UC San Diego

"Reclaiming the Future: A Speculative Cultural Study" examines authors of color who use speculative fiction as a tool of resistance and empowerment to (re)imagine the past, present and future for people of color in the US. This dissertation is organized into three parts: 1) Speculative Fictions from the Early 20th Century, 2) Speculative Fictions From the 1970s to Now, and 3) Critical Dystopias in the 21st Century and Beyond. The first part explores two novels from the early 20th century, Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902-03) and Daniel Venegas’s The Adventures of Don Chipote (1928). These chapters explore issues of racist science and experimentation in medicine and science on black people; and the utopian and dystopian symbol of the American Dream for Mexican immigrant laborers during the 1900s-1930s. The second part investigates texts from the late 20th century and 21st century, specifically Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed (1980) and Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017). These chapters discuss issues of reproductive oppression and sterilization abuse of poor women of color in the 1970s, and the speculative horror of real and imagined criminalization and mass incarceration of black people today. The final part analyzes two texts from 2009, Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer and Rosaura Sánchez’s and Beatrice Pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125-2148. These chapters interrogate issues of the future, such as: surrogate humanity and the invisibility of virtual laborers outsourced around the world; and the remapping of nation-states that use settler colonialism to displace people of color onto neo-Reservations and the moon. Despite these dystopian realities, my analysis emphasizes what science fiction scholar Tom Moylan calls the “enclaves of resistance” that exist in these texts to develop a critical dystopia so that people of color can reclaim these narratives and write themselves into the future. I argue that authors of color use speculative fiction as a practice to explore the lived and living experiences of their present dystopian realities and historically oppressive and violent pasts. My speculative cultural study highlights the social activism of people of color in the rewriting and world making of more equitable futures.