can be more broadly considered any work that posits a world that is better than our own. Expanding on what counts as utopian fiction still further, we can identify “utopian traces,” or hints at the possibility of creating a better world , in most fiction and art, not just science fiction. Phillip Wegner argues that it is the job of sf texts to represent a moment of “dramatic break in the status quo,” in contrast to other fiction that represents and interrogates a given social and cultural moment. This means that utopian ideas are inherent in the sf genre. Wegner argues that “the most concrete manifestation of any sf narrative’s Utopianism is to be located in those moments wherein the closure of the conventional realist work is displaced by an openness to the unfinished potential of historical becoming” . The argument advanced by much of the fiction I study — that Indigenous philosophies and sciences are integral to imagining a better world — represents such a break in the status quo, a challenge to the primacy of Western philosophy and science, even though few of the works I study actually depict better, utopian societies. Dystopias can be defined as societies that are meant to be utopian, but are so only for a select few, while the majority of people remain oppressed; often these societies are totalitarian in nature. The texts I study here would primarily be described as “critical dystopias,” a term coined by Tom Moylan. For Moylan, “critical utopias” describe sf from the late 20th century that rejects the idea of utopia as blueprint, and tries to imagine a better world in the context of Marxist principles of freedom and justice. Meanwhile, “critical dystopias” respond to capitalist market ideologies such as neoliberalism, which are alternately “pseudo-utopian” and “anti-utopian,” because they hold that “a viable market-driven society” can only be achieved by dismantling welfare and other social support systems and destroying the environment . Critical dystopias first “linger in the terrors of the present” bringing a feminist and antiracist perspective to the anti-utopia of capitalist ideology. But then they explore “ways to change the present system so that such culturally and economically marginalized peoples not only survive but also try to move toward creating a social reality that is shaped by an impulse to human self-determination and ecological health” , and in their open endings offer a utopian hope. I enhance Moylan’s analysis by looking specifically at Indigenous-authored dystopian fiction and dystopian fiction with Indigenous themes, focusing my analysis on how neoliberalism and the destruction it has wrought specifically impacts Indigenous peoples, and how they respond to it. There is a growing body of postcolonial studies of sf, including those that engage with utopian/dystopian works, such that postcolonial science fiction studies could be considered a new sub-field of SFS—and this study would fall into it. The most important example is John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, on which this study draws heavily. Rieder looks at early American sf, which is coterminous with colonialism, and persuasively argues that colonialism is “woven into the texture” of the genre. Another antecedent to this study is Eric Smith’s Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope. Smith focuses on the emergence of science fiction in the so-called third world and how it challenges the institutional limits of postcolonial readings of “first world” sf. Smith’s work is very closely aligned with my project, though I intend to conduct a more systematic engagement within the context of settler colonialism, and with more attention to Indigenous science and philosophy.