Paule Marshall’s 1969 novel The Chosen Place, the Timeless People has been understudied, perhaps because of its complex relation to genre within the field of literature and its interest in a wide array of character positionality. The novel, narrating a group of social scientists who arrive on a fictional Caribbean island in order to “develop” the hilly region of Bournehills, disturbs the borders between realism, speculative fiction, and the utopian. This thesis offers a reading of the novel’s utopian possibility based in the island’s refusal to adhere to historical scripts and its demonstration of the haunting, timeless truth of other realities. The island’s residents defy the visitors’ expectations through a paradoxically candid inscrutability and the landscape itself harbors symbols of collapsed time. This exploration of muddled genre boundaries is also demonstrated in Marshall’s depiction of character as both individual and instantiation of type. I use Sylvia Wynter’s theory of genre as a framework for discussing human categorization and the mixture of biological, social, and cultural differentiation which creates a dynamic individual. By manipulating the reader’s sense of reality, invoking the utopian drive for an actionable elsewhere and deconstructing a sense of objective individuality outside of historical and social development, Marshall makes the Western epistemological worldview alien, contributing to a reorientation of the genre of human.

This dissertation examines how Black women authors from the late twentieth century use the form of the novel to make vital interventions into contemporaneous American philosophies of science. I argue that this literature, written between 1969 and 1984, offers creative alternatives to various scientific discourses which continue to categorize and stigmatize people. The novels I discuss are not only radical in content, but also in form, working to estrange traditional modes of thought through nontraditional genres. I use the framework of “New Science,” a term originating in Aimé Césaire and developed by Sylvia Wynter, to situate the kind of knowledge produced by these literary texts—interdisciplinary, holistic, and contextualized in history and community. The dissertation thereby contributes to the growing scholarly overlap between the fields of critical race theory and feminist science and technology studies. Throughout the chapters, I take up specific violences embedded in scientific thought and engage with literary works which offer alternatives. I begin with Paule Marshall’s critique of the way that Western science construes itself as the neutral, objective center from which to dictate and globally manage the various “genres” of humanity. In chapter 2, I analyze the discourse of psychiatry in the seventies and discuss Toni Cade Bambara’s radical vision of wellness, developed outside of the framework of pathology. Finally, I look at the ways that Octavia Butler engages with the logical inconsistencies embedded in debates in sociobiology in the early eighties around the naturalness of violence and rape. From time to time, I connect these historic debates with contemporary policy and language used to categorize and control groups of people who are understood to pose a threat. I do this to highlight the continued relevance of literary knowledge, particularly from Black and other racialized artists, and its ability to expand our capacity for creative, value-laden, phenomenologically attentive science.